stable, fast configurations needed.

[fat_elvis]

haven't posted for 2 years. Upgrading my PC, and since the last one had LOTS of compatibility problems, I need your configurations. Stability / easy build are key. Wife thinks I'm insane since current PC works fine, and building it was ridiculous. If I have to tweak this pup to get it going, I'm never going to hear the end of it.

But, "If it ain't broke, upgrade".

.Please post your configuration / MadOnion 3D scores if you have them.

Or comment on my thinking:

Abit / Asus KT333, RAID? Others?
Onboard LAN/Sound - Anygood?
Althon XP (Speed?)
Memory (speed, brand?)
Graphics: GeForce4-4200, or Radeon 8500? Brand?


Thanks

[hiredgoonz]

System is rock solid...my onboard sound and NIC are great...

AMD Athlon XP 1600+ (1400Mhz) @ 1.54Ghz (11x140 @ 1.825V)
SOYO Dragon Plus (2ba3 BIOS)
2 x 512MB Samsung PC2700
1 x Maxtor 40GB ATA100/7200 RPM
1 x Maxtor 40GB ATA66/7200 RPM
1 x TDK 48x24x48x CDRW
1 x Panasonic 12x DVD
ATI Radeon 7500 Dual Display
2 x 21" Sony Trinitron
Onboard Sound - CMI 8738
Onboard NIC - VIA 10/100

[saphalline]

Originally posted by fat_elvis
...the last one had LOTS of compatibility problems...

Just out of curiosity, what's your current PC's configuration?

My system is pretty stable as stable goes, especially now that I'm on Win XP Pro. :D I got an Asus mobo, A7V266-E, with onboard RAID. Well, onboard RAID's a tricky thing. It sure does lengthen boot time, but it allows you to have four drives each on their own channel, or a total of 8 drives without any PCI controller cards. Don't know how important that is anymore, probably not enough to justify the extra 35-45 seconds boot time, but if I ever need that many drives I have it available...

The rest of my system:

768MB Crucial PC2100 DDR RAM (1x 512MB, 1x 256MB modules)
IBM 60GB 60GXP (NTFS)
Maxtor 20GB (secondary hard drive/FAT32)
Pioneer 16x DVD-106s (slot load, yeah! :cool:)
Leadtek GF2 Ti 64MB
Viewsonic 19" monitor
Sound Blaster Live! 5.1 OEM

Never gotten around to actually benchmarking it yet, maybe after I finish tweaking XP? In any case, my GF2 is soon to be upgraded to a GF3 Ti 200. They're cheap enough and I would probably gain 50-100% performance improvement in most of my games. Let's face it, a GF2 just can't cut it anymore (if you play all games at 1280 x 1024, that is ;))

Speaking of which, your graphics card decisions are pretty good, but you're not taking into account the fact that the Radeon 9700's are out, and that NVidia's come-back, the NV30, will be out in just a few short months. Be smart, grab yourself a cheapo GF3 Ti 200 for about $120, and save up for January when you can get a card 8 times more powerful for about $250!! Besides, GF3's are immensely overclockable and should serve you well for the time being.

[fat_elvis]

Thanks for the configurations. For the record, my pc is now quite solid. Current config:
Win XP Pro.
asus A7Pro KT133 ATA66
AMD 1 Gig hz Athlon
256 Generic memory
Sony CDRW
LG CD
Asus V7700 64MB DDR GeForce2/Pro

Rock solid, never fails. (with the exception of losing both hard-drives in the same week due to brown outs -- seems my 200 AMP service on the house was wired for 60, and down to a few strands of wire. Here I thought my switch to AMD was browning the lights).

Changes made to get it stable included the usual bios and driver updates but no go. 3 problems: bad Liteon CD drive (Brand new), Generic network card incompatible w/ MB and Win98 forcing complete reformat of drive upon crash, and...HEAT.

Bought a great heat sink, fixed heat problem, but caused another: none of the IDE drives being recognized. Turns out the heat sink was putting so much pressure on the chip that the thermal grease spread out to the point it shorted out something. Without that random discovery I'd still be scratching my head.

This last discovery took hundreds of hours, and several sys admin types to narrow down. Lastly, Win 98se was not stable with some of the newer hardware I had. XP is great.

thanks again.

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