I need to start looking at building a new machine. The one I have now just doesn't cut it anymore so I'm looking for suggestions. Money is an issue of course, but I need something that will handle heavy graphics programs. Everything from games to video capturing and editing.

I also need an external HD that I can move between home and school. Only problem is most of the comps at school are macs (not all though).

Anyway, I could use any suggestions on video cards, motherboards/processors and external hard drives.

Thanks :)

Wouldnt a cd-rw be a lot cheaper and easier than lugging around an expensive external HD that may or may not be compatible with macs?

I've heard of, but never used, little flash disk drives. Basically they plug into a USB port and act like a small disk drive. Really it's just memory. Dunno if they're compatible between macs and PC's.

But the cd-rw drive is a good idea too.

Well, after asking around, I found one that is compatible with both. I can't use a CD-RW because they don't have enough storage space. My project is to make a documentary so the file sizes I'll be working with will be huge.

What about DVD-R?

I'm sure there are cross-religion compatible drives, especially if you're using OS X or whatever the next one is (Mac Donkey? whatever)....

I know my bf uses his Mac laptop (that has OS X) on it as a big portable hard drive between work (Mac & PC land) and home (PC only land, baby!). Can access it fine on our home LAN.

***

I have a little USB drive thingy - very convenient when you just need to transfer a PPT or whatever. But Seriena prolly needs mo' space than they offer for the price (the higher disk spaces ones get ess-pensivo).

Yeah, I wish those little things would work, would make life easier ;) But when I met with my prof to talk about the project, one of the first things he asked was "Do you have an external firewire hard drive?" I said no and he said "Get one".

DVD will work for the end product but it won't be big enough for the intermediate stuff.

"Mac Donkey?"

Nah, Mac Chicken :D

Yeah, when you're working on huge files across different machines a firewire HDD (doing the work actually on the external drive) is really the only way to go. Otherwise you'd end up with the hassle and time consumption of moving huge files back and forth betweem machine and DVD-R. For video editing, I doubt 4.7GB is as much elbow room as it sounds at the production stage...

Abit and Asus make the decent motherboards. Just don't buy any cheap OEM crap like Jetway :D

Video card? You probably want one that'll do DX9 T&L etc. I've seen a lot of articles / posts that say Radeon 9800s are a terrific 'bang for the buck' deal at the moment.

The folks here will probably fill you in on which cards to avoid... I believe FX5200s and anything with "MX" in the title are the gist of it. Also some of the non-pro ATI cards I believe, 9800 model excepted.

Processors? I prefer a P4, for little things like the heatsink mounting system (no chipping the core or stabbing the motherboard with a screwdriver trying to get the damn things clipped on) and it's apparently better behaved if the cooling fails for whatever reason.

With CPU prices there's always a point in the range where the speed goes up one notch and the price suddenly hits an exponential and skyrockets. The one you probably want, is the one just before it :)

Thanks for the info. Do you know of some good product review sites I could check out as I narrow it down?

Try:
http://www.anandtech.com
http://www.hardocp.com
http://www.guru3d.com
http://www.tomshardware.com

Truth is before making a new PC "depending on your budget" - and your current PC - then my advise would be to wait if your already above 2.2 and using at least a 333 FBS or better. As for Vid Cards anything including a 9700 Pro is good.

If you can get away with upgrading and keeping it under 400 bucks, then I would do that.

New Generations of Hardware will be out I say within the next 6 months, that will blow away the 2-3 gig series, and unfortunately that will desire new ram, possible HD's, MB, powersource (depending what you have now).

The Serial Drives are a nice upgrade and really not that bad on price, though it really depends on which motherboard you have. (Haven't checked to see if they have a Serial PCI Card for Serial Drives like they do for SCSI's).

This is just off the cuff recommendations -

I am running a 2600 AMD w/Serial drives (the 512 Version, AMD) with a 9700 PRO and 2 gig (yea overkill, it was cheap) of DDR RAM. I truthfully do not see myself upgrading my gamer till another generation beyond the current 800 FBS P4's or 64 Platforms of AMD, its not really a HUGE jump in speed.

Most of the games currently that I play demand more from your HD performance (EQ, zoning and such) and quite frankly it seems no matter what Processor you are using, it hogs it all anyhow.

At full Raid in the worst zone for raids (water type zones, PoW) - I really have no trouble with lag, IE if you dont' have a bunch of peeps levitating.

i've spent some time looking at motherboards recently, and two for the athlon have stood out to me:

the asus a7n8x-x (or -deluxe if you want a slightly higher end model the on board dolby sound is nifty, as is the on board raid... but the -x is the same board without those features, possibly one or two others...)

and the msi ms-6570

both (or all 3) support pretty much the whole range of athlon xp processors, a wide variety of ram, from pc3200 ddr all the way down to pc133 sd, if i recall.

they were both in the $100 range, give or take a couple bucks, with the -deluxe model of the asus board being more, around 140 or 150.

My only hardware recommendations are these:

You get what you pay for, so buying quality is good thing, even if it costs a few more bucks.

And, make sure you purchase from somewhere that has good return/exchange policies in case something malfunctions because even if you are experienced in building your own system, sh*t happens in general and it super sucks if the store you purchased stuff from is a) far away and/or b) difficult to work with when their stuff fries.

You get what you pay for

I agree but only so far.

There was another post about PCs, still there methinks. Poster is all set to buy an Alienware box.

Now that is all well and good, I hear they put together good equipment. But I have always seen them as $500 worth of stuff in a $1000 case.

Ok, he does not want to build his own, I understand that But I would learn how, if it meant saving a K or 2 on just a good looking case.

If I spend more than 50 bucks on them, I feel cheated.

The stuff they put in those side market machines is just the same as you buy off the shelf.

And there are plenty of people who actually think they are getting better equipment for spending more dough on their 'pre-built' machine from Alienware or Falcon(Mach).

http://www.emagictech.com.tw/products.htm

Stumbled upon this while surfing. Not sure if it's what you want and I have no idea bout the quality of it, but from what I've gathered, it's a box that will let you insert a HDD of your choice into it and then let you connect it to USB2 or Firewire depending on which of them you'd get. (one had both too.)

If you're looking to build a budget system, check out this guide: <a href=http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTM1>http://www.hardocp.com/article.html?art=NTM1</a>. It's pretty recent and has good suggestions for components that aren't too expensive and will still yield you a good gaming system.

That's great, thank you. I'm kind of worried about buying now, with the new Athlon 64 and P4 3.2 out there. I'm sure that's going to be the standard 6 months from now. On the other hand, I'm running a 1.1 Ghz processor atm, so an upgrade to something like the Athlon xp 2500 or 2600 will be a huge difference. I'm not real sure how to overclock things, just starting to read about it here and there.

I'll probably go with the Radeon 9700 Pro and the Abit Nf7-S v2.0 Mobo which means I'll need a new HD, new PSU, cooling and ram. All together though I think I can do this for around $800.

That doesn't include the external HD, that's another issue though.

Thanks for all the help and links!

I just built up a ~$1500 32-bit system a few weeks back, and feel it was the right choice...

64-bit was a temptation but I think it's better to wait for it to mature a couple of years whilst it builds up popularity and little niggles / incompatibilities are ironed out. (Anyone who used the early VIA Athlon chipsets ought to know why - there's rarely such thing as 100% compatible, at least at first).

Same goes for the upcoming PCI Express, BTX cases, death of the traditional BIOS in favour of the new firmware systen etc. I'm not worried about missing out on the first implementations :)