building the beast

[jon sutton]

in an effort to separate my recording maching from my email, internet, goof-off machine i have spent hours pouring over the words of wisdom presented here.

i am left, however, with a few questions:

**the asus mobo seems to be the way to be but, what is the diff between an a7a, a7m, and a7v??? also what happens when you add an E to the end of the model number? if the fsb is 266 and the new p4 is 400 is the athalon setup still as quick?

**athalon, t-bird, xp, palamino, and xp t-bird (i swear i saw that today). what gives??

**memory. ecc, non-ecc?? what exactly am i looking for in ddr memory? beyone pc2100 ddr 266 what is all the other crap (184 pin, dimm ddr, 32x72, cl2.5??)

**drives... i was told recently that they had to match. that now seems to be a fairy tale. withour shelling out big jack for scsi drives do i need anything better than the maxtor 7200 ide that i have had for a year now? why are people buying 40 and 60 gig drives for the system drive that probably won't ever see a gig worth of info?

as you can tell, i am solid on.... the floppy drive and the video card! that leaves me about 761 miles from memphis. i do however, have a full tank and am ready to roll so please throw some wisdom my way.

thank you!!

[jon sutton]

i also see tower/fan/a7v/1600 kits going for just over $300 (priceline.com). is this a decent place to start since we have already decided installing a mobo is a little intense the first time???

thanks again (and again and again)!

[Mark_Knecht]

Jon,
Complete answers to your questions could probably fill books...

1) Asus naming - does it matter really? Actually the AMV nominclature is for chipsets from different manufacturers. The -E seems to be onboard audio and RAID. You can check this stuff out on the Asus web site.

2) AMD processor names. Fun, huh?!? You can learn about this on the AMD site.

3) Don't worry, be happy. (And buy whatever your motherboard manual tells you to buy!)

4) Drives - I completely agree on the system drive comment. However, today it seems that most prepackaged machiens are coming with 40GB, so that's cheap. Don't buy SCSI. I used to use ATA for my audio drive, I now use 2 external 1394 drives. Love them. I can leave my machine on all day with my audio drive turned off. Come home at night and my data is safe safe safe. Love it.

Glad you have the floppy under control. There will be a test on video cards at the next class. ;-)

Have fun,
Mark

[Allen Hallada]

Jon,
On the A7V266 VS. the A7V266E, they are different chipsets. The A7V266E is an enhanced version that runs on the KT266a chipset. It rocks. The A7M266 was a mixed chipset motherboard running on the AMD761 chipset. I've heard that AMD is planning on phasing this one out. Just heard it yesterday from PCMagazine source. The GA-7DX and GA7DXR also run on this AMD761 chipset.
The A7A266 is the one to stay away from as it has not worked with Digi001.

Hard Drives: For the price and performance, it is hard to beat the ATA100 7200rpm IBM 60GXP 60GB drives at www.newegg.com for 115.00 each.

Use 512 MB of PC2100 Micron DDR ram

Matrox G450 Video card

Nec 21" LCD Flat Screens (incredible for around 400.00)

Good luck.
Allen [img]images/icons/smile.gif[/img]

[B.Ray]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by Allen Hallada:
...Nec 21" LCD Flat Screens (incredible for around 400.00)...<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Please tell me where you saw this. I'll buy one today!

[yavuzj]

<BLOCKQUOTE><font size="1" face="Verdana, Arial">quote:<HR>Originally posted by Allen Hallada:
Nec 21" LCD Flat Screens (incredible for around 400.00)<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I think he means $1400.- or just typed fast. [img]images/icons/wink.gif[/img]