Brother's Graduation Gift

[NumenorLord]

I'm going to build my brother's PC that my mom is purchasing for his graduation gift. Here's what I want to put in it:

Centurion 534 Case(I won this case off of PCPerspective, which I'm still giddy about)
Enermax Whisper II 460 watt
Asus A8N-E
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
2x1 GB G.Skill DDR400 @ 2.5-3-3-6
256mb eVGA GeForce 7900 GT
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme
WD Caviar 300 GB
Asus DVD-Rom
Asus DVD+RW
Floppy Drive

All in all it comes out to a little over $1200. Comments?

 

[PJ101]

Looks good, what is he going to do with the computer? Is it more gaming or what?

 

[mesarectifier]

Why the Asus drives? I'm not saying they're crap or anything, just....why Asus??? I haven't used their drives for a while so I won't comment in case they've improved.

 

[rodney_ws]

I can comment on a recent Asus drive... I just got a new case (Kandalf) and had to get a matching drive so I ended up with an ASUS DVD burner... the model is infinitely less noisy than my previous Samsung CD-RW... I haven't burned any discs and I've only had it a week, but I can DEFINITELY comment on the volume level of it... bless you Asus.

 

[mesarectifier]

Isn't that bizarre, one of the things I hated about my old Asus drive was the noise! That and the fact that it was slow and unreliable. But it did burn some not-too-trashy CD-Rs in it's time. My Plextor is older and noisier, but burns better CDs still! And my NEC CD-RW is super quiet but burns terrible CDRs. Strange stuff!

 

[NumenorLord]

I needed silver drives for the silver front of the case and I trust Asus. Besides they got relatively good reviews, and they're not too expensive.

 

[mesarectifier]

Fair enough, and apparently they're pretty good! Looks like a good system.

 

[chunkymonster]

I'm going to build my brother's PC that my mom is purchasing for his graduation gift. Here's what I want to put in it:

Centurion 534 Case(I won this case off of PCPerspective, which I'm still giddy about)
Enermax Whisper II 460 watt
Asus A8N-E
AMD Athlon 64 3700+
2x1 GB G.Skill DDR400 @ 2.5-3-3-6
256mb eVGA GeForce 7900 GT
Sound Blaster X-Fi Xtreme
WD Caviar 300 GB
Asus DVD-Rom
Asus DVD+RW
Floppy Drive

All in all it comes out to a little over $1200. Comments?

That will be a nice machine...none of my brothers did anything that nice for me...

I can appreciate wanting to keep the front uniform with silver faces, but...my two cents, swap out the Asus ROMs for Plextors or Lite-Ons. Also, instead of 1-300GB drive, get 1-80GB for the system/OS drive and 1-250GB drive for back up and storage. Even if you partition the 300GB for the OS and storage, the system is still accessing 1 physical drive. I've gotten better I/O/performance with 2 "smaller" drives than by having 1 "bigger" drive. Again, my two cents, that and $5 will get you a grande latte from starbucks.

Nice gift! Good luck!

 

[jap0nes]

that's a nice machine!!
but i would take out:

the sound card - on board is good enough
dvd-rom - there's no need to have 2 drives, as in most cases they're not used too frequently


the money you save you can spend at his party buying beer or something

 

[rodney_ws]

LOL... the guy who is telling you to hold back on spending has a P-166... perhaps that should indicate you don't need to listen to him! Follow his advice and he'll have you giving your brother a manual typewriter.

 

[jap0nes]

well, as you're michael knight who drives a bleeding edge technology car as kitt, you can tell me why the need for a second dvd drive and a dedicated sound card, except for showing off in a signature.

 

[sandmannight]

nice gift...you could make it better by adding another 65-80 bucks and going duel core but thats up to your budget

 

[delanooch]

faster disk copying? no need to rip to the hard drive first, you can do this you know. I'm sure there are more reasons but I'm sure you can think of some more.

Pretty nice gesture to hook your brother up so well, I think he will love it!

Does it come with a car too? or is this just high school graduation?

 

[angry_ducky]

LOL... the guy who is telling you to hold back on spending has a P-166... perhaps that should indicate you don't need to listen to him! Follow his advice and he'll have you giving your brother a manual typewriter.

ROFL

I wish someone would give me a $1,200 computer for graduating 8th grade. If I get good grades, I might get an Xbox 360, though. The system looks nice; keep both DVD drives and the sound card.

 

[jap0nes]

hmmmmm nope
the best way to copy and entire disc IS to rip it off then record. copying disk directly from dvd to dvd is a little bit risky, as they cannot offer a constant read speed, even the faster ones. you must know the buffer underrun problem, right?

i still dont see a reason for a second drive and a dedicated sound card, but he must have his reasons. i was just giving my advice where he could save some bucks

 

[sandmannight]

LOL... the guy who is telling you to hold back on spending has a P-166... perhaps that should indicate you don't need to listen to him! Follow his advice and he'll have you giving your brother a manual typewriter.

ROFL

I wish someone would give me a $1,200 computer for graduating 8th grade. If I get good grades, I might get an Xbox 360, though. The system looks nice; keep both DVD drives and the sound card.

I would be happy with a computer for any type of gift. I graduated a lvl in WoW where is my computer

 

[EllisD420]

I definetly see your point, but i agree with having 2 dvd drives. If you are ripping a ton of disks to your HDD, then why wear out your nice burner ripping and burning, when you could have equal wear ripping with your dvd-rom and burning with the dvd-rw making them both last a bit longer? Just my 2 cents.

 

[Sekeru]

hmmmmm nope
the best way to copy and entire disc IS to rip it off then record. copying disk directly from dvd to dvd is a little bit risky, as they cannot offer a constant read speed, even the faster ones. you must know the buffer underrun problem, right?

i still dont see a reason for a second drive and a dedicated sound card, but he must have his reasons. i was just giving my advice where he could save some bucks

Cause a qulity soundcard is way better than onboard keep it, that is if he has some good speakers cause if not than the getting the sound card would be a waste.Other than that you have one lucky brother

 

[NumenorLord]

Ok, I've gone from onboard sound to a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 Value, and the difference was huge. Then, with my new computer I went with a Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS and the difference is once again humongous. Trust me, onboard sound isn't enough. Also, it takes stress off the cpu and will get you faster framerates if you have high quality audio turned on as an option, and everybody wants higher quality. Also, I often have two discs in my PC, and I like not having to open my drive everytime I want to switch between The Battle for Middle-Earth 2 and Oblivion. We will probably be ordering the parts in June or July, so maybe AMD's chips will come down a little bit between now and then (along with the price of a 7900 GT). Depending on how much things cost, we may choose to spend up to $1300 (my mom and I are paying for it). I like the idea of two hard drives and a dual core chip. The X2 3800+ would raise the price about $70, while having an 80 GB SATA 3 GB/sec hard drives and another 250 GB one (both with NCQ) will raise the price by about another $25, but I know that it will make loading things much faster. Also, I may pick up the Big Typhoon heatsink/fan combo for about $50. Hopefully prices are a little down in a few months so everything would fit into the budget.

 

[DDay629]

Don't get the X2. It's overpriced, and there is a better cheaper chip called the Opteron which is made of better parts. Its a server processor, but very popular in this community because it is so good. I highly recommend going with the Opty 165, which is 1.8 GHz, and which has a great stock fan, and is easily overclocked to as much as 2.4 GHz with not much trouble. Look into it.

DDay

 

[joefriday]

I agree about the 2 DVD drives: (almost) completely useless. A lot of things being copied from a DVD will need to be ripped to the hard drive first for two simple reasons:

1. The disk is copy protected and needs a program such as DVD decriptor or Alcohol 120% to make an image of it.

2. The disk is a dual layer and needs a program such as dvd shrink to fit it onto one regular DVD disk.

Who in their right mind would want to use the cd/DVD drive to play their games when Alcohol 120% and other programs like it can make virtual drives and disk images, allowing you to run any disk off the computer hard drive instead of waiting for the cd/dvd drive to spin up? It makes things quicker and really extends the life of your optical drives.

A CDrom drive would make more sense than another dvd drive, and even that doesn't make a whole lot of sense (other than music cd and data cd copying, which CAN be done reliably w/o need to rip to the hdd first).

 

[MrCommunistGen]

The Opterons have a different HSF from the X2?... cool! If I upgrade my processor any time soon (very VERY doubtful) I'll look into it. How is it different? Is a Cu/Al HSF or does it have a different fan? I'm very curious about this because I've never heard this before (although I've known for some time that the Opterons overclock very well).

-mcg

 

[mesarectifier]

A CDrom drive would make more sense than another dvd drive, and even that doesn't make a whole lot of sense (other than music cd and data cd copying, which CAN be done reliably w/o need to rip to the hdd first).

Look, I don't know quite what's going on in the USA right now, but in England a DVD-ROM drive costs about £15. For the sake of having the option of either ripping to HDD or copying on the fly, I think it's an absolutely justified minimal cost, especially seeing as in other parts of this forum people would have him spending it on uber-special thermal goo.

 

[NumenorLord]

Listen my brother is a comp sci major but he also has a life. He doesn't know about every new technology, and he isn't going to learn about all the new hardware coming out. That is why I designed this for him. Depending on prices I may check out the Opteron 165, or I may just stick with the 3700+.

 

[angry_ducky]

Are you saying that people on these forums have no life?