On Tue, Sep 27, 2005 at 12:08:31AM -0700, Mr O wrote: > All good choices on parts. Thankfully you got an Asus board. > Curious why you didn't get 1GB sticks of RAM though. Leave room > for expansion that way.
$45 per DIMM x4 vs $130 per DIMM x2. I am under the assumption that when the machine gets a RAM upgrade, it'll probably be to at least 2GB x2. I did make a few compromises in the system, and that was one of them. The choices for board came down to ASUS, MSI, and DFI. People recommend the DFI board for overclocking, but I don't plan to try and eek out every last MHz here and I don't want the noise from attempting to do so. Plus, DFI is a second tier maker, and their boards (including their nForce4 SLI LANparty board) are really finicky about components. Plus it only has two PCI slots. They'd both be full. MSI was a hard call. MSI has most of the overclock potential of the DFI board, matches the ASUS board on every feature point (and even does a few of them better with things like (Un)Creative SB Live onboard audio. There were some dealbreakers with the MSI board though: MSI's tech support is known to suck, so most everyone who has had to deal with them has hated it and MSI before they were done. Plus, the MSI board actually cost more than the ASUS board. And finally, there are no PCIe 1x slots on the board (although, are there actually any PCIe 1x cards on the market at all yet?) You could use the second video connector, and SLI is basically not worth it anyway, but you just know that's going to be disasterous. Featurewise, high-end ASUS boards have it all. ASUS AMD boards can't overclock for crap though, and ASUS is still shipping things like flat ribbon cables when everyone else has gone to rounded. The board also lacks silly UV-reactive and brightly colored components. Gigabyte's got a few features on ASUS (Firewire 800 and DualBIOS) but you are forced to use a low-profile chipset cooler on the Gigabyte, Epox, etc boards and most of them also have only two PCI slots. I honestly got the impression ASUS wasn't trying too hard with this board--which is why so many people are going with the MSI and DFI boards. Still, the ASUS board had the features I really wanted, if the board has problems ASUS _will_ take care of it, the chipset can be cooled with a third party cooler (NONE of the boards' stock coolers are particularly good or particularly quiet!), it's got plenty of PCI and PCIe slots, it's got the dual gigabit, firewire 400, a disgusting number of USB ports, and room for 8 SATA drives.. Even the inclusion of flat (black) ribbon cables is good for this mod since the CoolerMaster chassis easily routes ribbon cables cleaner than most chassis will let you route rounded ones. > As for the Thursday night assembly I'm bummed to have to miss it > as I'll be in Seattle. Too bad--it's going to be a nice system once built. =) It may return with me to a future euglug meeting, but there's nothing like seeing one go together from the ground up. There will be pictures. There's enough CoolerMaster stuff in this case that I'll be posting a worklog to their modding forum.. I've got a pic of the mod I made to my Aerogate 3: http://warped.bluecherry.net/~knghtbrd/forum/Aerogate_3_better.jpg I decided it was silly to make the thing's frame out of brushed alu and then cover it up with flat plastic. I mean seriously, what were they thinking! Looks much better now. _______________________________________________ EUGLUG mailing list [email protected] http://www.euglug.org/mailman/listinfo/euglug
