good cases / motherboards?

phrakture · 2005-03-10 16:00:46

ok, so I've decided I'm in the mood to build a new desktop system (combined a whole mess of hardware yesterday, turned it on and it made a funny noise and smelled like burning rubber - not fun) and am going to start with a case and motherboard today.

I'm looking for some recommendations... review sites for this sort of stuff would be nice... tomshardware doesn't have case reviews...

I'll be shooting for just below bleeding edge... so feel free to shout out anything you want.

dp · 2005-03-10 17:16:02

minimac

skoal · 2005-03-10 17:43:34

As far as reviews, I go to this one for motherboards. Several years ago they were completely unbiased. To what extent that has changed recently is questionable, since I'm cynical of any site with countless hardware Ads running on a hardware review site.

phrakture · 2005-03-10 18:05:05

well jebus that's some text:

anyway, about the burning rubber thing... i smelled it, screen went blank, no more screen... tried 3 video cards... no luck... the northbridge smells funny (yes, I smelled my motherboard)... *shrug*

I am currently going to reuse:
Monitor - got a good one
Video Card - not important right now... got some older geforces laying around that are more than ample when it comes to what I need
Sound Card - Have an Audigy laying around...

Ideas:
Case+Power Supply - I was planning on going all antec this time: Antec P160 case with Anter NeoPower power supply... opinions?

My concerns are mainly Motherboard/CPU and after than RAM and HDD (though I can reuse a disk for a while while I decide)

I'll take your advice on shooting for Intel, as I haven't kept up to the hardware stuff in a bit over a year. I'll check out the sites you linked and get back to you. I usually decide on exact CPU based on price and then try to get a motherboard that can handle more than that.

And yeah, I was actually just going to order those 2 from zipzoomfly

cactus · 2005-03-10 18:09:42

you forgot memory skoal. Good memory is a wonderful think. Soon you forget about it entirely.
Only when memory is bad do you ever really think about it.

MillTek · 2005-03-10 18:19:29

Phrakture,
Agree with skoal about Antec. We were having lotsa power problems and I heard about Antec. Made the switch and haven't had a problem on any of our four machines.

Jim

skoal · 2005-03-10 18:21:33

By the way, if you ever need any help troubleshooting a system, just "pm" me. I think I've run across just about any thing imageanable while configuring mine...

skoal · 2005-03-10 18:34:02

cactus wrote:

you forgot memory skoal. Good memory is a wonderful think. Soon you forget about it entirely.

Memory? Absolutely. I only use Samsung, Kingston, or Corsair.

phrakture · 2005-03-10 18:36:39

crap where did my post go??

to summarize: been looking at the gigabyte ga-8PI-1000 (I think that's it)... any opinions? I've had 2 gigabyte boards in the past and never had a problem (that I couldn't fix)

phrakture · 2005-03-10 20:19:39

So.... any thoughts on the Antec P160 Case with the Antec NeoPower PSU? I was thinking about ordering it right now, barring some huge opponent of either...

MillTek · 2005-03-10 23:13:04

What's teh power output of the psu?? The Antecs I bought were all 350

I watched them for weeks with gkrellm and the voltages are rock steady.

Jim

phrakture · 2005-03-10 23:18:47

480 on the NeoPower:
http://www.antec.com/us/productDetails.php?ProdID=24480

MillTek · 2005-03-11 00:34:45

I belong to an Abit forum and the guys that tweak their boards love Antec and the quality of the power supplies. I'd go for it. 480 should run a beast if u need it.

Jim

T-Dawg · 2005-03-13 02:55:50

I had an antec power supply and it pooped out on me in a couple months after I bought it brand new at best buy. There was no way I overloaded it, and it later destroyed my nvidia video card. A year and 150 bucks later I'm left with an icute 400W and this ati POS. [No problems with the icute]

Gullible Jones · 2005-03-13 04:01:48

Antec makes some nice full ATX minitower cases with 350 watt PSUs... Available on Newegg last I checked.

(I can't check now - just switched to 128 Kbps cable service. Fast enough, until you try loading an image-infested site during heavy load hours... )

skeeter · 2005-03-13 15:32:36

I saw DealSonic had a Skyhawk AL case for $35 and a Works PS for $60 w/dual 12V rails at 17A. Don't know the reliability of the PS though or what shipping would go for. Case has always been nice though even if you go for the Antec PS. Good Luck with your build.

sud_crow · 2005-03-15 04:13:47

There are some good case reviews here: www.anandtech.com

I just bought my new system and went through a lot of sites looking information about good PSU, but the case, i just went to stores to see them, i finally got this one:

http://www.apextechusa.com/proddetail.a … pe=&id=115

Im really happy with it, its a pleasure not to get cut with sharp edges and its almost 100% tool-less (the only thing that needs a screwdriver are the PCI slots, but i dont change that frecuently anything there).

Also it comes with a 400W power supply, though i changed it for a TOPower 420W one.

I went with an Athlon64 754 socket, because of several pros.

What type of motherboard are you looking for? do you need lots of SATA, AnyRaid, Firewire, lots of USBs, or just a motherboard with integrated video, a couple of SATAs, Raid and a few USBs?

I bought a DFI LanParty UT nForce3 250Gb. Its quite a motherboard. And there are others like the MSI K8N Neo Plat. or in the cheap side, there is the DFI K8M800 with integrated video...

zezaz · 2005-03-15 12:04:58

The Biostar IDEQ 210P looks fine too if you like barebones.

Gullible Jones · 2005-03-15 20:54:48

For mobos... Do you want socket A, 754, 939, 478, or T?

phrakture · 2005-03-17 23:06:03

Ok, I've ordered:
Antec P160 Case - it's nice, good quality
Antec NeoPower 480W PSU - ROWL!

Now I've decided to get an ASUS P5AD2 motherboard, but there's some confusion... the 925XE chipset is supposed to be better than the 925X, but the 925XE version of the mobo is consistantly around 5-10 USD cheaper? wtf?

As for hard drives, I'll grab a Hitachi 7K250... 160GB for $80-90, good deal and I have enough storage on my file server

There any soundcard I should shoot for over just a plain-jane Audigy 2?

I'll probably grab a 512MB PC3200 Kingston stick to start with... I can always buy more, it's cheap...

I was planning on grabbing a Geforce 6600 GT (they're around $175) and cramming a P4 530J (3.0GHz) in there (about $50 less than a 3.2GHz, deal!)

Opinions? Comments? Bitch-slaps?

phrakture · 2005-03-31 20:24:29

ok so I just now ordered:
Hitachi 7K250 Serial ATA 160GB
Kingston DDR2-533 512MB (HyperX)
I have onboard sound, so I'll hold off on that.. .and a spare CD drive...
so, the only pending things would be proc and geforce... which I'll do next paycheck (or when I get my tax refund, whichever comes first)

kleptophobiac · 2005-04-02 02:57:03

The 7K250 is a good line, and a good choice.

As for the case + psu - you've gone seriously overboard.

I prefer the Antec SLK3700BQE for most of my builds. It is very solid, very quiet, not blingy, and comes with a 350w smartpower PSU. I've built machines up to a Athlon 64 3400+ w/ 6800GT using that PSU with no ill effects.

neri · 2005-04-02 22:16:47

hi,

just to let you know what runs here
- CoolerMaster stacker (made my cpus about 5° cooler without adding more
fans) has lots of space and capability of BX if you need
- 2 Athlon MP2400+ (no it's not 64bit, but it's cheap and fast, SMP is just
very nice if you have many processes running)
- Antec 480W (a bit loud but runs fine)
- Tyan Tiger 2466-M4 (http://tyan.com/products/html/tigermpx.html)
no sound, no 1396, no usb2 - you needs card for that but maybe you have
from your old board

it's midrange in price and very solid, my luxury is a good keyboard
(http://www.logitech.com/index.cfm/produ … ENTID=9575)
and two LCDs

-neri

phrakture · 2005-04-04 14:33:52

kleptophobiac wrote:

As for the case + psu - you've gone seriously overboard.

yes well... without anything else, I turned on just the PSU, and it was utterly silent... I had to put my hand under it to make sure it's on...

and the case is just pretty - my girlfriend said it looks like one of those old-school cameros... which was funny...

phrakture · 2005-04-22 03:11:09

just an update: got all the hardware in - I opted for a 6600GT card, as I can always go bigger, and it's not like I'll be busting out any hardcore games anyway.... got a P4 3.0GHz @ 2MB L2 cache(!!)

Installing now - found out the onboard lan module wasn't on the install cd, but building the kernel from source works fine.... going to have to poke at everything else to get it working... onboard wireless (who needs this on a dekstop??)... sound (CMI9880?)... and then sata/sata raid stuff...

woot!

Arch Linux

#1 2005-03-10 16:00:46

good cases / motherboards?

#2 2005-03-10 17:16:02

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#3 2005-03-10 17:43:34

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