Topic: Dad's got a better PC than me

[hans]

Well sort of. My laptop is still better.

I just got off the phone with him and he's ordering a bunch of stuff from newegg.

AMD 64 X2 4000+ (Brisbane)
Gigabyte MB (w/firewire)
Arctic Freezer 7 Pro CPU cooler
2x1GB Corsair DDR2 800 RAM (cas lat 4)
Antec Sonata III case
Seagate Barracuda 250GB HD
Samsung OEM DVDRW SATA

With a $40 MIR on the RAM the total is ~$425.

It's slightly overkill for him since he mostly just does word processing and internet surfing but he doesn't upgrade often so I figure this will last him a while. And when it starts to slow down a bit, we'll overclock the CPU to get a few extra miles.

It's pretty close to the PC I've been thinking of building myself (which a faster CPU and more drives).

[Steve]

>>(Brisbane)

Negative ghost rider, tell him to choose a new core. Nothing really wrong with that one, but its subpar to the others.

[KnuckleBuckett]

Brisbane?  I thought that was their latest of that style chip?

[EDIT] added this link
http://www.ocforums.com/showthread.php?t=479182

[Steve]

Shit, what core was i thinking of? I thought it was Brisbane. I'll have to check my receipts at home but i had built three pc's off of (insert core name) and tweak as i might they just didnt perform as they should. Changed the core (ie installed just the new cpu) and viola lightning in a bottle.

[hans]

The one we ordered him was the 65W version and from what I read, the better one for overclocking. But to be honest, he's stepping up from a PIII 700 so pretty much anything is better than what he has. Plus I figured the lower power would be better for cooling (although we did get a nice cooler too).
The goal for the system was slightly above budget but with some nice components, like the Antec case. The 2GB is really overkill for now but I think he'll grow into it. And I'm going to try and convince him we should install Linux on the system and let him run WindowsXP through virtualization (where the bigger RAM might come into play).

[KnuckleBuckett]

Shit, what core was i thinking of? I thought it was Brisbane. I'll have to check my receipts at home but i had built three pc's off of (insert core name) and tweak as i might they just didnt perform as they should. Changed the core (ie installed just the new cpu) and viola lightning in a bottle.

You were probably thinking of Windsor.

[Steve]

You were probably thinking of Windsor.

Proba bly. I just got home so still have to dig out the TD and NE slips

[hans]

Well, we put together the PC today. I had my dad do most of the work while I supervised. Ofcourse, I made a few instructional "mistakes" while we were connecting all the case connectors to the MB. It's hard to read upside-down. But we got it all together and I think dad did pretty well. Fired it up and everything seems good. We didn't get a chance to actually install the OS, so I'm doing that tonight. I wanted to think about the partitioning scheme a bit more before doing the install. In the end, we're going with a pure Linux system. WindowsXP will be done with VMWare (or other VM possibly). The only thing I'm not sure of is if his piano tuning software USB key will work within VMWare, so he may have to run his old PC for a bit longer and if I want to avoid whining, I'll have to finally get around to finishing his new software.

The parts were all good choices I think. The cooling fan is awesome and quiet (the fan sucks air over the monster heat sink and right into the exhaust fan) and the and the case is beautiful (I'm going to be getting one myself this week). So far the temps seem really cool. low 30s system and high 20s for cpu but we'll see how that goes under some load. And did I mention this thing is quiet?! I even found out that we can overclock the system from the BIOS. How cool is that? The last time I built a system I still needed to tweak jumpers for that.

I think he's going to be really happy with the system.

I think I'll take some pics too.

[KnuckleBuckett]

Thanks for the update!