Video cards PCI express, 8x AGP 4x AGP which one??

So what's the damage on this setup? Why did you go with that particular mobo? I have just recently purchased the fx 2000 card for a really ggod price. my next item is a mobo combo, and then a new lcd. I am trying to decide on a whole new box wth a crappy video card vs. upgrading my puter pc by pc. current config:

asus a7z333 mobo athlon xp 2200

1 gb ram hard hacked ti4600 it's pretty good except for the graphics now since i sca rued it up. but i want to move up a little

I have one of these. Make sure to do all of your dynamic overclocking tests before you get all set up. It IS possible to destroy a windows installation using CoreCenter.

Great case. Dead quiet when an Athlon64 is at idle, and easily tolerable when running flat out. A lot of nice touches inside too. The only concern is the 380W power supply, but you'ge got a lot less power draw in there than I have in mine (Quadro FX1100 and RAID 0).

Prices in CDN added and vendor

Processor: AMD Athlon 64 3500 socket 939 $497.20 from NCIX

Mobo: MSI K8N Neo 2 Platinum (Nvidia NForce 3 chipset) $208.26 from NCIX

RAM: 2 Gig Corsair TwinX 3200 (2 one gig sticks) $697.95 from the computer rack (local store)

Hard Drive Western Digital Raptor 74 gig 10,000 rpm SATA with 8mb cache WD740 $274.74 from NCIX

Video card Nvidia Quadro 4 900 XGL $221.99 from ebay

Monitor Viewsonic 19" P95f $354.39 from the computer rack

Case Antec Sonata quiet case ....RECOMMENDED $139.14 from the computer rack

chose that mobo based on processor. the processor is the most I could afford, the next one up is considerably more expensive (50% more cost for

10% more power, not my idea of value!) the AMD 64 3500 is a socket 939 chip, relatively new and subsequently relatively few mobos support it so far. A little digging on , and provided the info to make the decision. hope this helps.

the full system including keyboard mouse wireless lan and dvd writer and cd rom cost me approx $3000.00 CDN, the hardest thing was waiting for all the goodies to arrive, Ironically it was the stuff I bought locally that took the longest (the store had not one item in stock despite their misleading website) but there was no way I was paying shipping on a moinitor or case!!

Hey Dale,

Still experimenting with the mobo settings, thanks for the heads up. One odd thing, I had to enable RAID to get the SATA HD to work so I have a single 74 gb SATA HD in a striped RAID array. Got the info from the MSI website on a forum. Prior to setting up RAID, the HD was showing as an IDE device.

I have not touched the overclocking utility yet, did you do this in the BIOS or thru a software app in windoze?? what settings do you recommend. For me stability is paramount but if I can safely squeeze some more power out of the system I am in.

Thx

Clive

That sounds familiar, but I couldn't have voluntarily remembered it. I was planning to build a 2-drive SATA array from the git-go, so I never had a chance to have that problem.

I didn't monkey with the mobo o/c settings much. The Core Center utility in windows does a fine job. It's also a good way to watch Cool n' Quiet change your clock settings to save power. Cool n' Quiet is such an excellent feature.

IIRC, I got the FSB on my 3400+ all the way to 224MHz with conventional cooling (Thermaltake Venus 12) before the system got mangled. The way the automatic overclocking utility works is to gradually increment the FSB while you run a benchmark (I ran the SW benchmark, obviously). Each FSB setting is saved to the HD, until the system crashes. On reboot, the last good setting is used. It just so happened that my system reached the thermal wig-out point just as it was writing the data. The data is kept in the user profile. When the system crashed, it scribbled all over the only user profile (administrator, duh). Windows would not boot, and a repair job on windows just left a huge mess. It had been too screwed up.

I think I was a victim of statistics. The time during which data is written to the drive during the o/c process is a tiny fraction of the time necessary for the process. Most people probably have no trouble. I've been gunshy since, running the system within spec. I'm tempted now to crank it up again, but I should probably resist. Probably. I should at least hold out until the weekend, just after the next backup, when I'll have time to repair any damage.