new system I'm building, some tips, comments

Antec and Enermax make good PSUs. I've got to say that I'm a bit biased when it comes to Antec. My two units are powered by an Antec PSU. One 350W Antec is powering 4 power-hungry IDE drives (DMax+ 40Gb, Barracuda IV 80Gb, Pioneer DVD 16x and Yamaha 3200E CD-RW), an XP1800+, 512Mb RAM, an Asus A7N266-C, a Radeon 8500DV and all but one PCI slot. I know it's recent, but it never failed. The other (300W Antec) is powering my old P3-600Mhz.
Why a RAID board if you're not planning on using two hard drives? The A7V333 (without RAID) from Asus is a good board to consider.
You could get a Pioneer DVD-ROM for just peanuts more than the LG CD-ROM drive.
For the CD burner, I wouldn't recommend anything less than a Plextor or a Yamaha (but that's just my opinion). I can say from experience that the Yamaha 3200E is absolutely amazing.
Well, that's it!
Good luck!

<font color=red>Floppy disk?!? What the heck's a floppy disk?!?</font color=red>

yads,

Let me know how things go. I bought that same board a little while ago but I haven't finished building my system yet. I hope I got the good version of this board.

:tongue: <font color=red>I invented the internet and bacon.</font color=red> :tongue:

I built a system with the GA-7VRXP and a Radeon 8500 last week and i can say now that the Radeon 8500 (64MB) definately will not work on this mobo. I get the same problems like the guys with Geforce Cards i.e. lockups after some time in all 3D Apps. Raising Core Voltage did not work for me and the only way to get around the lockups was to lower the processor speed of the Radeon to 255mhz. But now there are lots of graphic glitches like distortet textures and dropouts instead.

I'd say chuck the R8500 and wait for R300lite. It should be a bit more, but performancewise, you'll get a lot more, plus the DX9 features.

For you sound card, unless your getting some sweet ass sound system (Klipsch Promedia 4.1 or something) that Audigy Platinum isn't really needed. Also look into the Hercules Game Theatre XP. Seems very good.

Get a WD Special Edition drive with the 8MB cache. Also, get a Lite-On burner. One of the best (after Plextor) but doesn't cost a fortune. At newegg.com, a 32X Lite-On is ~$60.

Yeah, I live in Canada, and I could get some Samsung for $179 before and now it's ~$240...GRRRR....

:smile: Falling down stairs saves time :smile:

Are u saying the Gigabyte GA-7VRXP doesn't work well with GeForce 4
????

Actually I'm now considering getting an ASUS GF4Ti4200 or an MSI GF4Ti4200, but I'm leaning towards the ASUS since from what I understand it's got better preformance. I think I'm also gonna ditch the gigabyte mobo and go for the ASUS A7V333. The only reason I was considering the gigabyte was that it had onboard LAN, but I guess I can get an ok LAN card for cheap. Also the Audigy platinum (I'm probably gonna get the Ex version) Is cause I'm a bedroom musician so I'd like to be able to record some stuff and make music. Plus I'm getting the logitech Z-560 speaker system as well. As far as the burners I don't know if I can justify spending an extra $100 on a plextor burner. I'm also not bothering getting a DVD drive since I have a playstation 2 to play those :-)

Do you think ASUS board + ASUS GeForce 4 will work better than Gigabyte board + Asus GeForce 4?

everything looks fine i guess. i would get 128 mb on the Radeon 8500. the price of Radeons has gone down dramatically and it performs well. $162 at newegg. about a month ago it was $225.

i have Lite-On optical drives and they work great. if i remember correctly they were second in perfomance to Plextor drives (which are also good but a bit expensive). ive never heard anything about LG but whatever.

and the 512 mb samsung ddr ram has only increased by 2 or 3 dollars. so its really not that bad. now, the 256 mb samsung ddr went up by 10 dollars so yeah that sucks.

and like someone said, antec or enermax make good psu's.

pekstein

<i> Garth, marriage is punishment for shoplifting in some countries. </i>