R.i.p

[Vexx]

ah my 2.4c machine burned out two days ago... :bang head
also took the mobo with it.. Still don't know what happened
but it served me great for two years

hm
what do you guys suggest now? I'm thinking about a a64 venice machine.. SLI

donations welcome :p

[KJSatz]

Well I'm one of the people who doesn't think SLI is worth it. OK Let's think it through via Satz logic, or "Salic," as in salt, like Saline, indicating that it should be taking ONLY when with a grain of salt.

OK you buy the DFI Lanpartay SLI mobo. So that's like $40 on top of non-SLI. Get the rest of your stuff, and feel limited to NVidia because why have a SLI mobo with an ATI card in it , right? Well you get say, a 6800GT. Let's just say, hypothetically, that a 7800 Vanilla would out preform two 6800GTs in SLI. So you get one 6800GT now and later on, they cost about $200, and you buy another. So you've spent about $500 on video cards plus the $40 on the mobo, leading up to $540 invested in "Video Technology." Now, surely a 6800GT (while they're retailing at 200) could pick up $100 at least. So that leaves $440 to spend on a video card, like a 7800Ultra (it'll come out some time I'm sure), and have better preformance.

Right?

[Gasoline]

If you want to re-use as much of your old parts as possible and stick with a socket 478 machine to keep the budget down, I just got 4.1GHz stable on air cooling today with my new cpu chip that just arrived from NewEgg.

ABIT IC7-G Max II mobo
P4 Prescott 3.4GHz OEM (SL7E6)
Corsair PC-3200 CAS2 memory (2X512M) timed at 2-2-2-5 (since mem clock is only at 192MHz due to 5:4 ratio)
FSB @ 242MHz with 5:4 ratio
bumped vcore up to 1.4375 setting, but due to my crappy old ANTEC plain 400W psu, the vcore reported by SysTool is only 1.39v


Not bad for a budget machine built from yesteryear's parts.

[KJSatz]

Yeah how much are you willing to spend and what exactly do you need (what do you want to re-use). Just up front I'm going to strongly suggest that you aviod SLI (read previous post) but go PCI-E because AGP is largely morte.