Building a Dream Machine

[Grabbit]

For the most part I know what I'm doing. Been building computers for a long time. However that doesn't mean a lot seeing as there are monkeys who can put the parts together and load an os. Soooo. I have a few questions.

I don't exactly understand how Memory speed and the FSB coincide. Is the Memory bottlenecked if the memory speed is faster than the fsb? I.E. DDR 433 memory on an Athlon 2200 with a 266mhz fsb? Will it take a P4 2.4 or faster with a 533 fbs to utilize the memory speed? Someone mentioned to me changing a memory multiplier but I'm not real familiar with that either....is that a cmos setting? Would be much appreciated if someone would take a minute and clear this up for me.


Secondly...
I have a question about hard drive rpm's. Is going from a standard 7200 rpm drive to a SCSI 10k, or even 15k drive worth the cost of the drive and controller?


Lastly..
If anyone has a link to a site with very good informative hardware isntallation tweaks or tips feel free to post them here.

Thanks in advance

Marauder Grabbit Allworth
60 Assassin
Township Rebellion
Stormhammer

"The more you sweat in training, the less you bleed in war."

[Urgas]

try www.tomshardware.com

He always has some good infos but i didnt check it all that much lately.

Urgas

[Eomer]

www.anandtech.com is also very good. I used to keep up with hardware a lot better than I do now, so ima stay outta this!

[Parak]

AMD cpu's are currently limited to 266 mhz (ddr) fsb speed. Shortly they are coming out with 333 mhz chips (finally). Essentially, getting memory that is faster than that will not give any noticeable performance gains, as it is limited to the cpu's fsb speed. However, if you are overclocking the fsb (which is probably the only choice with overclocking, unless you unlock the cpu), you should go with the highest quality and speed memory, which is currently PC3200 (400 ddr). While the JEDEC did not officialize the standart yet, the memory is rated to perform at those speeds. Motherboards with support for DDR400 chipsets are set to come out shortly.

As far as scsi drives go, I personally do not think they are worth the extra cost, unless they are used for server operations (databases, etc) or heavy multimedia use (encoding, CAD, etc). You'd get near scsi performance with western digital special editions 120's in striped raid mode, or even stand alone. Plus they are getting pretty cheap now, I saw a deal for one for 110 bux, though after a staples 100 bux mail in rebate (staples is so-so on MIR's).

Get a case with removable mobo tray, helps a lot, don't skimp on the power supply, get at least a 300 watt one from a good maker, more if you plan to have a lot of components. I'm not an expert in this area, so I can't really recommend any specific manufacturers. Enermax psu's are the most popular, but I've read some horror stories with their nonexistant customer support. Antec makes good psu's from what I read, and Vantec (no, not the same thing) makes really stylish ones with nifty features.

[Eomer]

AMD's can still be unlocked with the pencil trick I think... haven't tried on my xp2000 because I don't think there is much point really, at least not until some super duper new game comes out to make it worthwhile.

[Kallaill]

STFAK UP PARAK U MAKE MY BRAIN HURT :|