Building a New PC and Need Advice

[bxblue]

I am building my first pc and lovin it. so far I got a SOYO KT400 DRAGON ULTRA PE mobo, a 2400+ CPU w/Thermaltake Volcano 7+ and this kinda cool Enermax ripoff case w/ 80 mm side fan. I'm planning on running raid 1 and overclocking of course as soon as I get over the fact that I finally built my own. What I am asking for is any suggestions as far as HDD ( western digital 8mb?), memory(Corsair?), graphics card(Chaintech nvidia ti4200 128?), PSU(Stealth?), or any other advice you found valuable the first time you built a pc. Your opinions will hopefully save my ass in the long run.
Thanx.

[Darthtanion]

Sounds good so far. Keep it going and you'll have a killer in no time. :)

Western Digital is the king daddy in hard drives right now. If you can afford the few extra dollars, make sure to get the 8MB cache models like you mentioned. Not only are they fast, but WD has long had a reputation for long lasting drives.

Corsair does make good memory, but you can find several good brands if you go looking. Since you're here in the States, price out Corsair, Mushkin and Crucial and go for the best price. While Crucial only offers PC270 modules, they are well known for their ability to run at higher speeds.

Video cards are pretty much an industry standard at the moment. Look for price and warranty and go from there. It used to be that one manufacturer would always do better, but these margins have closed a good bit lately. Not too many folks will break away from the manufacturers reference boards for there to be much difference. If someone advertises faster memory on the card, then that might be worth the effort of looking in to.

As for PSU, I would go with something along the lines of Antec or Enermax. Both of these are easily found online and are very reliable and stable.

Let us know how your project goes. The first system built is always fun. Oh, and your comment about RAID... did you mean RAID 1 as written (mirrored drives) or were you wanting RAID 1 (striped drives)? Both have benefits, but a RAID 0 array would probably be more beneficial for a Power User machine. ;)

[mrfin]

I've heard good things about the new Western Digital 8MB buffer HDD's. I personally like Seagate drives. They have proven to be very reliable, fast, and quiet. Again, I've heard great things about Corsair and Samsung RAM. Remember though, that most memory chips used on RAM come from Samsung. I have always used Visiontek cards. I have never tried a Chaintech card, but I wouldn't hesitate buying one. How much are you willing to spend on a vid card? There are some great deals on the internet for G4 Ti4600's. Everything you named sounds good. You might even want to wait until January or so when nVidia release their new graphics chip. All of the G4's will come down in price. Good luck on whatever you choose.

[bxblue]

Sounds like some good advice. I probably will wait on the vid card til January. I was talking about RAID 1 mirroring . I figured if I was going to run RAID I might as well get redundancy too. Is there really that much of a performance difference between raid 1 and raid 0?

[Darthtanion]

RAID 1 will write the same data to a pair of drives so you'll get the performance of the worst of the pair. While this is good for business users, it generally isn't necessary unless you have a lot of data that is particularly important on your machine.

RAID 0, on the other hand, breaks the data up into manageable chunks and writes them to a pair drives simultaneously. This allows you to use the speed of both drives and does make a difference for performance. Noticeable to the eye? I guess that is debatable, but the benchmarks will reflect an increase in performance. A lot of it really depends on the quality and speed of the drives you use in the array.