Need advice on hard drive and graphics card.

[bakerdav]

I own this part of the system already:-


AMD XP 3200 Barton 400FSB cpu
DFI Lanparty NF2 Ultra Motherboard
512 MB DDR SDRAM PC3200 400 Mhz MEMORY
Sony DVD writer
case

What i need help with is picking hardrive and grpahics card. Money is a facter as i'm a student! Graphics card i'm looking at is 256Mb Radeon 9600 XT DDR DVI-I TV Out, which i have found for £135, and SATA 160Gb Diamond Max Hard Disk Drive OEM for £90.

Are these going to be good, or can i do better in the same budget? Is SATA the way to go? Oh yea and what is ATA RAID 133 for? I have two slots on motherboard for that as well!

Shop been looking at is www.watford.co.uk

Can you recommend a fan as well? Around 20-30 quid!

Thanks for your help!

 

[Ian]

You seem to have chosen some good choices - and some not bad prices. SATA is probably worth it if your motherboard can support it, as it will be used alot more in the future. Check out our latest hard drive review (https://www.pcreview.co.uk/article-4021.php) as it will explain it a little more.

The ATI 9600 will play games very well, and it has some excellent features. If you are looking for something a bit cheaper, I would recommend the GeForce 5200 series - but the 9600 is a very good card.

Some other retailers worth looking at are:

http://www.dabs.com
http://www.microland.co.uk
http://www.komplett.co.uk
http://www.uc-solutions.co.uk

There is a whole list here : https://www.pcreview.co.uk/retailerratings.php

 

[kalbal]

dont touch the 5200 ...

comparing it to a 9600XT is a bad idea
3dmark2001se
Fx 5200=5000-6000 MAX
9600XT=10000-15000 MAX


big difference there, the 9600XT is a gr8 buy and comes with HL2 which would retail for about £39.99, so that cash is took off the card price for a start.

also another recommendation would be to check the fx-5900's they are supposably Nividia's top of the range cards, they dont perform well to the likes of the 9800XT but for the price they are unbeaten...
fx5900=£170
9800XT=£350
9800 non pro= £220

the fx 5900 is a good buy, i want one myself tbh

 

[kennclaud]

BakerDav, First of all for what are you mostly be using your PC? so said your a student so im assuming that you'll be using your pc for school projects (GAMING most of the time). Get 9600XT and SATA HDD. or just go for a plain 9600SE and a 133 HDD (80GB) if you'll just be doing printings, web browsing, buring and watching movie (on the PC). with this option it'll save you atleast 100bucks$ and you can still play decent games (FPS)

 

[qmanq]

If you want best perfirmance for gaming (cos your a student), i reckon getting 2 x 256mb would be quicker than one 512mb. and yes SATA it's godda be. You can get a 160gb Maxtor now for about £85. dont get anything with SE on the end

 

[1nteger]

I would always question how much storage you REALLY need when choosing a hard drive. 120Gig is fine if you need it, but you can save some cash by going for 80Gb or even less if you aren't likely to be storing large programs or files. I would definitely go for SATA...partly because it's the newest technology and partly because the cables are much smaller and easier to work with than standard IDE ribbons or rounded cables. Personally, I reckon the Western Digital drives are still tops...For £90 you might even consider one of their 10,000rpm Raptors...only 37Gb, but again, how much capacity do you REALLY need? Are you going to backing up on DVD? The Raptor comes with 5Yr warranty...buying a cheaper drive might be a false economy if you end up with an unreliable drive. Warranty is worth keeping an eye on.

Vid card: I still think nVidia cards are the way to go rather than ATI, largely because of operating system issues I've had in the past. Both have equally fast cards, and the test should be based on what your most demanding applications actually run like, not on spurious and marginal dirrerences in 3DMark scores. Often it's the drivers that have biggest impact on these benchmarks anyway. To save some dosh, check out cards that have a good rep for overclocking (and ones with good cooling that don't sound like jet engines), avoid 256Mb or 'Ultras'. FX5900 is very good now for priceerformance. Avoid cards with games bundled that just haven't appeared yet...you get a voucher rather than the game...Half Life 2 is now going to be September, by which time it will probably look 'old hat' compared to games that should be out before it.

(If you must get a card with a game then the new nVidia nv40 cards are being bundled with Doom 3 after April !!! )

Memory: 2 sticks of 256 should run better in dual channel mode than a single dimm of 512Mb.

This is all just my personal view of course, but i hope it's useful...happy building!

 

[floppybootstomp]

Time for me to chip in

I think both the Hard Drive and the 9600XT as a graphics card are a good choice. The 9600XT will handle most games, but will probably struggle with Doom 3 and probably some future games.

I recently bought an Aopen FX5900 from Dabs for £145.00 inc. postage, and that after saying I'd never buy another Nvidia card. At that price, it was too good to resist.

And it works well, I'm able to run a lot of games such as Call Of Duty, Unreal 2 and James Bond Nightfire at a much higher res than I could with the FX5900's predecessor, an ATI 8500.

And it also overclocked to 5950 settings with ease, but it was getting a tad warm, so I throttled back.

Take a look over at Dabs, they may still have some.

 

[Quadophile]

Talk about playing games on the PC, I upgraded my rig last year only because my son was into games but after getting the xbox and the Pixel Plus TV with it he just does not want to come back to the PC.

I recently upgraded my rig with a SATA 120 gig drive and it's performance is pretty good compared to the older 60 gig I am using in the same machine. Have dedicated 100 gig for Video only. Both are Seagate Barracuda's. They are extremly silent compared to the Quantum I have on my second rig. However the Quantum is very fast at less than 9 millisecond average seek time compared to both seagates which clock at around 12 milliseconds average, but run much cooler comparatively.