Building a PC....

[Mollox]

Aside from sourcing the right (matching) components, is there anything I need to worry about when building a PC? Need to help a mate and want to make sure we don’t forget anything.

Is there a list of the standard cables and auxiliary odds and sods that you need?

Is any part of the process tricky (fixing CPU to motherboard?) or is it pretty much click and screw?

Any idea on how long it will take from start to finish?

[Sparky]

If you are buying all new components, then all the leads will be present. If you buy more than 2 IDE drives or 4 SATA drives, then you might need more drive cables.

All drivers should be with the new products too, but no harm in downloading the latest drivers.

You basically should have everything you need if you buy a new motherboard. Some cheap motherboards don't come with cables, but I usually buy Asus boards and they give you a lot of extras.

Either way, a list...

* SATA Drive cables

* Y-power splitters for extra drives

* Drive bay screws (case may not use screws though)

* Driver software

Depending on the CPU, it can be tricky, or at the very least, put doubt in your mind that you've just snapped your CPU as you force the heatsink clip over the chip onto the mobo!

For example, when installing my AMD64 chip, you drop in onto the motherboard, and then move a lever to clamp the chip onto the board. Then the heatsink sits ontop and with two more levers it clamps to the board too. You need a lot of force to get this to engage and some clicks make it sound that you've just wiped out the CPU.

It takes me about 15 mins to build a PC into the case, and then another 30 mins to get XP on and setup. I then go back and tune the PC in the BIOS and then Windows, so add another hour for that inc testing.

Once it's all tested and working, I then tidy up the cables and use wire clips and sticky pads to keep cables out the way of fans. I use round IDE/SATA cables to reduce air-flow drag.

Choose your heatsink carefully. Some are too heavy for the CPU and some are too large and will either not fit on the board due to badly placed capacitors.

Long graphics cards (6800+ Ultra for example) will also get in the way of memory sticks or in my case, the SATA drive headers and require a bit of modding, or a different product.

Set aside 2-3 hours in total for a properly built and tuned PC. If they aren't bothered about tuning it, then an hour and a bit will do.

Good luck

[Mollox]

Good, good - that's pretty obvious I suppose

This PC will be used as the recording/playback platform for a home studi so silent running is the name of the game - as well as low cost!!

Any pointers on that front?

[Mollox]

I remember Bison building a PC a while back and he was talking about needing some fiddly gunk to stick the CPU to the heatsink or was it the motherboard, I can't remember...

[Sparky]

Yes, you'll need CPU thermal paste. This should come with the CPU. It did with every AMD I've bought. You can of course get better paste. Some cheaper CPU's come with a thermal pad, already stuck to the CPU. You just peel back the sticker and apply the heatsink. This is the cheap option. Thermal paste is far better, but you only need a thin layer all over the CPU. The idea is not to empty the entire contents on to the chip. Thin but even coverage.

I opt for silent drives, that run at a min of 7200rpm, but have a Raptor (10k) as a boot drive. Drives with large caches help too, but a decent amount of ram is important too especially if it's a home stuido machine for video. I've popped 6x300GB disks in and I can't hear them ( thanks to this case ), and the Raptor is not bad but a little louder than the other drives.

To get silent machines, you need to get better components. Heat sinks that have near silent fans really. Not much to it. Powerful graphics cards that say "silent operation" are I've had many powerful cards that state they are near silent and they never are!

Get a decent case too. I've bought coolermaster as they are built better in my opinion and help to keep the sound down.

Don't forget a silent PSU too.

tuning your PC to slow down the fans when it's cooler helps a lot. Asus's new boards do an excellent job with their Q-fan BIOS option.

[Mollox]

Ok,

Does anyone fancy helping out with a spec here?

Budget is £5-600 and there’s no need for a monitor

Main requirements for this system are processing power (it willl be running some heavy home studio software) and silent running.

Current thoughts are along the lines of:

3+ Ghz processor. (Is there any mileage in going for a Pentium M chip and an adaptor?)

Motherboard TBC on confirmation of chip

1.5 GB RAM (I suppose a chip, MB and RAM combo is the way forward here – any ideas?)

Quiet PSU

Quiet case

80gb HD

Graphics Card w/ dual monitor support (doesn’t need to be fancy)

Wireless Keyboard and mouse

Would you recommend some kind of fan control/temperature monitoring built into the case?

Anyone fancy recommending the kit for this? Ta

[homerj]

http://www.buildyourown.org.uk/

Nice little site, with all you need to know about building your own !

[Omi]

Go with a Zalman cooler, and read QuietPC.co.uk as well as their forum for a lot of advice on quiet running. - Asus A8N SLi comes with 4 SATA leads and 3 Dual IDE leads, decent quiet PSU (Tagan, Antec or Enermax) will come with all the power leads and look into Getting a decent case that's highly rated on QuietPC and appropriate fan controller.

[Mollox]

Hmm, ta, what about using the Intel Pentium-M 740 1.73GHz (533FSB) 2MB L2 Cache (Socket 479) CPU?

Mate thinks using this and an adaptor vs say a 3.2Ghz Prescott is a better move? To be honest I don't know...

[Chris_B]

Precott is quite hot, so unless the case you choose has very good airflow, it will be noisy.

A few Antec cases come with silicon rubber grommets for mounting hard drives, which really helps reduce the noise, and you can buy gaskets to fit around fans etc.

I've got a WD1600JD drive in an Aria case on an Intel MATX board, and the 120mm fan on the back turns quite slowly, so isn't too noisy, and the hard drive just can't be heard. The only mistake I made was getting a Prescott P4 - far too hot and after some fairly lightweight use the fan speeds ramp up.

I recently built an AMD chip into an Antec P180 case, and it's quieter than the P4 2.53Ghz that it replaced, even though it has four SATA drives, two of which are 10k rpm ones, and it has a grand total of four 120mm case fans plus the twin-fan PSU. The P180 is quite an expensive case, but since the Sonata II came out, you might find Sonata cases going cheap.

In a nutshell: bigger and slower fans are quieter than smaller, faster ones, rubber grommets round fan and drive mountings reduce vibration, Athlon 64s seem to be cooler than Pentium 4s, and I personally wouldn't go with a mobile processor for performance reasons, and you might as well go for 2GB of memory as you will use a lot of it and it's cheap enough.

[Chav]

Ahtlon 64's are perfect for quiet setups - they run ice cool compared to Intel's egg fryers!

[Mollox]

You gonna recommend anything as the basis of a 5-600 quid system chav?

[Mollox]

OK, I think we have the basics sorted. Came out at just over £550 IIRC (without monitor/DVD) and all we need is a cheap wireless mouse and keyboard combo. Before you say anything - the graphics card is deliberately pants as there really is absolutely no graphics need on this pc - just Dual Monitor support

AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice 90nm (Socket 939) £143.94

Asus A8N-E nForce4 Ultra (Socket 939) PCI-Express Motherboard £76.32

Zalman CNPS7700-ALCU Ultra-Quiet CPU Cooler £26.97

GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC3200 Value Dual Channel Kit CAS2.5 £70.44

and

GeIL 512MB PC3200 Value CAS2.5 ££33.78

Arctic Cooling T2 Silentium Silent Midi Tower Case - 350W Seasonic Silent PSU £58.69

Samsung SpinPoint P HD080HJ 80GB SATA-II 8MB Cache £42.24

HIS Excalibur ATI Radeon 9250SE 128MB DDR TV-Out/DVI (PCI) £38.72

What do we think? Key requirements are power, quiet running and around the £500 mark - any good?

[Sparky]

You say this is for a home studio. Is it Audio or Video or both?

Or something completely different?!

[Mollox]

Audio

[Sparky]

Spec looks OK, but I'd have two hard disks. Keep the OS and programs on one, and the audio samples and work on another.

Besides, drives are dirt cheap at the moment.

[cheechy]

Omihemps - you

You've introduced me to the quietpc.co.uk website and now I'm going to have to spend some money on a nice HTPC case and quiet PSU!

Cheers

[Mollox]

He's got an external firewire drive for that purpose...which brings me to something I have just realised - that Mobo doesn't have firewire on board. Is it better to pay more for a mobo with firewire or just add a card? I see ebuyer do a 3-port firewire for £7 or so...

Obviously also, the bit I omitted to mention was sound card - he's got all the pro stuff hooked up to his current PC so we'll be taking the pro sound board and everything else sound-related from his other pc.

Wasn't suggesting he'd be making music from the pc speaker

[Mollox]

Also chaps, we were having great debate last night over whether the AMD Athlon 64 3500+ Venice was better for this application than the Intel Pentium 640....

any thoughts? We seem to have gone with the AMD in the end...

[Omi]

AMD is better for pure maths processing and will run cooler (read:quieter) than Intel for the same kind of power. Look at the benchmarking graphs on Toms Hardware or similar and note the comparative performances of the Athlon 64s available. - Go for a San Diego core if you can keep it in budget. - My San Diego 3700+ is currently clocked quicker than an FX53 and never breaches 40 degrees, except when running Primetest, which does stupid maths until something on your system starts crying and wetting itself...

If you're going ASUS Mobo with PCI Express, then go for the A8n SLi Deluxe, which has Firewire and the ability to expand to SLi matched GFX later. - It also has Active Overclocking based on temperatures and load on the CPU.

If you can push the boat out just a touch further, the A8N SLi Premium has a heat pipe rather than a fan on the northbridge, cutting case noise further.

PSU-wise, you'll need something better than 350W, especially if you're firing a couple of drives, a PCIx graphics card (noteably power hungry) and a few Firewire/USB devices. - Good overclocking while keeping temperatures controllable is very dependant on steady voltage rails. - Go overkill on your PSU and be prepared to spend up to £70. You can pick up 550W PSUs for £10, but that's like an Aiwa 2000W (PMPO) stereo system. More than half a second with a heavy load or surge and your cheapest compenent can take out 3 of your most expensive.

The case advice on QuietPC is VERY good. - I didn't discover them until after I'd purchased. I've got a Thermaltake case with three big slow fans and rubber mounted everything, but it still sounds like a jet taking off.

Also, I'll VERY MUCH recommend the Western Digital SATA-"II" drives. - They really do feel like the specced 300Gb/s, which is ideal for audio editing.

Zalman cooler is 'the bomb'!

[Sparky]

With AMD, you shouldn't have anything less than 400watts for a PSU.

I have the Western Digital SATA-"II" drives that Omi mentioned. They are fantastic. The reason I asked about if it was Audio or video was down to how much thrashing the hard disks would get (Adobe Premier really uses them!).

I'd personally get a mobo with Firewire built in, as you get better results speed-wise.

Now, one final point.

[ QUOTE ]

I see ebuyer do a 3-port firewire for £7

[/ QUOTE ]

Go and wash your mouth out.

NEVER mention that name here again. They are the WORST company to buy IT kit from. Their site may look nice and their prices good, but too often their shoddy service lets them down.

Besides, I'd spend a little more on a Firewire card personally.

[Mollox]

Cheers Omi,

Its amazing how much you can learn in a day – I knew nothing about this stuff til last night.

I don’t think the budget is going to allow a faster processor – the 3500+ is good isn’t it?

Need to have a think about the Mobo – is that a weakness in this spec? Do we need SLI? Isn’t that 2 x graphics cards? I mean graphics is the last thing this system needs which is why its getting one £40 card….unless graphics card can hinder overall performance?

Interesting re the PSU – it was hard to calculate but the stuff we found seemed to suggest 350 would be enough. However I get the point re more oomph means its running lighter (quieter) on lower loads. Thing is the budget is tight and the advantage of that case is that its got the psu built in – the other alternative was an Antec Case that’s £100 which blows the budget and then there’s still the need for the PSU…aaargh…

Is this system going to run particularly hot? We hadn’t planned on overclocking it or would it be stupid not to? How DO you over clock?

I hear ya re ebuyer - but if you're one of the lucky ones it works great! Those samsung drives have been strongly recommended as being very quiet though...

[Sparky]

The 3500 is a great chip, and it won't run too hot.

[Omi]

Just make sure you get a 90nm core, the 120nm's run a lot hotter.

SLi will run one graphics card, but then if you want to start editing video or playing high resolution games, you can then upgrade to 1 or 2 better cards.

PSU is vital.

eBuyer are fine until you get them on a bad day, then you're screwed. Touch wood I've had no problems!

Give me a fixed budget and tell me what you already have/don't need to buy and I'll take a look, give you my choices and some rationale as to why?

Working just now though. (Allegedly+++)

[aal234]

if you get the asus sli board you could cut back on the cpu to a 3200 I have a standard asus sli board and a 3000 (clock speed at stock 1800mhz) and it overclocks to 2.6GHz the same speed as the 4000 chip. not bad for 100 quid. and it is stable all day long with prime 95. I think pretty much every athlon 3200 will manage 2.2ghz usually more.

I got a great deal on a used asus sli from ebuyer for 45 quid. it was missing the heatsink mount but got one from www.chillblast.com. not sure if ebuyer still have them. item number is 88456.

I would try and get a board with built in firewire probably better than a cheap pci card.

as for hard disks give the samsungs a go. i used to swear by maxtors but have had problems with disks from maxtor, western digital and seagate recently so i don't think anyone is best really.