New System Build - Want Opinions

A

Andrew Littlefield

Ok I am getting ready to build a new PC. First question is should I
build now or wait a bit more? I have to have the new PC built before
Labor Day.

Take a look at the system and options below and please give me some
feedback. Money is not a big deal but I don't wnat to waste it either.
So if you see anything that looks stupid let me know.

Primary things that will be done with the PC: Games, Databases, Image
Editing (flatbed and film scanners attached), web page creation, plus
all the normal web surfing and word processing type stuff. I am hoping
for no heavy number crunching at home, though I may need to do some FEA
or MATLAB work at some point.

I generally don't overclock and just buy new stuff when the old gets too
slow. Maybe retail instead of OEM CPUs?

Speakers: Klipsch ProMedia Ultra *
KB/Mouse: Logitech MX Duo *
Soundcard: SB Audigy 2 ZS *
SCSI Card: Adaptec AHA-2940AU * - For Film Scanner
Video Card: 6800GT (probably eVGA since they are available)
Hard Drive: WD Raptor 74 GB
Case: Antec P-160 w/window
Power Supply: Antec 480W True Blue
CD/DVD: NEC 2510A
Floppy: TEAC
Case Fan: Antec 120mm Blue LED
CPU Cooler: Thermalright SLK948U
CPU Fan: Vantec Stealth 92mm
Thermal Paste: Artic Silver 5
Memory: Corsair XMS PC3200 XLPT Twin Pack - 1 GB total

CPU/MB 939 Option
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3800+ OEM
MB: Asus A8V Deluxe

CPU/MB 754 Option
CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3400+ OEM
MB: Asus K8V SE Deluxe

* - Existing / Stuff already bought for this PC but currently being used
on the old one

Existing stuff that will be hooked up: HP LaserJet 5L, Canon S9000,
CanoScan FS4000US, Epson Perfection 2450 Photo, Saitek 45, External Zip
Drive, APC BackUPS XS 1500

Suggestions on where to buy stuff would be appreciated as well. I have
been primarily looking at NewEgg for pricing.
 
M

Matt

Andrew said:
I generally don't overclock and just buy new stuff when the old gets too
slow. Maybe retail instead of OEM CPUs?

The stock retail HSF should be fine unless your case has a cooling
problem. The OP of a previous thread (try groups.google.com) indicated
he had trouble with overheating in his P160.
 
H

Hamman

Everything looks good exect a couple of things:
I generally don't overclock and just buy new stuff when the old gets too
slow. Maybe retail instead of OEM CPUs?

Get a retail, even if you dont plan on using the retail HSF you get a better
warantee. One of my friends just had a 2800+ go south even with a complete
retail setup.
Hard Drive: WD Raptor 74 GB

High failiure rate. Get another disk, i recommend a Maxtor, somewhere in the
region of 100-200Gb for backups and storage. I believe they have a 1 in 5
chance of failiure within the first year.

hamman
 
M

Matthew Logan

Well from the looks of it, you're building yourself one kick-ass system. If
you have to have it built by Labour Day I'd say there isn't any harm in
buying now as prices aren't likely to drop much in only a month and a half.
The only suggestions I could make are perhaps go with the 3500+ instead of
the 3800+, it'll save you money and you'll still get really good
performance. Or, if you want to save even more money, just go with the
Socket 754. You system would still be able to handle anything. Also if
you're planning on going top shelf with the graphics card I'd recommend
going with an ATI X800 Pro instead of nVidia as it performs just as well
(and better) and it's a lot less power hungry. That's really all I can
offer you, I don't know if I could help you out with pricing as I live in
Canada, you could try www.ncix.com and see if that does anything for you,
but they're Vancouver-based, so I don't know. Good luck with that.
 
J

John R Weiss

Hamman said:
High failiure rate. Get another disk, i recommend a Maxtor, somewhere in the
region of 100-200Gb for backups and storage. I believe they have a 1 in 5
chance of failiure within the first year.

I have yet to hear of a Raptor 74 failure, and have heard plenty of Maxtor
failure stories. Where did you get your info?
 
J

John R Weiss

The Newegg price for the retail 3800+ is over $700. Consider that you can
get an Opteron 248 for less than that (or a 244 or 246 for MUCH less), get a
dual-CPU MoBo, and add a second CPU when you feel the need later (good for
Photoshop!). The ASUS K8V you picked goes for $152, and an equivalent dual
940 MoBo would go for$260 (Tyan Tiger K8W 8151) to $380 (Arima HDAMB) to
$435 (Tyan Thunder K8W S2885ANRF), depending on your needs, from
www.monarchcomputer.com.

BTW, I would go with the retail CPU unless you plan on something fancy like
water cooling.

John Weiss
Nuc Eng RPI 74
 
H

Hamman

John R Weiss said:
I have yet to hear of a Raptor 74 failure, and have heard plenty of Maxtor
failure stories. Where did you get your info?
Spending far too many hours on usenet.

hamman
 
K

kony

I have yet to hear of a Raptor 74 failure, and have heard plenty of Maxtor
failure stories. Where did you get your info?

From what I've seen the Raptors fail about 2-3X as often.
Check some forums or places like Newegg's user ratings.
 
A

accelerator

Bear in mind that at the moment the Socket 939 Athlon 64s are
disproportionately expensive when considering price to performance
ratio, because they represent the cutting edge.

A Socket 754 Athlon 64 system will offer extremely good performance
anyway, so that is the one I would go for. The only reason not to
choose Socket 754 is that processor upgrades may not be available,
because AMD will be transferring its Athlon 64 upgrade path to the
Socket 939. Whether it is worth paying so much today for Socket 939
is still questionable though.

Rgds

Accelerator

==============
Posted through www.HowToFixComputers.com/bb - free access to hardware troubleshooting newsgroups.
 
J

John R Weiss

kony said:
From what I've seen the Raptors fail about 2-3X as often.
Check some forums or places like Newegg's user ratings.

OK:

Newegg gives the Raptor 74 5 stars, with 190 votes and 119 reviews/5
failures.

The Maxtor 80 is also 5 stars, 106 votes, 51 reviews/5 failures.

Maxtor 120: 4 stars, 60 votes, 34 reviews/8 failures.

Looks to me like the Maxtor has 2-5X the failure rate, from this sample.

Now, please show me the rebuttal data from wherever you can find it.
 
B

Bioboffin

none said:
Here are the Newegg customer reviews for this drive:
http://secure.newegg.com/app/CustratingReview.asp?DEPA=0&item=22-144-160
It looks like about 5 reviewers out of 119 or so had drive failures.

As a system administrator responsible for 50+ computers over the last five
years (i.e. about 100 different pcs), as well as my own experience, I have
only ever once seen a hard drive failure. That was on my own pc, and was
undoubtedly caused by my moving the pc carelessly while the hard drive was
running. I have owned both Western Digital and Maxtor hard drives. They all
operate faultlessly. (At least over a 3-4 year period, which I consider to
be a reasonable life span).

So I wouldn't worry about it too much. (Just make sure your backups are up
to date - just in case).

John.
 
K

kony

Here are the Newegg customer reviews for this drive:

http://secure.newegg.com/app/CustratingReview.asp?DEPA=0&item=22-144-160

It looks like about 5 reviewers out of 119 or so had drive failures.


It does seem that later posters to that feedback secton have had
good results, as that's roughly the industry average.

The odd part is that I do recall at least one of the Raptors
listed on Newegg's site having significantly more than 5 problem
reports, the rate was about 1 in 9. I don't know if Newegg
stopped carrying that drive so the feedback is hidden (might be
found if you can determine what the old product's Item # was to
derive the URL). At any rate I suppose it doesn't matter, if the
current Raptors are having only average failure rate then past
failures are irrelevant, unless someone happened upon old stock
elsewhere.

Hard to know what to make of Newegg's ratings though, I've seen
some pretty poor products rated pretty good when their only
redeeming virtue was low price... I could understand if reviewers
wrote that item was a good value but instead they rate other
aspects that were only average if not inferior to other similar
products. Certainly it's not the case with the Raptor though,
upon until recently it was clearly the performance choice, though
Maxtor's new Maxline III seems to be pretty competitive since it
has so much higher capacity too.
http://www.anandtech.com/storage/showdoc.html?i=2094
 
K

kony

Newegg gives the Raptor 74 5 stars, with 190 votes and 119 reviews/5
failures.

The Maxtor 80 is also 5 stars, 106 votes, 51 reviews/5 failures.

Maxtor 120: 4 stars, 60 votes, 34 reviews/8 failures.

Looks to me like the Maxtor has 2-5X the failure rate, from this sample.

Now, please show me the rebuttal data from wherever you can find it.

I really don't feel the need to prove anything to you since I
have no reason to lie about it, but I looked anyway and can't
find the Newegg product review which showed roughly 1 in 10
failures, +-15%.

It might be an older product listing or retail, I don't know. If
I figure out the old product # Newegg used then it should still
be on their site but so far I only see listings for 22-144-160
and 222-144-200. I am 100% certain the reviews I saw were for a
Raptor Newegg once sold. AT any rate it may be irrelevant, if
the current Raptors have roughly average failure rate then past
data is not applicable, as with any other drive.
 
J

John R Weiss

kony said:
The odd part is that I do recall at least one of the Raptors
listed on Newegg's site having significantly more than 5 problem
reports, the rate was about 1 in 9. I don't know if Newegg
stopped carrying that drive so the feedback is hidden (might be
found if you can determine what the old product's Item # was to
derive the URL). At any rate I suppose it doesn't matter, if the
current Raptors are having only average failure rate then past
failures are irrelevant, unless someone happened upon old stock
elsewhere.

The Raptor is a new design, so failure rates of the WD 7200 RPM SATA drives
don't apply.

The only other Raptor is the 36, and Newegg still carries both. It has 311
reviews/12 failures covering 340 drives. All the other complaints were for
noise or failure to meet cost/performance expectations.

Hard to know what to make of Newegg's ratings though, I've seen
some pretty poor products rated pretty good when their only
redeeming virtue was low price... I could understand if reviewers
wrote that item was a good value but instead they rate other
aspects that were only average if not inferior to other similar
products.

Since we are comparing different drives using the same rating system (Newegg
user ratings), any systemic errors or problems would tend to be similar
across brands. Also, since people who have problems are more likely to
write a [bad] rating than satisfied customers, the apparent failure rate is
much higher than the actual rate.
 
J

John R Weiss

kony said:
I really don't feel the need to prove anything to you since I
have no reason to lie about it, but I looked anyway and can't
find the Newegg product review which showed roughly 1 in 10
failures, +-15%.

No accusations of lying, though it is possible your recollection fails you.
I've seen too many assertions on Usenet that could not be substantiated once
the poster was asked to do so. Such assertions don't help the people who
are seeking help or advice.

I even gleaned the data from one of the sources you challenged me to look
up, and cited figures for the Maxtor 80 (because it is similar in capacity
to the Raptor) as well as the 120 (because it fit in another poster's
capacity range of 100-200 GB, and had sufficient data).

It might be an older product listing or retail, I don't know. If
I figure out the old product # Newegg used then it should still
be on their site but so far I only see listings for 22-144-160
and 222-144-200. I am 100% certain the reviews I saw were for a
Raptor Newegg once sold. AT any rate it may be irrelevant, if
the current Raptors have roughly average failure rate then past
data is not applicable, as with any other drive.

AFAIK, there are only the 2 current Raptors, 36 and 74, and Newegg still
sells and lists reviews for both. Other current WD drives use the Caviar
(in use for MANY years) or Protege moniker, and I can't recall another
Raptor in 12+ years.

It is also possible that the set of reviews you recall include all
complaints, not just failures. There are apparently a lot of [early?]
Raptor 36 customers who are unhappy with the noise or perceived performance.
Neither of those appear to have carried over to the 74.
 
K

kony

The Raptor is a new design, so failure rates of the WD 7200 RPM SATA drives
don't apply.

The only other Raptor is the 36, and Newegg still carries both. It has 311
reviews/12 failures covering 340 drives. All the other complaints were for
noise or failure to meet cost/performance expectations.

When I wrote Raptor, I meant Raptor.
Hard to know what to make of Newegg's ratings though, I've seen
some pretty poor products rated pretty good when their only
redeeming virtue was low price... I could understand if reviewers
wrote that item was a good value but instead they rate other
aspects that were only average if not inferior to other similar
products.

Since we are comparing different drives using the same rating system (Newegg
user ratings), any systemic errors or problems would tend to be similar
across brands. Also, since people who have problems are more likely to
write a [bad] rating than satisfied customers, the apparent failure rate is
much higher than the actual rate.

Unfortunately they aren't, because you find a difference in the
types of customers. Raptor buyers are looking for higher-end
performance and willing to pay premium for it (ignoring SCSI),
while the majority of non-Raptor buyers fall into either the
max-capacity or lowest-price categories. We cannot assume
different customer segments will have similar rates of failure
nor report them on Newegg's review page at same rate. What was
noteworthy was the alarmingly high reports of failure... if the
rate hadn't been so high I never would've noticed in the first
place.
 
D

Dick Sidbury

none said:
Here are the Newegg customer reviews for this drive:

http://secure.newegg.com/app/CustratingReview.asp?DEPA=0&item=22-144-160

It looks like about 5 reviewers out of 119 or so had drive failures.
I'm a satisfied Newegg customer but I've heard that they uh... "only
post the reviews that they think will help sell equipment." i.e. there
have been reports of unfavorable reviews being omitted. Their Web site
in fact disclaims using their customer reviews as a basis for buying.

dick
 
D

David Maynard

Dick said:
I'm a satisfied Newegg customer but I've heard that they uh... "only
post the reviews that they think will help sell equipment." i.e. there
have been reports of unfavorable reviews being omitted. Their Web site
in fact disclaims using their customer reviews as a basis for buying.

dick

Quite right. And it isn't surprising either as any casual look though
computer groups will reveal scads of folks attributing 'problems' to the
wrong thing.
 

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