Buyer's Guide - Entry Level to Mid-Range, March 2005
by Jarred Walton on March 15, 2005 1:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Hard Drives
With native SATA support provided by the chipset on all of the recommended motherboards, it only makes sense to go with a SATA hard drive. The difference in performance is generally negligible, but noise levels and storage capacities still vary. We're basically looking for a quiet drive with as much capacity as we can find without going over $75. 80GB models are the sweet spot these days, with 40GB models generally costing only a few dollars less and having higher noise levels.
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Price: $59 shipped
The Hitachi drives aren't the quietest hard drives around, particularly in terms of seek noise levels. Ball-bearing noise is not a problem, thankfully, as fluid dynamic bearings are used. With a price that's $15 lower than the competition, we're going to give the Hitachi the nod as the basic recommendation. If you want the longer warranty of a Seagate as well as a lower seek volume, the price will go up to $75 with shipping - still not bad at all, considering. Samsung 80GB drives cost about the same as the Seagate, and we would say that their seek noise levels are the quietest of the bunch. If you're using a quiet case that's located on top of your desk, you might find the noise of the drive heads seeking to be irritating on the Hitachi and even the Seagate. It is worth pointing out that various revisions of the Seagate and Hitachi drives may be more or less noisy, however. Some users still have bad memories of the "Deathstar" 75GXP IBM drives, but the latest models from Hitachi (who purchased IBM's hard drive division) have not shown any propensity for early failure, so we're okay with recommending them.
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Hard Drive Alternative: Seagate 160 GB 7200 RPM 8MB SATA
Price: $94 shipped
Jumping up to the larger storage capacities, the price differences between the various brands tend to disappear. Given the longer 5-year warranty on the Seagate, it's the natural choice. We'll leave that up to you, but the same noise rankings as above still apply in our experience, with the Samsung having the least seek noise and the Hitachi having the most. The price for SATA and IDE versions of the 160GB drives is close to identical as well, should you feel the need to go with an IDE interface.
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JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
17 - The older Maxtor are like the older WD: they use standard bearings and are prone to develop a whine (in my experience). If you can verify that the drive has fluid dynamic bearings, you could get Maxtor as well. I haven't had great experiences with the Maxtor drives, although I've heard the latest models are better.JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
15 - Sorry, I meant "9550" but typed "5500". The article lists the correct card, though. :o Most of the FX cards aren't worth consideration.As for the 6200TC, there are actually 3 versions, all of which were tested in the AnandTech article. There is a 16MB 16-bit card (one RAM chip), a 32MB 32-bit card (two RAM chips), and a 64MB 64-bit card (four RAM chips). The 32MB cards are not a 64-bit interface as far as I am aware. Many companies are causing confusion on the TC cards as they'll count the PCIe connection as bandwidth in order to make the features look better. Even if the RAM were 700 MHz instead of 550 MHz, you're looking at 2800 MBps on-card bandwidth for the 32-bit version vs. 4400 MBps on the 64-bit version. In theory, the PCIe connection will add an additional 2000 MBps (roughly - 2000 up and 2000 down) , but some of the RAM bandwidth is going to the CPU.
16 - I'd take the guaranteed 6600 for $7 more over the 6200. The 6200 also lacks support for certain memory compression schemes as I understand it.
Klober - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
I know this is a minor point, but I'm curious as to why Maxtor isn't mentioned in the price guide for hard drives. Is there something I don't know about them concerning speed, noise or reliability?filterxg - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
To most people I'd continue to recommend a 6200 over a 6600 vanilla. Rivatuner unlocks the 4 pipelines (softmod), so it becomes an indentical card.Jep4444 - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
"Oh, as far as the budget PCIe card recommendation going to the 64MB 6200TC, please read the benchmarks in our 6200TC article before saying that the 32MB/32-bit version is better (due to memory speeds)."you seem to be confusing cards, i'm talking about the 32MB/64bit part thats clocked at 700mhz(as opposed to 550mhz of the 64MB one)
you're thinking of the 16MB version thats 32bit
PS who said to use the 5500? he mentioned the 9550 which is faster than the 5500
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
13 - Regarding refurb, that's something for the individual to decide. Warranty and availability are limited, so we don't recommend them in Guides. I still don't know about the Chaintech, as I can't find concrete information on specs for the Ultra vs. standard. According to Chaintech, it's the standard nF4 vs. the Ultra, which means the only thing that gets lost is SATA-2 support and a few network "enhancements". They're the same chipset with different resistors cut.Fricardo - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
Same as those above, I'd say go with a 6600 non-gt for the upgraded setup. If you're actually going to upgrade the vid-card -- indicating you care somewhat about gaming -- you might as well do it right and spend the extra $7.Is it worth the $10 savings to go from the Ultra mobo to the vanilla? I don't know but I've heard that chipset wasn't made to OC well. Seems like you'd get a bit more value and $99 is still a great price for a mobo. I'm just wondering.
Another possibility for reducing cost is refurbed parts. I've been looking through NewEgg's refurb video section lately and there's tons of great cards for cheap. PCI-Express too. It seems to me you can really raise value that way.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
Oh, as far as the budget PCIe card recommendation going to the 64MB 6200TC, please read the benchmarks in our 6200TC article before saying that the 32MB/32-bit version is better (due to memory speeds). The bump from 32-bit to 64-bit more than makes up for the slower RAM (if it is indeed slower). The 64MB 6200TC also beats the X300 in *every* test, so there's no reason to go with the X300 card unless you insist on ATI.http://www.anandtech.com/video/showdoc.aspx?i=2300...
I'm actually not fully convinced the "TurboCache" architecture really works all that well. Looking at the various cards, the performance scales almost directly with local memory bandwidth. But that's a topic for another day.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
Oops... some bad picks on the GPUs this time. I keep forgetting the 5500. I have updated the GPU page with new picks, and will shortly update the summaries. I guess after seeing 6600 AGP prices I forgot that the PCIe cards were substantially less. Sorry.I also corrected the VNF4 to omit the Ultra. I can't tell if the Ultra includes Firewire support or not. Newegg, at least, is using the same images for both models. I think that's what threw me off in the first place.
rivethead - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
Sorry about my post #7. I just re-read it and I wasn't very clear.What I was trying to say is that I think you're wanting to recommend the Chaintech VNF4 mother board (currently $89 shipped from newegg). This board is different than the Chaintech VNF4/Ultra which is about $100 shipped. For the extra $11, you get a motherboard powered by the nvidia nForce 4 Ultra chip which includes onboard firewall, SATA2 support, and nvidia nTune performance software.
For me, I think the extra $11 is worth the features.
I beleive you'll need to either change the price or alter the narrative to be clearer on your board selection.
But if you really can find the Chaintech VNF4/Ultra for $89 please let me know where!