Mobo ?

[jamesongst]

Guys I am new to the whole building my own pc area. I am looking at a couple different motherboards from Asus and Abit and trying to price everything out. The question I have is what is the benefit of building my own pc compared to buying one from a company like Dell? Was wondering are the components used in Dell products like the motherboards not as good quality or fast as one I would buy when building a pc? Any input would be appreciated.

 

[gaara]

Yes, building your own computer will always be the better (and cheaper) route to go than buying a Dell, they have incompatability issues with their motherboards which prevents them from being used with any parts other than Dell specific parts.

 

[aj2003]

if u build ur own u will get better parts for cheaper, most dells ive seen come with onboard graphics so had to be upgraded using a pci card which are really really slow. Its not hard to build ur own just put everyting there it fits really

 

[Trifid]

its like making a lego thing. lol. I had a good time building my pc, and have learnt alot about them, previously the only thing i had done inside the pc was put in a pci network card, and it was no harder than that.

what cpu and socket will the motherboard be for?

anouther advantage if a part does break/die it would be easy replacing it, with a dell you would have to call them up and be charged rip off prices.

you can't overclock dells too.

dell's graphics cards are really dated 5200/5500/5600, unles un get the xps, which you could build for about £500/600 less.

 

[CntdwnToExtn]

yup, building your own pc will allow you to start knowing what each piece does and how everything is hooked up.
i've built about 5 now and i love it every time.
dell's.....meh, as said before, you can make better computers for the price they sell them at. plus, it's a pain in the butt trying to do administrator things on them...at least on my buddies it was hard cause they locked you out of stuff...

 

[jamesongst]

The computer I want to build will be used for online daytrading so I want something that is gonna be really fast. I was thinking of a Tsunami case, P4 3.2Ghz 800MHz FSB processor, 2GB of Dual Channel memory not sure what brand, probably 120GB hard drive not sure on brand yet. That is about all I've kinda came up with so far. Just not sure what motherboard and other little things to go with as far as which brands are good and fast. If you guys have any recommendations please let me know.

 

[jamesongst]

I see alot of you guys are running AMD, do you find those to be better than Intel?

 

[Trifid]

AMD's are better at gaming, especially the 64's with the built in memory controller. If i did alot of video encoding than intels would be better for it, with the higher clock speeds. Amd's are also cheaper by a couple of £'s

with dual channel ram if you are gaming than you would want to have 1gb, as it loses a couple of fps with more than that.

hardrive:
seagte makes reliable ones
westerndigital... (i can't remember what they are good for )
maxtor makes fast ones, but are known to be unreliable

 

[gaara]

Western Digital are by far the most reliable hard drives, Seagate is considered to be quietest and also pretty reliable, but pretty slow compared to the others. Maxtor is known for it's speed, but they are noisy and unreliable.

As mentioned above, AMD is better for gaming, but they do boast a lot of other features. With built in memory controllers, they have a newer FSB of 1GHZ, plus they have Hypertransport technology which transfer data to and from the memory at speeds of to 2000mb/s. AMDs also generally run cooler than Intel proccesors and will overclock better from what I have found.

Intel is better for multitasking, boasting larger L2, and in the Extreme Edition proccesors, L3 caches. They tend to be better at performing big, number crunching tasks, and they are more compatible with newer technologies such as PCIe and SLI.