critique my PC upgrade

[Hemi-Cuda]

got some excess cash finally, so now's the time. i'm keeping my existing Geforce 8800GTX but looking to upgrade on the AMD 4400+ and DDR 400 ram i have in there now. also needed more HD space, wanted a new soundcard and case, and gave myself a budget of $1000. here's what i have



unless there's some screaming deals somewhere online i'm sticking with Memory Express for the convenience of picking up the stuff myself. any thoughts?

[SebC]

Unless you have already have an aftermarket heatsink, I'd consider adding one so you can overclock your system. Also, the Nine Hundred is a dust trap (especially in Calgary), but if you're going to clean it out regularly that shouldn't be too much of a problem.

[llama64]

If you don't have it already, upgrade to Vista. Otherwise that 4GB of ram will go to waste.

And I'd consider another audio card. Unless you are doing high end audio processing work (not games), go with a cheaper Audigy SE 7.1. It's cheaper, does everything a game needs it to do and with much more stable drivers then the X-Fi. If you're keen at getting a high end audio card, look into alternatives other then Creative. The hardware Creative makes is pretty good, but they can't employ decent driver software developers at all.

Otherwise, /drool

[LockedOut]

I agree with llama64. I'd stay away from Creative when it comes to sound cards.

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by llama64

If you don't have it already, upgrade to Vista. Otherwise that 4GB of ram will go to waste.

And I'd consider another audio card. Unless you are doing high end audio processing work (not games), go with a cheaper Audigy SE 7.1. It's cheaper, does everything a game needs it to do and with much more stable drivers then the X-Fi. If you're keen at getting a high end audio card, look into alternatives other then Creative. The hardware Creative makes is pretty good, but they can't employ decent driver software developers at all.

Otherwise, /drool

i already have an Audigy 2 that i've had for years but it seems to be going a bit wonky lately. i'm mainly getting the X-Fi for gaming as it does provide some nice benefits there, it's gotten quite good reviews on gaming sites

and since Vista's performance with games is still pretty terrible compared to XP i have no plans to upgrade to that just yet. maybe with a couple of service packs it might get better but even with XP only recognizing 3.25gb of my ram it'll still perform better (don't quite know about XP 64-bit though, it seems to be forgotten)

as for cooling i'm also gonna pick up one of these. thanks for the feedback

[zhulander]

You're going to have to rethink the RAM. The heatpipes on it get in the way of the fan on the freezer 7 cooler.
That Seagate hard drive seems to be very unreliable from personal experience and per Newegg customer reviews:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148288

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by zhulander

You're going to have to rethink the RAM. The heatpipes on it get in the way of the fan on the freezer 7 cooler.
That Seagate hard drive seems to be very unreliable from personal experience and per Newegg customer reviews:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16822148288

really? of 698 reviews on that site, 463 were 5 stars. Hitatchi and Western Digital drives have far lower approval ratings. plus i stuck with Seagate as i've been using them for about 10 years now and had never had one go bad

[SebC]

Originally Posted by zhulander

You're going to have to rethink the RAM. The heatpipes on it get in the way of the fan on the freezer 7 cooler.

Either that, or rethink the cooler. I can vouch that that RAM works with Striker II Formula (my PC building mistake) and the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme. Although, hemi could probably go with the cheaper, PC-6400 OCZ RAM and not notice any difference.

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

really? of 698 reviews on that site, 463 were 5 stars. Hitatchi and Western Digital drives have far lower approval ratings. plus i stuck with Seagate as i've been using them for about 10 years now and had never had one go bad

+ more cache = better

[Hemi-Cuda]

Originally Posted by SebC

Either that, or rethink the cooler. I can vouch that that RAM works with Striker II Formula (my PC building mistake) and the Thermalright Ultra-120 Extreme. Although, hemi could probably go with the cheaper, PC-6400 OCZ RAM and not notice any difference.

+ more cache = better

i actually did rethink the cooler. after looking at some more reviews, i decided on a Xigmatek HDT-S1283. it was tops for overclocked temp reducing on most benchmarks, cheaper than anything by Zalman or Thermaltake, and has a thinner profile than the Arctic. course you never know how everything will fit together until you start to build it, but i'm pretty confident it'll work with that EVGA motherboard

[ricosuave]

I thought that with the release of xp sp3, the 4gb thing was resolved?

[CubicleGeek]

The 4GB barrier is not a bug, it's an inherent limitation of 32-bit OSes. You will never be able to access all 4GB of RAM because there are not enough addresses between the 4GB of RAM, video memory, system, and anything else that has directly addressable memory.

[cal_guy]

Originally Posted by Hemi-Cuda

i already have an Audigy 2 that i've had for years but it seems to be going a bit wonky lately. i'm mainly getting the X-Fi for gaming as it does provide some nice benefits there, it's gotten quite good reviews on gaming sites

and since Vista's performance with games is still pretty terrible compared to XP i have no plans to upgrade to that just yet. maybe with a couple of service packs it might get better but even with XP only recognizing 3.25gb of my ram it'll still perform better (don't quite know about XP 64-bit though, it seems to be forgotten)

as for cooling i'm also gonna pick up one of these. thanks for the feedback

The difference between Vista and XP are basically non-existent in gaming performance.

Just take a look at these almost 1-year old benchmarks which show minimal difference between Vista and XP
http://www.firingsquad.com/hardware/...te/default.asp

Or these benchmarks that are more recent.
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/...2302495,00.asp

Also remember the majority of hardware review sites are doing their testing and benchmarking on Vista.

[Rathji]

The difference between XP and Vista for gaming really comes when you are playing a directX 9 vs directX 10 game. A new game will be using direct x 10 and will run faster on Vista, older games that are not using 10 will run a slight bit slower because every DX9 call will have to 'convert' it to a direct x10 call that vista will understand.

So, unless you are playing games that are a couple years old, Vista is probably your best bet.

The only time Vistareally blows is when your system can hardly run the game you are trying to play, since it does require more resources to run ( For example a 1gig ram laptop), but given what you are getting here I doubt that will be a problem