Need advice on building a comp

[brembo]

A friend of mine is gonna be using photoshop and autocad. Grad school stuff and all. What we are lookin for is a system that will handle cad and photoshop for 2-3 years and not become a problem. 1 grand is kinda the cap that has been set, there is some wiggle room, but 1000 is the target cost.

AMD or Intel?
20 gig should be fine.
GeForce2, I think photoshop would like that.
If y'all would post sites for cases, and the like, I would be ever so happy. I have some ideas, but I have never built one, so I thought I'd ask the experts.

[drdoug99]

um, check out www.pcpowerandcooling.com they are pretty top quality stuff.
www.antec-inc.com is very cool as well. for cases.

I"d go AMD, for the fact that they are cheaper, and usually offer equal or better performance for the same megahertz.

For cases, I'd check out www.ubid.com as well. I got a Mid-Tower case, from FutureCom, with a 300watt AMD approved power supply for $55 bucks including shipping. The case does feel a bit flimsy though, the guage of the steel is pretty thin. But aside from that it's a quality case.
http://ocz.safeshopper.com/ has their 512MB sticks of RAM for like $109, or $129, that's pretty good for ram. I'm buying all my RAM from them, the "Enhanced 150mhz" RAM, guarenteed to over clock to 150 at 2-2-2 CAS.

[ 05-20-2001: Message edited by: drdoug99 ]

[brembo]

DrDoug99 I do apprecite that. Thanks so much.

[smaier69]

for a CAD workstation i would recommend a 3DLabs Oxygen or something of the like. they are very specialized OpenGL video adapters. the workstation-grade cards can very very expensive, however. and the DirectX support is nowhere near as balanced as the OpenGL end.

only downside is it probably would not be competitive for 3D gaming in general (by comparison to a good geforce2 or 3).

have a look at some of these.... http://www.3dlabs.com/product/card/oxygen_overview.htm . they have some other cards which are also very nice as well.

[ 05-20-2001: Message edited by: smaier69 ]

[brembo]

When I built my machine(Dell custom job) I looked at Oxy boards, but opted for GeForce2 cuz I like Unreal. And my geezus are they expensive.

[Prey521]

Wouldn't an Intel chip be better since Photoshop is SSE optimized ?

[ 05-20-2001: Message edited by: Prey521 ]

[el bob]

No matter what your final system is going to look like, you are going to need a lot of good quality RAM.

I would usually recommend a new Abit board supporting pc2100 (266MHz) DDR-SDRAM and a T-Bird but I think that would be pushing your $1000 limit.

So I would just stick with 256mb of pc133 SDRAM on an abit kt7a with a Duron 850. The L2 cache is significantly smaller, however you will not kill your wallet and the difference isn't that bad.

I think buying two separate pc133 128mb dimms would be cheaper then buying a 256mb dimm. Check out www.crucial.com for prices.

In terms of cases; assuming that you are not going to require extra cooling for overclocking, you might want to save your cash in this area.

Good luck.

[brembo]

Yes! Input, more ! more! Thanks guys.

[drdoug99]

heh, "Input, more more!" reminds me of that movie Short Circuit. "Johnny 5 is Alive!!"

Durons are extremely cheap as well, a 1.0 Ghz Duron is like 80-100 bucks, new OEM in box.

Here's some links to online computer stores, to check out.
http://www.neutronet.com/index.html http://www.pcnation.com/asp/index.asp http://www.xicomputer.com/index.html http://www.cdrexpress.com/ http://www.newegg.com

[terrancelam]

A reminder, cheaper is not nesscarily better, the lower the price for a AMD cpu, the higher the price for a quality board. It's about 50/50, but they are irght the AMD cpus do have the advantage right now. If you want something that'll last get a dual cpu board setup and a geforce2 gts,2 duron 800's, a 20gigmaxtor 7200rpm, a ****ty soundcard (should be real cheap), some good old crucial ram and a 52x cd-rom should be about 1g, maybe alittle over by $150.

[YARDofSTUF]

Abit kt7a - 120
duron 800 - 60
20 gig maxtor HDD - 100
full tower case with 300watt PSU - 55
Fans Heat Sink(get an all copper one), Ties etc... - 60
2 256 meg sticks of HIGH quality ram - 200
Geforce 2 mx http://ocz.safeshopper.com/13/6121.htm?905 - 120

Cd rom - 50
disk drive - 10
sound card SB live value - 45

total should be around 800-850 bucks, or take out the grforce 2 mx card and that leaves the total at 700-750 giving u 300 bucks or so for a nice ass card!

With an all copper HSF and buying ur ram at http://ocz.safeshopper.com u should have no problem OCing the duron to 1ghz or 1.1ghz, u can up the fsb to 133 easily and should get it around 143 or so with no trouble


oh yeah get artic silver II thermal paste too!

[ 05-21-2001: Message edited by: YARDofSTUF ]

[brembo]

You the man yard. Thnx.

[YARDofSTUF]

Originally posted by evil brembo:
You the man yard. Thnx.

nope i'm just the yard, the system i listed is very similar to the one i built for me, the board will run teh new 1.333 axia chips too so if that doesnt cut it in the long run save teh money and pop in a 1.333 and that copper gladiator would handle that chip too, also remember case fans are good, http://2cooltek.com has nice case fans

and www.abilitywholesale.com has the case and PSU i mentiond for 50 bucks