building my first PC and need advice

[felix726]

hey everyone,
here's the deal, decided it was time for a new PC and decided to build my own, but I need a little help on choosing components and setting them up. First off I am thinking about a PIII 500mhz and an ABIT BH6 motherboard. Are the PIII's worth the cost or would I be better off sticking to a celeron? I was also wondering if RAM is backward compatible. For example, will PC133 run on a 100mhz board? Just wondering in case I ever want to upgrade to the new Pentium cpu's that run on the 133mhz fsb( to new and to expensive to buy one now I think ). I'm Thinking about the Diamond Viper V770 ultra 32mb agp video card and a Creative Labs Sound Blaster Live sound card, anybody had any major problems with either of these. I am going to start using cable access through my local cable company and need a good 10Base-T Ethernet card, any suggestions? I already have an 8gb and a 13gb hard drive, a CD-RW, and a 19" monitor. I don't have a ton of money to burn but I want to get the best for what I do spend, any any suggestions those of you with a lot of experience at this can give me will really be appreciated. I am also planning on formatting both hard drives and installing Windows98 on the 13gb and Red Hat6.0 on the 8gb and then just dual booting, but I have some questions. Should I install Windows98 before installing my sound, video, and ethernet cards or should I just go ahead and throw everything together and then install (sorry if this is an obvious question but like I said this is my first time to try and build a PC from scratch /forum/redface.gif ). Thanks everyone. /forum/smile.gif

Rob


[This message has been edited by felix726 (edited 10-31-1999).]

[Underclocked]

Please no flames for this opinion, but I would recommend either an Asus P3B-F or an AOpen AX6BC Pro Gold as opposed to the Abit board (personal preference).

It sounds like you are into gaming given the choice of video cards, so I would recommend you selecting a case based on good thermal design and the AOpen HX08 would be great. A super slot fan would be a boon for heat removal and they are quite inexpensive.

The PIII at a good price might be the best bet, although the new ones are just hitting the market (.18micron). As far as best bang for the buck, a lot of the PIII 450s are easily overclockable if you want to dabble carefully into that. I don't believe the extra cost of the PIII 500 is warranted.

The ram will work just fine as long as you are not incorrectly mixing various sdram types. PC133 will be fine at 100MHz.

As far as physically installing the various cards before loading 98, I would do so being sure that all cards, memory, cpu, and connections to the motherboard are secure.

Loading Linux and NICs I would leave to someone that knows what the heck they are talking about. /forum/smile.gif

[Dominus]

As for the cable NIC, if the ISP offers one, take it. The ones they provide are certain to work correctly. Otherwise, try a D-Link 528. It's an excellent PCI 10BaseT NE2000 clone that you should be able to get for around $35 CAN.

One thing to note: SB Live's don't work in Linux yet (very problematic cards IMHO anyway), but Creative Labs just open-sourced the drivers, so expect support for them in the next round of experimental kernels.

[KillerBug]

3Com ten base-t
P3-450 or Athlon 500 overclocked to 650 or 700
Abit BE6 or for Athlon K7M
TNT-2 Ultra w/32mb, s-video out and 3d glasses
Alpha P3-125 w/peltier conversion (for athlon, if it is overclocked to 650 or 700, it already has enough cooling)
Sound: Aztech PCI-256 or PCI-512, SB is just the same, but costs more.
And I would sugjest a 40x (not 50, they are realy noisy and they do no offer any real performance over 40x) cd-rom drive, faster than the cd burner reading, and safer.

With this speedy motherboard, I would sugjest PC133 ram, 128mb of it.

Last, if either of the hard disk drives are 7,000 or 10,000 rpm, get hard drive ay coolers.

Install Windows with minimum components, and then install stuff one thing at a time, exceptions to this rule: 2nd hard drive, any secondary disket drive, case fans.

You want to seriously underclock durring install, if you get the 450, drop it to 300, the more stable, the better. Then install the supercooling and overclock to 600 or 630. Put in components one by one, load drivers, shut down, and put the next in untill everything is together.

One note: Before you begin this, go to Abits web site, put the latest BE6 bios flas on a dos disket and load it before even hooking up the hrd drives, with just the 450 at 300, a disket drive, video, and ram.