Hey I am new here and not sure where to post this but I was wondering if anyone could help me out. I am building a new system due to the fact that I can't work very efficiently with my current setup, ie running Premier, photoshop, Dreamweaver at the same time. Right now I have an oldish P4 1.8GHz with 768MB of Ram but its limit is 2GB and its RDRAM which is freakin expensive. Anyways my question is how much difference will I notice in multitasking with such programs as photoshop, illustrator, dreamweaver, flash, and I always gotta have some music running in the bkground. Also I dont do much gaming since they stoped making new versions of Diablo, but World of Warcraft does look tempting. I dont mind spending some money but with building a new PC I am up to over 2 grand and just wondering if I will notice a great difference for the money, or should I wait to build my dream PC.

I have been researching hardware and have come up with this list:

AMD 64 X2 3800+ Dual Core
Asus A8N-sLI-dELUX-939
xION 600WATT atx PSU
OC Z Dual Channel 2048MB PC3200 DDR
Thermalteke Black Armor Full Tower AXT Case


A few other questions if anyone is still reading this post,

I understand that with SLI you can only run one monitor, I currently have a 3 monitor set up and could never think of using just one monitor. What does the SLI advantage really do, is it just better freame rates in games and video. Just wondering cuz I was going to save some money and use my two older prexisting video cards which are a NVIDIA GeFORCE FX 5200 and an NVIDIA GeForece2 MX/MX 400.

Also when buying a case most have the standard outlets for the motherboard inputs/outputs to fit through, The ASUS A8N-SLI-Delux I am looking to buy has a pecuiler placment of ports and has 7.1 audio sound build in and from what I can tell not many cases have holes for them. Can I cut them out of a case or what. I was going to buy the Thermalteke Black Armor cuz of good airflow and cooling plus lots of room, but it looks like the case doesn't match the motherboard.

I was also going to try to hook up a RAID set-up of 2 harddrives for storage and buy one 10,000RPM SATA Drive
for my OS. What are the best HDs and ways to set this up. Can I set up ATA/100 Drives in RAID formate, cuz I got
two 300B Seagate Ultra ATA/100 drives laying around that got shipped to my house by accident!!!



Any advice on anything mentioned above or in general on building a great mulitasking machine for
video, web, and motion development would be greatly apreachiated. I'v done so much research over the last
few weeks that my head hurts and I though it would help to ask some knowlegeble people for advice.

Also thanks TOMS HARDWARE GUIDE for the Intel vs AMD benchmark comparison, it helped me out alot.

Firstly, I'd swap the deluxe model for the premium one. The Deluxe has issues with performance, as well as the northbridge fan breaking and being quite loud. For the extra $15 - $20, the preimuim model is a much better deal.

For your SLI question, I recommend reading <A HREF="http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041123/sli-performance-31.html" target="_new">here</A>. Long story short, you don't HAVE to run in SLI mode, and instead can get a nice 4 monitor setup without having to fill PCI ports with old and outdated GPUs.

As for the ports issue, most cases these days actually have the ports built into a removable panel. As well, the motherboards come with their own panel for their particular port setup. Thus, you jsut pop the one panel out, and pop the one from your motherboard in.

That's all I got. Which model of OCZ ram were you thinking of using? And what graphics card, as at least one of your old ones won't fit (I'm assuming that one is AGP and the other is PCI).

Looks like a pretty sweet system. The only thing i'd be wary on would be the Xion. I don't recognize that name...

Sli is pretty much just for gaming right now...There are companies out there starting to play with it in regards to FEA stuff...but nothing much yet, and it doesn't sound like something you would use.

The big deal about the sli is the Nforce chipset. I don't know what you know, so i'll say a bit about it. The nforce 4 chipset uses pci-e instead of agp for the primary video. There are several pci-e slots depending on which board you get...i think there were 4 on my sli-deluxe, but i can't remember now. Anyway, 2 of those slots are good for pci-e video cards, the other 2 are for modems/sound/etc. AGP video cards will not work at all with this system. Pci ones will, but only in one of the 3 pci slots available. To recap, there are 2 pci-e slots for video (or any other device...typically just video so far since its a new technology...), 2 pci-e slots for other stuff, and 3 pci slots for whatever.

The sli-deluxe is a great board...so long as you don't want to over clock it. You can still use the Deluxe-SLI board in a non-sli formation and get up to 4 monitors hooked up. You just have to buy 2 pci-e graphics cards with 2 monitor-out's on each. Most pci-e cards i personally have looked at (mostly 6xxx nvidia cards and ati 7xx 8xx cards) have two dvi connectors on them. Each card <i>should</i> come with at least 1 dvi to vga connector dependent on what brand and company you buy from...

Now that that is said, probably you can get by with anything above 500w on a psu, from a good brand. PSU's are kind of hard to put a finger on right now, on whether or not its a good brand. Typically i trust Enermax, Fortron, bleh...i'll just give you a site to check out. <A HREF="http://silentpcreview.com/section4.html" target="_new">http://silentpcreview.com/section4.html</A> You can cross check them against Tom's big psu review and this <A HREF="http://www.hexus.net/content/item.php?item=1359" target="_new">review from hexus</A>. Seasonic s12's are pretty good too so long as you aren't using a dfi motherboard. One more thing to remember...You want a 24-pin psu otherwise known as 2.xx unit, some people call it btx (even though btx doesn't really exist). Having multiple 12v lines doesn't matter either, and can only hurt in instances where you try to grab too much power from one of the two lines.

edit: One more thing...The reason there haven't been very many people helping you on here, is because you didn't put this in the right thread. This is the Overclocking Cpu's section. If you want more opinions and information, move this thread to another location (ie copy the contents of this one to the correct thread location, and delete this one).

F@H:
AMD: [X2 3800+ down][64 3000+ down][2500+][2400+][2000+][1.3][366]
Intel: [X 3.0x4][X 2.8x2][P4 3.0x2][P4-M 2.4][P4 1.3]

"...and i'm not gay" RX8 -Greatest Quote of ALL Time<P ID="edit"><FONT SIZE=-1><EM>Edited by apesoccer on 10/06/05 03:46 PM.</EM></FONT></P>