Need advise on Buying a MB

[manou]

Hi;
I want to make a pc for myself but I need some advise on buying a motherboard ,graphic card, Hard drive, RAM and PowerSupply, I intend to use AMD athelon xp processor,( 1800 or faster, I don't know yet, depend of the price)
I don't do gaming at all,

I use graphic software for publishing like Adobe illustrator, Corel Draw, Adobe photoshop , and some web publishing software like Dreamweaver MX,FirewordMX, FlashMX, and intend to use some DV editing software and do some light animation in the near future, but I have not yet decided what kind of software to use.

I don't mind to buy a MB with some onboard sound or Network, as long as they work find, but I think It is wise to not use onboard graphic card. I don't want to go for cheap mb, but can not afford the expensive one either.

I appreciate your reply on this, I reside in Canada
Thanx

[BigBlue66]

I suggest the MSI KT3 Ultra2 motherboard. Since you're doing video intensive things, you should probably go with 512mb of DDR SDRAM. I suggest orginal Samsung PC2700. Corsair and Crucial are also known good brands that work well in this motherboard. You should probably hold off on any boards with the KT400 chipset because they haven't perfected it yet. I plan to upgrade after the "a" version of the chipset comes out.

For video, I suggest an MSI GeForce4 Ti 4200 128mb.

Harddrive, a Maxtor ATA133 of your choosing.

Power supply, either Antec TruePower 430, 480 or even 550. Turbolink are also decent power supplies, being made by the same manufacturer that makes the Antec power supplies. PC Power and Cooling are considered to be even better than the Antec TP series with closer tolerances, but you pay the price for that, too.

[manou]

Thank you very much BigBlue66,
I am going to shop around to see how much it will cost me,
I really appreciate your reply,
Thanx a lot.

[deadkenny]

You certainly have some specific apps in mind. Blue's recommendation is a good one for a general purpose desktop / bargain gamer-performance system, but I'm not so sure it's the best for your purposes (no offense intended Blue, just a contrary opinion). For your purposes I might tend to recommend a P4 system, except that it sounds like it might be out of your price range. Since the 'south bridge' performance sounds like it might be important to you, I would not recommend a Via chipset as the first choice. SiS is a bit stronger here, but I'm not sure I really like the SiS 745 in this case. If you were going this direction, I would recommend the MSI 745 Ultra over the ASUS board. The SiS 746 is due out soon, so you might want to wait to see. Another alternative is nForce (or nForce 2). Any of these boards should be available with acceptable onboard sound. Unless you're getting a 166MHz FSB Athlon (it doesn't sound like you are) then save some money and get PC2100 DDR memory - PC2700 doesn't improve performance much unless you're going with the faster FSB (faster processor or OC). I think HDD performance will be critical, so at least get something like the 8MB cache WD HDD and / or RAID. SCSI would be good, but again probably too expensive. I'm not clear on how important 3D rendering is to you, so I'm not sure about the video card.

[Aznmask]

For the motherboard , cpu, case.. Buy the Barebone system which save you alot. Some motherboard include soundcard,56k, lan, too.

Video card - RADEON 9700 PRO or his little brother RADEON 9500Pro.. all depend on your price.

Harddrive must be atleast 7200rpm atleast 40GB depend on your need.

[manou]

Thank you all for your replies, I learned a lot,
I am going to shop around to see what the price come out,
the pentium is kind of pricy for me , and the DV editing thing is somthing as a hobby which I always liked to do, so I want to have the hardware for it when I start to learn, I am not into heavy stuff, so as I have asked couple of my friends they all say AMD XP is fine,
I have checked the MSI GeForce4 Ti 4200 128mb Graphic card,
expensive for me, but I have to see if the other hardwares are not too expensive then I may buy this Graphic card,

more ideas are still welcome, I am going to stay around for a week or so, then decide.

here is what I have come up with so far ( all in C $)

AMD Cpu XP 2000 ------------------------------C$159.00
RAM DDR 512MB ------------------------------ C$199.00
MB MSI KT3 Ultra2-----------------------------C$129.00
Video Card MSI GeForce4 Ti 4200 128mb---C$ 265.00


Thank you again for the replies.

[crucibelle]

dead kenny -

kind of off subject here, but do you have any idea on the eta of that SiS 746 chipset? :t

-jeanna

[Benssax]

Originally posted by manou
Video Card MSI GeForce4 Ti 4200 128mb---C$ 265.00




thats way to much for a ti4200 128mb..:eek:

[omega31]

He said Canadian dollars, not U.S. dollars. $265 Canadian is about $170 U.S.
http://www.oanda.com/convert/classic

[missiveusa]

Cool site. omega. I always wanted to know the value of my camels in dinars:D . Seriously, very useful for those wierd Euro purchases.

[deadkenny]

Originally posted by crucibelle
dead kenny -

kind of off subject here, but do you have any idea on the eta of that SiS 746 chipset? :t

-jeanna

Really! The chipset was announced a while ago (it's right there on the SiS website). Yet where are the boards? Problem is, the chipset doesn't do anyone much good until a mobo manufacturer actually puts it on a board for us. I don't have any hard info on a 746 board release date. SiS just doesn't seem to have the influence to 'push' their stuff (not like Intel, that's for sure).

[crucibelle]

Yep, that is what I was wondering really - when a board with the SiS 746 chipset would be available. Although, I didn't know that the chipset itself was out either. I was considering purchasing the MSI 745 Ultra, but I'd hate to do so and then a 746 board become available soon afterwards. Also, the only halfway reputable place that I could find it for sale online was direct.mwave.com (extremely good price too - around $65), but they don't even have it anymore. so, I have no idea where I'd be able to find it. Thanks for the reply, dead kenny! :-@

[deadkenny]

I've always really liked the idea of the SiS 'single' chip design. However it appears that the 746 is back to the traditional separate north / south bridge design. The 745 is a good value chipset, and the MSI is the board to get with that chipset. The 746 has been out, 'in theory', so long that although it has USB 2.0 and AGP 8X it doesn't appear to 'officially' support 166MHz FSB, or serial ATA. It does at least appear to have SiS's high bandwidth north-south bridge connection technology. It's hard to know what niche the 746 will fill, since at least part of the reason that the 735 and 745 chipset boards are so cheap is due to the single chip design (cheaper to manufacture because all of the north / south connections are unnecessary).

BTW, cute 'kissy face' smiley there. I sure hope you're female.;)

[crucibelle]

Hmmm, might do me better just to go with the MSI 745 Ultra then. I swear, this whole choosing a new motherboard thing has got me sooo confused. Too many choices. I've poured over so many review sites with benchmark results, etc, I'm now dreaming in graphs... heheh:D

100% female here, yep! :-@