Recommend a socket 775 mobo that supports 45nm CPUs

[E-66]

Just realize that overclocking has the potential of reducing the life of the CPU and/or other components. If you're not gaming or running anything else CPU intensive todays CPUs are plenty fast enough without overclocking them any.

The main thing I'm going to be doing is editing large .wav files and encoding thousands of wavs to both lossy & lossless formats. One of tests they do on Tom's Hardware is encoding a full length CD to MP3, and you can see the performance increase they get by overclocking. I'd like to get this kind of improvement too.

To bring an E8400 to 3.6GHz will not require more voltage in most cases, so I would say it would have no negative effect at all to set it 20% over its stock speed. Also a P35 can handle everything just fine, even with tight RAM/chipset timings and the stock cooling .

That's the impression I got too from reading the Tom's Hardware article on overclocking the E8000's.

It looks like a P35-based motherboard like you guys have suggested is a great choice, and I'll just get an inexpensive video card to go along with it, like the Sapphire Punto showed me.

One more question: I'm going to go with 2GB of memory (2 x 1GB) - is there any brand you'd suggest using with that Gigabyte brand motherboard? I ask because regardless of how many good reviews a particular brand of memory has, I see a lot of comments from people on Newegg about how Brand A memory doesn't work well with Brand Y motherboard, but when they changed to Brand B memory everything was fine. And yet for someone else Brand A memory worked fine with their Brand Z motherboard. Seems like circular mess I can't make sense of. I was thinking of just getting Crucial memory since that's what I've used in the past successfully, but now even the higher end Crucial Ballistic is getting bad reviews on Newegg. I know you have to take all reviews with a grain of salt, but it's still a concern.

Edited April 11, 2008 by E-66

[Zxian]

Personally, I'm a bit partial to OCZ, Corsair, and Kingston. I've got 4 sticks of Crucial Ballistix DDR2-1066 here - 2 of which are dead after only 3 months of use. I'm currently waiting until I have the time to sit on hold to get an RMA number from Crucial.

All my computers at home use OCZ Platinum, my computer at work uses Corsair XMS2, and Kingston has always been a simple, cheap "fall back" option for troubleshooting.

[puntoMX]

I use just ADATA/VDATA RAM, although there timings are not the best, they can hit high frequencies without raising the voltage above 2.1. For the low price on DRAM now, you could get 2x 2GB stick for less then 70USD at this moment with 5-5-5-18 timings (tuned at 5-5-4-13) and there Vitesta 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 for 81USD with tighter timings at 4-4-4-12. Both work very well.

[nmX.Memnoch]

And yes, I know what you mean about the 486's. My first adventure in overclocking was with a 486DX 33MHz to 40MHz. It ended up frying the motherboard after several months.

For real, how did you manage that?

Eh...who knew about cooling back then? The 486DX 33's didn't even have a heatsink on 'em...

[puntoMX]

Okay, that part, but I thought they had a small passive cooled heat sink on them, unlike the SX versions that were even running at 16MHz (almost bought it as my first PC from ACER!)...

[E-66]

I use just ADATA/VDATA RAM, although there timings are not the best, they can hit high frequencies without raising the voltage above 2.1. For the low price on DRAM now, you could get 2x 2GB stick for less then 70USD at this moment with 5-5-5-18 timings (tuned at 5-5-4-13) and there Vitesta 4GB(2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR2 SDRAM DDR2 800 for 81USD with tighter timings at 4-4-4-12. Both work very well.

Yes, I've noticed that memory is quite cheap at the moment. I don't know very much about memory timings.... how much of a difference is there between 5-5-5-18 and 4-4-4-12?

What about voltage? I see some listed with a specific figure, like 1.8v, while others have a range, 1.9v-2.1v. I was reading some memory-related threads on a forum and someone commented that it's possible the motherboard wouldn't boot if the memory required voltage over 1.8v, and that you'd need to temporarily use some cheap DDR2 to get the board to boot so you could get into the BIOS and change the voltage settings to support higher voltage. The post was from 11/2006.

Also, I'm not sure how much of a speed/performance difference I'll see between 2GB and 4GB. Thoughts?

Thanks again.

Edited April 12, 2008 by E-66

[E-66]

EDIT: by the way, the mobo I advised you here cost about 89USD, ad a simple PCI-E 64bit card on it and you will pay the same price as a board with G33/G35 chipset.

Can you recommend another video card? I checked the other day and there were over 100 of the Sapphire cards in stock. Went back today to start adding thing to my shopping cart wishlist and it's suddenly become a 'deactivated item'

[puntoMX]

They were deactivated yesterday, let me see the next "not to bad " card . brb.

EDIT: SAPPHIRE 100165L Radeon X1650PRO 512MB 128-bit GDDR2

Sure it’s way more expensive, but I think they will respect the mail in rebate. There are a few "pros" over the x700, like faster GPU, dual DVI, 128bit memory interface, better cooler (less noisy) and more hardware features.

[E-66]

It's not that much more expensive.

I don't expect you to spend hours picking out my individual components so let me ask you this: What criteria are you using when you look at these video cards? I was looking at them earlier today as well and there weren't any other X700 based cards (which ATI has discontinued). The next jump up on Newegg is to the X1550 series but they look like they have inferior specs to the X700. The X1650 you showed me above does look better though.

I obviously don't need a $500+ card, but where should I draw the line? At what point would a card be considered overkill for my needs? I guess you need the best cards for the newest games, but what's the difference between a $500 card and a $50 card when it comes to web browsing and less intensive games? Or what about just going to a very interactive webpage/website with lots of graphics... would it display faster with a better videocard or does the time it takes a page to load depend purely on your internet connection speed?

I can build PCs, format HDDs, edit the registry, and make Norton Ghost images, but it's questions like these that I've never learned the answers to. What can you tell me?

[puntoMX]

The x1550 is more a renamed x1300, not really a powerful card. If you like to play games you would need a card that can handle textures well and fast, so any thing less then GDDR3 would not pull the latest games due to lack of memory bandwidth.

Then you have vertex and pixel shaders and lately also combined shaders and programmable shaders so a shader processor can do vertexes or pixels. I will try to find something to read on that later. (There are geometry shaders too by the way).

EDIT: There you go, read this first: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shader

[E-66]

Are you anti-GeForce? There are even more of them on Newegg than Radeon cards.

[puntoMX]

No, I’m not anti nVidia, but for the price ATI has better cards, however, the high-end section is dominated by nVidia.

[E-66]

I have to be honest, that video stuff on Wiki was way over my head, lots of terms to try to understand and keep track of. Maybe with continued re-reading it'll sink in.

I was looking through Newegg's offerings and looking at more expensive cards with big rebates

Unfortunated they don't take the rebates into account when you sort the cards by price.

Any game I have here is at least 4 years old. I just went on Newegg to look at the games that were reviewed most: Crysis, Battlefield, Call of Duty, HalfLife, Unreal, Halo, World of Warcraft.... I've only heard of about 3 of those before, the rest are Greek to me. I guess that gives you an idea where I stand on gaming.

Is there some kind of rule of thumb to knowing what level of graphics card you need?

Let me ask these question again - I obviously don't need a $500+ card, but where do I draw the line? At what point would a card be considered overkill for my needs? What's the difference between a $500 card and a $50 card when it comes to web browsing and less intensive games? What about just going to a very interactive webpage/website with lots of graphics... would it display faster with a better videocard or does the time it takes a page to load depend purely on your internet connection speed?

[puntoMX]

No rule on that but, If you want to play the latest titles on average settings, then a nVidia 9600GT would be the best bang for the buck.

What about just going to a very interactive webpage/website with lots of graphics... would it display faster with a better videocard or does the time it takes a page to load depend purely on your internet connection speed?

Any PCI-E card would be good for that, and the page load time would be dependent on your internet connection indeed.

[E-66]

Sorry for all the questions, but every statement you make makes me think of more.

If you want to play the latest titles on average settings, then a nVidia 9600GT would be the best bang for the buck.

As you can tell, I don't even know the names of most newer titles. Instead of playing the newest game on average settings, what about older games on the best settings? Same card choice?

Define 'average' vs. 'better' settings. What does Better have that Average doesn't? Better FPS? Higher screen resolution? What?