After my PC has been giving me problems, I’ve decided that it’s time to upgrade. But this time I decided not to really go for the highest specs, but to build a practical gaming system / Digital Audio Workstation.
Fortunately for me, a bunch of components which I’ve spent quite a lot on are still very much in the game and haven’t lost their appeal, such as the Lian-Li casing, the hard disks, audio card, cd-roms, monitor, keyboard/mouse, etc. I basically just had to change the Videocard and CPU. Unfortunately, the CPU I intend to buy entailed that I had to change the motherboard, since it was a different socket type. With such a drastic change, my current RAM would do the new components justice. And of course it was time for a new Power Supply Unit just to be on the safe side.
After researching, I went with these components:
- AMD Athlon64 3000+ (Venice core)
- Epox EP-9NPA+ (socket 939, NForce4 chipset)
- 2GB (1GBx2) Geil RAM
- Palit GeForce 6600GT 256mb (PCIe)
- HEC 550W PSU
I started out with the budget configurations by ExtremeTech and TomsHardware. The sure choices from there were the CPU and the GPU 1 Graphics Processing Unit… otherwise known as a videocard.. As for the motherboard, I was ready to get the cheapest 939 board out there (ASRock, ULI chipset) since I wasn’t an overclocker or anything, but given the GPU, and amount RAM I’ll be putting in, then the board had to be somewhat on an enthusiast level to handle the “load” properly.
Fortunately at stock settings, those pricey motherboards out there perform very closely as any other cheaper board of the same chipset… the key term here is “at stock settings” – meaning no overclocking. I never was a fan of overclocking, so those NF4 ULTRA / SLI based boards, at stock speeds, have minimal gain over any other NF4 board.
Bottomline is, I wasn’t going to use a value/budget board, but also didn’t need all the bells and whistles, of a top-of-the-line enthusiast board. So I ended choosing the cheapest, enthusiast-level board.
But the board was only 1.5k more expensive than the uber-value board with a totally different, and inferior chipset. So that was the least of my concerns.
The suggested specs for the 6600 GPU was 128MB non-GT 2 Which is a cheaper, but SEVERELY underclocked GPU line., but after researching more, bang for buck was pointing to double the memory and of course, going GT.
I did spend on the RAM though, my audio needs needed more than 1GB. Drum modules like BFD, and Drumkit From Hell alone can take up a gig of RAM if you don’t freeze/mixdown their output.
Another bummer is that the bigger the RAM you get, then the better quality they have to be, since there’s a whole size/access speed relationship now involved. So while running at stock speeds can allow a user to choose non-branded RAM, when you go higher density RAM (2GB), to maintain the latencies you need you’ll need reliable ones – regardless if you overclock or not.
Besides having a gig of ram, kept my obsolete computer snappy for 4 years… I guess it’s about time I doubled that so this new setup would last me another couple of years.
So tomorrow, I will start dismantling my PC, and start a general cleansing of dust et all. Wish me luck!