New parts for new PC (need help - little knowledge of hardware)

[Jason]

Patrick Proniewski wrote:

> On 18 nov. 2003, at 03:01, Bryan Cassidy wrote:
>
>> Next is to choose a mother board. I am
>> wanting a ASUS just because I hear alot of people talking about it on
>> the forums, irc etc and think I would be happy with it.
>
>
> you will, as long as you do not choose a cheap ASUS (SiS chipset and 
> controllers)
> For max performance and better FreeBSD support, choose a motherboard 
> with Intel chipset (if you choose to go with a pentium of course, I've 
> no experience with AMD)
>
If you go amd choose an nforce board.  The newer chipset revisions are 
great for overclocking.  The nforce also has(depending on manufacture 
and chipset version) great integrated audio(the same dobly digital 
thx(?) certified hardware on the xbox) and video(a geforce 2 or 4 mx).  
Last time I heard the onboard land support sucks for any open source os, 
or in other words may require a lot of your time to get working.  Asus 
is very good, but I am an avid epox user, so I must recommend an epox also.

>
>> If the motherboard from
>> asus has onboard sound can I use a PCI sound card?
>
>
> you can, of course.
>
>
>> Is it best to use a
>> PCI sound card or onboard?
>
>
> PCI is better, in general, as for Video or LAN, but some high end 
> motherboard have very good (in quality) onboard feature.
> my order of priority here is : lan > video > sound : if you can buy 
> only one PCI card, take a NIC card, then a video card, then finally a 
> sound card.
> Of course, a gamer would choose to get video "offboard" as a priority. 
> depends on your use.
>
>
>> I was thinking about buying the TrueBlue 480 Watt PSU
>> 480 Watt ATX12V Illuminated from antec. Good idea?
>
>
> first you list your needs :
> - computational power
> - disk space
> - video power
> - RAM use
>
Pcpowercooling.com  has excellent equipment and has info to help you 
choose the right size psu. Also I have always used linksys network 
equipment and am very happy with there products.  Finnally if you can 
afford it scsi is diffenetly better than ide, but I'm sure most people 
will think that is over kill.  Though if you are shopping on ebay you 
can find some great deals, older used scsi is still leaps and bounds 
better than ide, though the sizes of the drives may be low by 
comparison.  I would suggest you do most of your shopping for new stuff 
on newwgg.com,  I have always had great experinces with them.

> then you choose your processor, your disks, and so on.
> You should end with 1 or 2 motherboards that will suit your needs and 
> price.
>
> In general you'll want to avoid very cheap chipset, ultra-low end 
> video card are just good enough for console, low end NIC with crash 
> your freeBSD box (worst case) or drop paquets and deliver poor I/O.
>
> Remember that PIV and latest AMD need huge PSU, 480 W will be fine 
> anyway.
> SATA disk are not yet good enough to justify their tag. IDE will be 
> great but I would recommand a good controler (*not* SiS)
> Try and choose a good motherboard that will sport 4 or more RAM slots, 
> and that support more than 1GB RAM, so you'll be able to add some RAM 
> later.
> Don't go with IDE RAID. Even if it works great, it's extra money and 
> hassle.
> NIC : intel etherexpress Pro 10/100 is really good, most 3Com are good 
> too, avoid low end Dlink/Realtek
>
> Take a look a ABIT's motherboard, some of them are really good.
>
> hth
>
> patpro