Gents.

I am currently quite fed up with the twice dead and revived Athlon XP 2600+ machine. Nothing bad about AMD, but ever since my first Slot A Athlon I had nothing but problems.
This is neither a bitching or trolling post, or an "AMD V Intel" post.
I find it slightly hard to pick components based on reviews and so have to ask for the opinions.

The existing machine is comprised of following items:
Asrock K7VT6 (died last week, waiting to replace)
AMD Athlon 2600+ 400Mhz FSB CPU (running at 333Mhz FSB) - not running at all atm chilled by Arctic Cooler.
1024Mb RAM in 2 PC3200 DIMMS at 400Mhz
ATI Radeon 9200 All-In-Wonder
1Tb HD space in 5 WD HD (2x200Gb, 3x250Gb) 3 of them using PCI controller (no raid)
All on a 300W PSU in a neatly ventilated I-TEE case.

I aim to replace the mobo on this one and hand down to my wife for the purpouses of Sims2 and occasional network shoot'em-up slaughter to clear up family issues.

Now, the machine I am looking for is not aimed for gaming, although I do enjoy UT2004/CS/COD etc. and would like those to run fairly speedily.
My main priorities are 2D photo processing in Photoshop, 3D Gfx (using Lighwave and Maya), video processing/encoding, running testlab on VirtualPC and music production - to name a few daily tasks.
All the disks except system 200Gb will be moved to the new machine and although I would appreciate fast x-fers I am reluctant to go with SATA.
Disk usage is probably 90% storage 10% transfer/access.

Occasionally I tend to leave the machine on for a while - up to 2-3 weeks with a restart in between. Due to that I don't tend to poke around overclocking things, and it remains a kind of "would-be-nice-to-try-but-not-necessary" thing.

Additionally, I just replaced the batteries in my Smart UPS 700 and will be using it with the new box - last time a power spike killed the mobo and 700Gb of disks in one go.

So far I have received few suggestions as for instance:
"If you go for Intel CPU, stick to Intel's native chipset", or "Athlon 64 system will ofer more bang for the money".
But it is always interesting to hear other opinions.

So any comment is welcome.

for a new machine go with AMD's 64 939 or 64 X2 series. there are a lot of choices, depending on how much you want to spend. sicce you are going to be doing photo prcessing and such a higher end 64 or 64 X2 should be enough.

any of the ASUS, DFI, or ABIT boards would be fine. for just general use i doubt your going to want anything special. ABIT and DFI tend to be OCer boards but are still very reliable.

your video card shoud run you about 200, give or take a little, for something to run you FSP's and such. also, stay away from ATI. i have had many headaches because of them. Nvidia seems to have there stuff together. just my 2 cents though. : ) im pretty sure others have had better experiances than i.

there is nothing wrong with going SATA. I have built many systems with SATA and no problems so far. *knocks on wood* : )
SATA 2 is the newest stuff out. you may want to look at that. great Xfer speeds and they are pretty cheep.

Sounds like you UPS's arn't doing their job. if you have a power spike that shouldn't happen. make sure you have you UPS's pluged into a surge protector and not a power strip. i have seen many machines go up in smoke because of this.

sticking with intels native chipset is a great idea, if you go intel. AMD wise Nforce 4 chipset is the way to go.

Look for this stuff and youll end up with a nice system

939 mobo with pcie
939 A64 (3500? venice)
7800gt or x1800xl
Cosair,ocz,geil, are some good ram brands, personaly i perfer OCZ

i'm a photog who uses G5s, powerbooks, and PCs

amd's 939 all the way if you only want a pc, although if your work is important, i'd get the mac.

a8n-sli premium, even if you don't intend to use sli in the near future

the 7800GT is a great value (albeit $300) especially oc'ed, if you want something cheaper, the x800gto overclocks well, at just under $200, although you can't pair it up unless you go crossfire, which is stupid with the x800 - highly suggest the 7800gt, especially from eVGA, whose warranty *i think, you'd have to check me on this* covers oc's

two gigs of corsair valueselect - cheap and good

opteron 165/170 if you like to/can oc, otherwise 3800+. you'l get a heck of a lot more bang for the buck if you oc an opteron

i back up my media on [archival] DVDs, but have 1tb hard drive storage on my computer anyway
-------------
don't be afraid to pay a little more for bigger/better components. if you make a living off your equipment, don't try to save $3000 on equipment and end up losing $10000 b/c of it.

LOL wow

im very surprised that any one would suggest a MAC on a PC forum.

most people have a anti Mac stands and for you to make the suggestion to switch to a mac is GREAT.

im a Mac boy myself. i work on them all day (fixing them, when they have problems)

the only issue is if he wants to play game there arn't many out there for a mac. it is unfortunate that the best computer manufacture can't get viedo game companys to make game for them. HerrOber listen to avatar3k and me. a Mac for photos and viedo editing is the way to go. sure they are more expencive and you will pay the Mac primium but it is well worth it. as a matter of fact the machine i am useing right now is a Mac.

just 3 more things buy the apple care and dont get the new intel stuff just yet. when ever apple changes hardware like just recently the 1 gen allways has issues. wait till 2 gen intel stuff. and upgrade the memory but dont do it from apple, they will rip you off. buy the ram from crucial. they have memory that works just fine if not better.

avatar3k my hat is off to you for makeing the unpopular suggestion. *claps hands* : )

Macs are nice but who on freaking earth wants to pay 3-4G on a Mac when you can have a tottaly insane custom build pc for 4,000$ its stupid i think. with that kind of budget you could afford a fx57 even...

Thanks for the tips guys, it does answer quite a few questions indeed.

When it comes to Mac, I would probably give it a go if they haven't moved to Intel platform. Motorola's RISCs were good CPUs - I used G4 once upon a time. On Intel MACs became more of the OS choice, unfortunately.
Apple did not make things better by actually enforcing the Palladium System (i.e Trusted Platform), so I'm afraid I will keep to the PCs for now.

AMD has some good CPUs, however prices on the 64 FX-57 and FX-60 are shocking - £700. That even beats Intel's extreme edition by around £200.

Opteron's I suppose is equivalent to Intel's Xeon? The only trouble with those is that there are limited 64Bit software, and most of the stuff I work with is 32Bit. I would love to see the development of 64Bit platform, but without involving my wallet for a while.

SATA should be fine as long as it can be booted to in DOS mode or recognised correctly by windows during setup. Never used SATA before, so and comments would be welcome.
10.000RPM is no go, since this will increase the wear of the disks. At some point I was planning to stick to 5400RPM, but 7200 is most common now and I have to leave with that.
Was also thinking about getting an external enclosure with either USB2 or FireWire interface to keep the disks in, but this will probably come in later.

UPS didn't have batteries replaced since they died approx. 1.5 years ago. So it wasn't really involved in the surge situation.

Don't overlook Foxconn motherboards, they offer some very nice boards at good prices. They might not be the best overclocking boards, but they are well-made, stable, and reliable. There is lots of good memory out there, but don't overlook Wintec, they make good stuff at a good price. If this is the only forum one reads, one would be led to believe that only Asus, Abit, and DFI make worthy motherboards, and only Corsair makes good memory. Not that there is anything wrong with these, because they are good, just be advised you do have other viable choices. Over the past few years we have built quite a few systems with Foxconn boards and Wintec memory, without ANY failures.

i dont see why you wouldn't want a new intel mac they are going to a hell of a lot better than the Power PC ones. even if you dont want an intel one you can still get a Power PC one. Imac, G5, Ibook, Power Book. these are all still made.

you should watch the apple key note speaches. the reason they made the switch was be cause Power PC couldn't deliver the performance per watt. Intel is the solution to this, that and more speed.

Dont discount Apples new systems i bet you if you put a high end PC laptop up agaist the Mac book pro. the mac book would smoke it.

same goes for any of the new intel mac that are coming out.

yes the price is steap, but you get what you pay for. Macs arn't ment for the light hearted. they were built by professinals for professinals. the pure quality of their machines is beyond that of your custom PC. even the machines that dell, HP, sony, and gateway can not come close to the attention that is placed in these machines. that and you dont have to deal with some guy in india or china that can berly speak english and reads off of a 3 x 5 card. i am not tring to be a bigot or anything i love ppl from india and china. i just don't want to deal with them if im tring to fet warrenty work taken care of.

anyway as for 10,000 RPM drives go, they were ment to take a beating. they are raid drives and are very reliable. they wouldn't have made them as such if they wern't up to the task. and SATA works exactly the same as IDE just on a different connector.


This next part is for INeedCache

i can understand where you are coming from. the reason ppl sugest those boards is cause ppl have used them. agreed foxcon is a good company. they used to supply apple with the mobos for their lamp shade imacs. (good mahines) PC wise ppl are reluctant to go with them beacuse they like the big manufacturers they have been around for a long time and have made a name for them selfs. what it eally comes down to is reliability, ppl want it and those mobos have it. same goes for the memory. i have never heard of Wintec, but illl look into them. they may be a nice company.

I doubt it, the mac book pro isn't going to be the only laptop with a Core Duo on board, let alone that Core Duo can go higher than the 1,83Ghz.. thus there will be more 15,4" laptops that have a +1,83Ghz Core Duo or better gfx card.

So you run it in 32 bit windows. Almost any CPU you buy today will have 64-bit support (the ones that don't have a version that does and that's the better version anyways). And the Opteron is really just a server version of the Athlon64's, and tested extra hard for stability - in a server hardware crashes are not a good thing.

Mike.

So you run it in 32 bit windows. Almost any CPU you buy today will have 64-bit support (the ones that don't have a version that does and that's the better version anyways). And the Opteron is really just a server version of the Athlon64's, and tested extra hard for stability - in a server hardware crashes are not a good thing.

Mike.

Sounds like HerrOber is talking about the Itaniums, but even those can operate 32-bit with the help from emulation abit slower.

i ment curently. obviously right now the mac book is the only laptop out with a duo proc. but also remember new revisions of machines come out all the time. but even if there was a PC lap top with a duo proc in it. the mac book would smoke it.

if you care. the reason i think this is the OS the Mac OS has a lot less to deal with in terms on files. The files arn't as scattered as windows and there are a lot less files to read and write.

It was Itanium I had in mind indeed.
Aren't Itaniums/Opterons pure 64Bit CPUs? Or do they simply support 64Bit calc?
If they are indeed native 64Bit it would be a waste to use them in the build which will operate purely in 32Bit environment. Besides, AMD made socket jumps which made many systems obsolete almost as soon as they were out (SlotA-SocketA is a good example). There is no guarantee that the same thing won't happen some time soon to the Opteron.
Imho, one should wait couple of years before going with the pure 64Bit CPUs.
Not least because of the software and drivers. I remember how long it took ASUS and Canon to come up with the drivers for WindowsXP.

As for MACs, I think I pass. It wouldn't be simply building a new box, but would require me to re-obtain all the software I already have.
I am simply not interested in this kind of step.