Building my own PC -- hardware advice needed

[John Blaustein]

Hi,

I'm not sure this is the right place to be asking about hardware selection,
but if it isn't, perhaps someone will point me in the right direction. If
it is the right place to ask, I'll appreciate any comments anyone is willing
to share.

I am going to build my own PC -- first time I've done this. My main use of
the PC that requires power and speed is Photoshop CS. I will not do any
gaming or anything else that requires 3D graphics.

Having had two PCs with ASUS motherboards that worked very well, I will
stick with ASUS.

Here's what I'm planning:

Intel P4 3.0 Ghz CPU
Matrox G450 graphic card (perfect for Photoshop)
2 -- Western Digital WD1200JB EIDE drives (I have these already)
1 -- Plextor CD/DVD burner (I have this already)
Floppy drive
Faxmodem
LAN and Audio built into MB
USB and Firewire ports
Antec case w/350w power supply

My questions concern choice of motherboard and RAM.

The motherboards I'm considering are:

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe -- 875C chipset -- $169 (at newegg.com)
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe -- 875C chipset -- $163
ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe -- 865PE chipset -- $116

The specs of these three MBs seem almost identical, so I'm wondering if
anyone has experience with these boards who could give me a reason to select
one versus another. I'm not clear on what I'd get with the $169 board that
the $116 board wouldn't give me. In other words, is the extra money worth
spending? (I don't need WiFi which the P4P800-E Deluxe has included.) I am
not clear about the differences between the 875C and 865PE chipsets, and
what those differences, if any, will mean to me as the end user. Also, I
can't tell the difference between the P4C800-E Deluxe and the P4C800 Deluxe.

RAM:
I will buy PC3200 RAM, 1GB or 2GB of RAM -- all of the MBs above will hold 4
DIMMS. Checking Kingston RAM prices on newegg.com, there are several
choices of 1GB (2x512) packages, ranging from ValueRAM at $194 to HyperX at
$282. I know I need to buy matched pairs of DIMMS. I'm not clear on the
difference between the ValueRAM and the HyperX, other than the price. Both
have very similar specs. I want good, fast, stable RAM, but I don't want to
spend any more than I need to. Any help or recommendations?? (I used
Kingston as my example, but Crucial and Corsair have the same range. These
three brands have been recommended to me.)

Thanks for any help, recommendations and comments.

John

 

[SSDD]

Building your own PC is fun and you'll be better off in
the long run. Good luck!

As far as hardware goes, you've got a pretty decent
selection going. ASUS is a good Motherboard.

However...(my favorite word) Intel makes their own
motherboard, supporting their own chipsets, supporting
their own processors. You don't get any more rock-solid
stability than that. Also cheaper. TigerDirect is selling
the Intel DB875PBZLK for 139 I believe. That MoBo is
actually on my wishlist. It also has applications built
into BIOS to improve throughput of data. All for cheaper
than your ASUS selections. The 875 Chipset is an
improvement over the 865 and well worth the money. I
can't list everything to you right now, but go to
Intel.com and you can find all sorts of info on it.

You've picked a good processor, have your own video card.
The only other suggestion I'd make are your hard drives.
You have 2, do you use them for RAID?

The Motherboard I described above also has it's own RAID
controller and S-ATA interface.

S-ATA with it's 1.5 GB/s interface set up on RAID 0 would
give you an incredible boost in performance when loading
pictures. Western Digital makes some great S-ATA drives.
I have 2 WD Raptors (74 gig S-ATA) on the way as I write
this. A note: if you make this your choice, buy directly
from Western Digital. Buying from newegg or tigerdirect
will be considerably more expensive.

Other than that, you've got yourself a good system plan.
Good luck to you putting this together. It's exciting
building your own system. Especially when you fire it up
the first time.

 

[Miss Perspicacia Tick]

Hi,

I'm not sure this is the right place to be asking about hardware
selection, but if it isn't, perhaps someone will point me in the
right direction. If it is the right place to ask, I'll appreciate
any comments anyone is willing to share.

I am going to build my own PC -- first time I've done this. My main
use of the PC that requires power and speed is Photoshop CS. I will
not do any gaming or anything else that requires 3D graphics.

Having had two PCs with ASUS motherboards that worked very well, I
will stick with ASUS.

Here's what I'm planning:

Intel P4 3.0 Ghz CPU
Matrox G450 graphic card (perfect for Photoshop)
2 -- Western Digital WD1200JB EIDE drives (I have these already)
1 -- Plextor CD/DVD burner (I have this already)
Floppy drive
Faxmodem
LAN and Audio built into MB
USB and Firewire ports
Antec case w/350w power supply

My questions concern choice of motherboard and RAM.

The motherboards I'm considering are:

ASUS P4C800-E Deluxe -- 875C chipset -- $169 (at newegg.com)
ASUS P4C800 Deluxe -- 875C chipset -- $163
ASUS P4P800-E Deluxe -- 865PE chipset -- $116

The specs of these three MBs seem almost identical, so I'm wondering
if anyone has experience with these boards who could give me a reason
to select one versus another. I'm not clear on what I'd get with the
$169 board that the $116 board wouldn't give me. In other words, is
the extra money worth spending? (I don't need WiFi which the
P4P800-E Deluxe has included.) I am not clear about the differences
between the 875C and 865PE chipsets, and what those differences, if
any, will mean to me as the end user. Also, I can't tell the
difference between the P4C800-E Deluxe and the P4C800 Deluxe.

RAM:
I will buy PC3200 RAM, 1GB or 2GB of RAM -- all of the MBs above will
hold 4 DIMMS. Checking Kingston RAM prices on newegg.com, there are
several choices of 1GB (2x512) packages, ranging from ValueRAM at
$194 to HyperX at $282. I know I need to buy matched pairs of DIMMS.
I'm not clear on the difference between the ValueRAM and the HyperX,
other than the price. Both have very similar specs. I want good,
fast, stable RAM, but I don't want to spend any more than I need to.
Any help or recommendations?? (I used Kingston as my example, but
Crucial and Corsair have the same range. These three brands have
been recommended to me.)

Thanks for any help, recommendations and comments.

John

You'd be better off asking this in alt.comp.hardware (found via your ISP's
news-server) as this group is for folk having issues installing hardware
under XP.

You're cutting corners, and that's never advisable. For Photoshop you should
really be looking for the fastest drives available and that means a WD
Raptor 10K. Here's my recommendation for a graphics editing system
http://secure.newegg.com/app/shoppingcart.asp?DEPA=1&submit=ADD&item=29-102-162
(you will, of course, need to add an OS to that). The AMD64s are much better
suited to graphics editing than the P4.

 

[John Blaustein]

SSDD,

Thanks for the comments.

I'm leaning towards an ASUS vs. Intel MoBo because my current ASUS PIII MoBo
has worked so well. In addition, I read a comment on either ExtremeTech.com
or Tomshardware.com suggesting that ASUS boards are better than Intel's. I
have to confess that basing my decision on one negative comment is pretty
lame! I'll look at the board you mention on the Intel site. In either
case, I will stick with the 875 chipset.

Regarding the hard drives -- to be honest, I don't know what RAID is! I've
seen that mentioned repeatedly, but I'm not sure what it means. Can my
WD1200JB drives be connected to the MoBo via RAID, or would I need new
drives? I know that there is either EIDE or SATA, but I'm not clear whether
RAID only works with SATA drives? Perhaps you can explain this.

I do understand that my current drives may not be the fastest, but for the
moment at least, I want to use them on my new system since I already have
them. I certainly agree with you that my EIDE drives won't load and save
large Photoshop files as fast as the SATA drives, but the main improvement
I'm looking for is how the PC processes Photoshop files once they are open.

By the way, can you comment on my questions about how much I should spend on
RAM?

Again, thanks for your time and comments.

John

 

[John Blaustein]

Miss Perspicacia Tick,

I'll go to the other NG. Sorry if I'm not in the right place here. I will
be using XP, however.

I know that my HDs aren't the fastest, but I own them and want to use them,
at least for a while.

I'll check out your newegg shopping cart. Thanks for the link and your
comments.

John

 

[Paul]

There is an Asus newsgroups (well maybe where
u r).

alt.comp.periphs.mainboard.asus

I use the Asus P4P800 non-deluxe here. A good mobo.
with 1GB PQI 400 DDR ram, and a 2.4 800 FSB CPU with HT.

Not that much diff between it and the Deluxe. Only Sata 0,1 and firewire. I
use a SATA 120GB hdd, and a 80 GB ide, with a 52x cd burner and 4x DVD
burner, and a PCI firewire card. And it has never given me probs.

I think the deluxe is similar to the non-deluxe for the
USB ports (8 USB2). I use a digital cam, a USB 2
printer, an internal card reader, and a scanner on this. A 7
port port USB 1.1 hub and a 8 port ethernet hub.

It seems to handle all of these quite nicely. All with a 320w power supply.

 

[Guest]

I've been using and building systems with ASUS
motherboards for 14 years - I like 'em . . .

 

[John Blaustein]

Thanks, Paul. I'll go to the ASUS NG.

Anonymous... glad to hear about your success with ASUS boards.

John

 

[SSDD]

What RAID is, is taking 2 or more hard drives, and
basically linking them together so Windows sees it as one
large drive. The benefit of this comes from striping data
across both drives, meaning, half of the data is on one
drive, half on the other. Meaning together, both drives
have to write less and read less, and data is sent back
and forth over more channels.

Take SATA for example. A single SATA drive has a max
transfer speed of 1.5 GB/s. If you set them up as RAID,
the maximum transfer speed jumps to 3.0 GB/s. Granted, we
don't have the technology yet to actually get to 3.0
GB/s, but it will at least double the performance of a
single drive.

The MoBo I described and I'm assuming the ASUS too, have
a built in controller for S-ATA RAID only. To do this for
EIDE, there are PCI controllers you can buy with all the
software to set them up. Granted, that's extra money, but
the performance speaks for itself.

What you could do is run your two drives for a while. If
you decide to go to S-ATA RAID for the performance gain,
you could load your OS and your photoshop/pictures/etc
onto your SATA drives, and ALSO keep your IDE drives
connected for extra storage. There are a lot of
possibilities.

As far as RAM...
There are a lot of good companies out there. I'm not
completely sure about the HyperX RAM. I'm not sure what
benefit it brings except a larger price tag. Ultra,
Kingston, Corsair are all good manufacturers. A wise
investment is to make sure you get Dual Channel RAM. It
is on the same thought process as S-ATA. Dual Channel
theoretically doubles your max memory bandwidth for
better performance. This works best with RDRAM, but that
stuff is really expensive.

Nice thing is that Dual Channel isn't usually more
expensive than regular RAM. Dual channel RAM is basically
tested to make sure that the 2 sticks are more closely
matched in performance, but any 2 sticks of the same size
and same type will work.

As far as the comments on which processors to get...
Don't read too much into that right now. I forsee a lot
of things happening with processors in the near future. I
can't imagine Intel staying out of the 64 bit processor
world for much longer. In actuality, tests proved that
the Intel P4 extreme edition wiped the floor with the AMD
64.

Good luck, and I hope I've helped a bit.

 

[John Blaustein]

SSDD,

You didn't help "a bit." You helped A LOT!! Now I know what RAID is all
about. I can now see why it's so fast and why it is always recommended for
Photoshop systems. Thanks for taking the time to write such a thorough
explanation.

While I'll use my EIDE drives for now, I'll go with a RAID MoBo so I can
upgrade at some point in the future.

Given all the RAM choices, I guess I won't buy the cheapest or the most
expensive, but something in between -- maybe more toward the less expensive
end. I understand everything you said about dual channel, etc.

John

 

[Robert Tyler]

SSDD,

You didn't help "a bit." You helped A LOT!! Now I know what RAID is all
about. I can now see why it's so fast and why it is always recommended for
Photoshop systems. Thanks for taking the time to write such a thorough
explanation.

While I'll use my EIDE drives for now, I'll go with a RAID MoBo so I can
upgrade at some point in the future.

Given all the RAM choices, I guess I won't buy the cheapest or the most
expensive, but something in between -- maybe more toward the less expensive
end. I understand everything you said about dual channel, etc.

John

Check out Mushkin RAM - not the least or the most expensive

I have been using only Mushkin for years - extremely reliable

1GB PC3200 DDR Blue Dual Pack (2x512) - $ 255.00

www.mushkin.com

Also available at Newegg

Bob Tyler...
Tyler Systems, LLC

 

[Robert Tyler]

SSDD,

You didn't help "a bit." You helped A LOT!! Now I know what RAID is all
about. I can now see why it's so fast and why it is always recommended for
Photoshop systems. Thanks for taking the time to write such a thorough
explanation.

While I'll use my EIDE drives for now, I'll go with a RAID MoBo so I can
upgrade at some point in the future.

Given all the RAM choices, I guess I won't buy the cheapest or the most
expensive, but something in between -- maybe more toward the less expensive
end. I understand everything you said about dual channel, etc.

John

Check out Mushkin RAM - not the least or the most expensive

I have been using only Mushkin for years - extremely reliable

1GB PC3200 DDR Blue Dual Pack (2x512) - $ 255.00

www.mushkin.com

Also available at Newegg

Bob Tyler...
Tyler Systems, LLC

 

[John Blaustein]

Robert... will do. Recommendations from people who actually use this stuff
helps a lot. The endless choices are overwhelming to an end user such as
myself. Thanks!

John