How's my new planned rig? [Archive] - Northern Sound Source

MDesigner

07-06-2003, 02:29 PM

Looking for some opinions/input on some equipment I\'m planning to buy. I\'m trying to achieve a nice balance between value and performance, since money is VERY tight right now. But I just can\'t deal with these audio dropouts and poor performance.. not to mention my motherboard sucks (A7V133) and has a crappy IDE bus on it that keeps giving me hard disk errors. images/icons/frown.gif

Anyway, what do you think? All prices include shipping.

ASUS A7N8X-X - $98 (replacing my A7V133)
Crucial 2x 512MB PC2100 - $138 (replacing 512MB of PC133)
Maxtor 80GB (for .gigs only) - $76 (adding on)
Athlon XP 2200 retail box - $74 (replacing my Thunderbird 900MHz)
Antec 400W Power Supply - $60 (replacing my 300W generic)

Grand Total: $446

SOD213

07-06-2003, 04:33 PM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
Looking for some opinions/input on some equipment I\'m planning to buy. I\'m trying to achieve a nice balance between value and performance, since money is VERY tight right now. But I just can\'t deal with these audio dropouts and poor performance.. not to mention my motherboard sucks (A7V133) and has a crappy IDE bus on it that keeps giving me hard disk errors. images/icons/frown.gif

Anyway, what do you think? All prices include shipping.

ASUS A7N8X-X - $98 (replacing my A7V133)
Crucial 2x 512MB PC2100 - $138 (replacing 512MB of PC133)
Maxtor 80GB (for .gigs only) - $76 (adding on)
Athlon XP 2200 retail box - $74 (replacing my Thunderbird 900MHz)
Antec 400W Power Supply - $60 (replacing my 300W generic)

Grand Total: $446 Newegg? images/icons/smile.gif

I just built my new system, very similar to yours.

A7N8X Deluxe (has SATA for future expansion, and I\'ll probably never use it. images/icons/wink.gif ) - $129
2x 512MB Kingston PC3200 - $174
WD 120GB JB (3 Yr warranty) 7200rpm - $107
Athlon XP 2500 Barton (OC\'d to 3200XP (200MHZ FSB) ) - $91
450W Power Supply - $78

Do yourself a favor, stay away from Maxtor. Even though I had a WD fail on me two weeks ago, I at least had warning enough to be able to pull all my data off except for 300MB of wallpaper that I had elsewhere. (Net loss, 0 Bytes.) I\'ve also had good luck with Seagates, and they\'re quieter.

System\'s running stable enough, even OC\'d. Still working out the kinks, I think I should have gone with better memory for OC\'ing, but other than that, I\'m happy. Just be sure that the soundcard you\'re running is compatible with the Nforce motherboard. My Echo Mia is, but I\'ve stuck with Intel chipsets (and CPU\'s) for compatibility with other cards.

MDesigner

07-06-2003, 05:09 PM

I\'ve got an Audiophile 2496. Anyone know if this works ok with the nVidia chipset?

Also, I\'ve had no issues with Maxtor.. in fact, all the techies who build their own machines always rave about it. I get a bunch of disk errors, but that\'s always happened with all my HDs, so it\'s my IDE bus that\'s causing the issue.

SOD213

07-06-2003, 07:26 PM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
I\'ve got an Audiophile 2496. Anyone know if this works ok with the nVidia chipset?

Also, I\'ve had no issues with Maxtor.. in fact, all the techies who build their own machines always rave about it. I get a bunch of disk errors, but that\'s always happened with all my HDs, so it\'s my IDE bus that\'s causing the issue. According to what I\'ve been able to Google, it should work fine. (M-Audio just says to stay away from Via, isn\'t that what you have now? images/icons/wink.gif ) I\'ve had luck with Echo Audio\'s cards on Via, Intel, and now N-Force chipsets. I\'ve had a couple of Laylas, now I use Mias.

I don\'t know about the techies you know, but I\'ve been in the pc building business professionally for the last 6.5 years. Seagates and Western Digitals have been good for us. We tested Maxtor about a year ago, half the drives failed within a year. We get computers in that are 5-6 years old (sometimes I wonder if I built them originally) with the 1.6GB Western Digital still cranking away.

Besides, with Seagates being the quietest drives anyway, shouldn\'t you go with them? images/icons/smile.gif

Haydn

07-06-2003, 08:35 PM

I\'ve never had problems with Maxtor drives in my systems at home and at work. Probably have about 50 of them running. Only bad one at work was caused by dropping the drive, oops! I\'ve had a few WD\'s fail though. The newer WD\'s appear to be better than the drives from a few years ago. Beware of the Quantum designed Maxtor drives. Remember that Maxtor took them over awhile ago. Always had problems with Quantum drives.

Sovereign

07-07-2003, 04:34 AM

Sam, I recommend at least 1,5 GB of ram, you\'ll be able to load 50% more instruments that way with the XP tweak.

MDesigner

07-07-2003, 03:47 PM

I\'ll consider a Seagate IDE drive if possible.. I do like Seagates.

So, is my price OK? If you think I can get that stuff for a lower price, please let me know.

Simon Ravn

07-07-2003, 04:41 PM

Originally posted by Sovereign:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by MDesigner:
* Maxtor is very good quality IDE, and is quieter than WD.Definitely not true, I could probably dig up some reviews from storagereview.com but WD is the quietest after Seagate.

My own experience with both brands confirms this, which is why the two new giga boxes I built recently both have WD drives. images/icons/smile.gif <hr /></blockquote>WD might be the quietest after Seagate, but they are A LOT noisier. Seagates are almost silent when inside a standard casing, WD\'s are very much audiable and also emit low frequency vibrations.

MDesigner

07-07-2003, 11:01 PM

Here\'s what I know about hard drives (or what I\'ve been told by \"techies\"):

* Avoid Quantum.. complete crap.
* Maxtor is very good quality IDE, and is quieter than WD.
* Seagate is probably as good as Maxtor for IDE, but top-notch in their SCSI line of drives.

As far as the RAM, I\'ll probably get 1GB now and another 512MB later.

Actually, I just realized I don\'t really need a new machine just yet.. I\'ll get new parts once I land a new day job. images/icons/frown.gif Heh..

Sovereign

07-07-2003, 11:03 PM

Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
WD might be the quietest after Seagate, but they are A LOT noisier. Seagates are almost silent when inside a standard casing, WD\'s are very much audiable and also emit low frequency vibrations.Hmm, so why don\'t I hear both of my WD800JBs? images/icons/cool.gif I\'ve never encountered any \"vibrations\" with this drive. Here\'s a quote from the Storagereview article:

\"two-platter design, the WD800JB turns in a relatively low noise floor, shaving more than 2 dB/A off of the scores delivered by Western Digital\'s three-disk designs. The Caviar\'s objective idle-noise score is in line with the competition- only Seagate\'s Barracuda ATA IV delivers significantly lower acoustics. Subjectively speaking, the drive\'s seek noises are among the quietest we\'ve heard, something unsurprising given the drive\'s rather high average access times.\"

Obviously noise is going to differ per drive design, but all recent WD drives are pretty silent.

Sovereign

07-07-2003, 11:07 PM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
So, is my price OK? If you think I can get that stuff for a lower price, please let me know. [/QB]Prices certainly look okay to me, though I would not buy that Antec power supply if your old one is working okay. Get 512 MB of additional ram for that money instead, it\'ll help you far more.

Yes I know, I am persistent. images/icons/grin.gif

Sovereign

07-07-2003, 11:38 PM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
* Maxtor is very good quality IDE, and is quieter than WD.Definitely not true, I could probably dig up some reviews from storagereview.com but WD is the quietest after Seagate.

My own experience with both brands confirms this, which is why the two new giga boxes I built recently both have WD drives. images/icons/smile.gif

Alexcremers

07-08-2003, 01:20 AM

Last week some techies also told me to go for Maxtor because WD is more noisy. Are techies being payed by Maxtor or do they hear things differently? Soon (a couple of days) I will know whether my newly ordered Maxtor 80GB , 8MB Cache , is noisy or not and then I\'ll tell you.

------------
Alex Cremers

Simon Ravn

07-08-2003, 01:55 AM

Soverign - I don\'t know why you can\'t hear them.... images/icons/smile.gif But as the review says, Seagate Barracuda\'s have a SIGNIFICANTLY lower noise floor... I don\'t agree that it\'s only the Barracuda IV btw - I have IV, V and 7200.7, and I haven\'t noticed any huge difference in noise from the three drives. The WD\'s are MUCH MUCH noisier - and I have two of the WD800 drives, so it\'s not because I haven\'t tried them. Regarding Maxtor, it\'s at least as noisy as the WD\'s, and it has very noisy seeking - worst of the bunch here.

Alexcremers

07-08-2003, 02:04 AM

deleted post

Sovereign

07-08-2003, 03:22 AM

Maxtor just as bad as WD? Not from where I am sitting. images/icons/wink.gif My Maxtor 80 gig drive makes a lot of noise actually, crappy thing is starting to get bad sectors too I think.

But as I said, my WDs are pretty much silent most of the time, I just can not hear them in my cases. This is consistent with what I\'ve read in hardware forums about these particular drives too. I\'d love to point you to some threads to make my point, but they\'re all in Dutch. images/icons/grin.gif

Here\'s something I found which proves I\'m not hearing things images/icons/wink.gif

http://resellerratings.dealtime.com/xPR-Western_Digital_Caviar_WD800JB_Special_Edition_80_ GB~RD-62826778244 (\"http://resellerratings.dealtime.com/xPR-Western_Digital_Caviar_WD800JB_Special_Edition_80_ GB~RD-62826778244\")

Simon Ravn

07-08-2003, 05:44 AM

I don\'t see any proofs of anything. Bottom line is, I have used - and am still using - both Maxtor, the new WD drives, one of the new Maxtors - in the same casing. When I mentioned Maxtor being \"as bad\" as WD, I only mean noise-wise. I think WD makes better drives - however one of those WD drives has recently started making a whining noise that has forced me to take it completely out of the system. The drive still works, but it has the added fidelity of a high-pitch whine. I wonder if I can get this drive replaced - probably not.

Anyway. Buy whatever drives you want. I know what I\'m sticking to if I want a silent system.

MDesigner

07-08-2003, 07:43 AM

I was talking to a buddy of mine last night about drives, and he too said that Seagates are great for SCSI systems, but if I\'m going ATA, go Maxtor instead. Can anyone tell me about Seagate performance for ATA100/133?

I actually own a Maxtor 80GB fluid-bearing drive right now, and I can say it\'s very quiet. As I said, I get disk errors frequently, but I had the same problem with my IBM drive.. so, coincidence? No.. it\'s my IDE bus on my weak-*** A7V133 motherboard, which I can\'t wait to ditch!

At this point I\'m just trying to decide what kind of drive to get.. Maxtor or Seagate.

PS: Sovereign: I do need the new power supply. 300W will not handle the A7N8X + Athlon XP 2200, I\'m pretty sure. I plugged an XP 2100 in this thing before and it blew out the power supply. Besides, 300W is way too low for all the stuff I\'ve got going on with this machine.

§eth

07-08-2003, 08:27 AM

Hey Sam I also am using 3 Seagate Serial drives and I\'d swear they were not working if my DVD drive was not spining. They are pretty darn quiet. I have used Maxtar on my old comp for gaming not knowing about seagate at the time.It was my first 7200 speed dive and was loud, but bearable becaue I\'d be blasting things away and did nt care about the noise. Now I use the WD Raptor and the Seagates exclusivly.

Sovereign

07-08-2003, 09:19 AM

Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
I don\'t see any proofs of anything.Well then, I might as well say that your statement below isn\'t proof of anything either. images/icons/wink.gif

Bottom line is, I have used - and am still using - both Maxtor, the new WD drives, one of the new Maxtors - in the same casing. When I mentioned Maxtor being \"as bad\" as WD, I only mean noise-wise.And I am in precisely the same situation, having used Maxtor for the past three years and just recently switching to WD, this was a true blessing. The 800JBs I have are just not audible, I don\'t know what version you might have but I do know what I am hearing. images/icons/wink.gif When I have the drive power down in standby mode there\'s no audible difference, which to me was quite amazing.

Anyway. Buy whatever drives you want. I know what I\'m sticking to if I want a silent system. [/QB]But then of course, the Seagate drives are not as good in terms of performance. images/icons/wink.gif

Anyway, if you want a silent system put it out of the room you\'re working in. images/icons/grin.gif

Sovereign

07-08-2003, 09:23 AM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
PS: Sovereign: I do need the new power supply. 300W will not handle the A7N8X + Athlon XP 2200, I\'m pretty sure. I plugged an XP 2100 in this thing before and it blew out the power supply. Besides, 300W is way too low for all the stuff I\'ve got going on with this machine.Hmm, are you sure it wasn\'t something else? I\'m running an XP2000 on an NForce 2 with my EWX 24/96, a GF3 TI200 and a NEC DVD+R drive, two Maxtor HDs, all on a power supply which is rated 150W. images/icons/grin.gif

MDesigner

07-08-2003, 10:01 AM

Sovereign: 150W?? You\'re going to blow something out one of these days.. I\'d seriously consider changing to at least a 350W if I were you.

Maybe you\'re right though, maybe my power supply was just a cheapo and blew out.. I don\'t know. I\'d rather not risk it though.

Sovereign

07-08-2003, 10:04 AM

Originally posted by MDesigner:
Sovereign: 150W?? You\'re going to blow something out one of these days.. I\'d seriously consider changing to at least a 350W if I were you.Well, it\'s a mini-atx case, I have a spare 200w lying around but that\'s as high as those small power supplies get. And given what I\'ve seen people stuff into their 150w en 200w shuttles I think I should be safe. At least, I hope so. images/icons/wink.gif

JonFairhurst

07-08-2003, 10:07 AM

Here\'s some hard data on the noise level of the Seagate...

http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200210/20021014ST3120023A_6.html (\"http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200210/20021014ST3120023A_6.html\")

Simon Ravn

07-08-2003, 03:14 PM

Originally posted by Sovereign:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
I don\'t see any proofs of anything.Well then, I might as well say that your statement below isn\'t proof of anything either. images/icons/wink.gif

Bottom line is, I have used - and am still using - both Maxtor, the new WD drives, one of the new Maxtors - in the same casing. When I mentioned Maxtor being \"as bad\" as WD, I only mean noise-wise.And I am in precisely the same situation, having used Maxtor for the past three years and just recently switching to WD, this was a true blessing. The 800JBs I have are just not audible, I don\'t know what version you might have but I do know what I am hearing. images/icons/wink.gif When I have the drive power down in standby mode there\'s no audible difference, which to me was quite amazing.

<hr /></blockquote>\"Having used Maxtors for the past three years...\" - so... This must mean you have used the OLDER Maxtor models. How can you compare those to the new WD\'s? We are obviously talking about the new models of all brands here. Sure NEW WD\'s are not as noisy as OLD Maxtors. And odd - I don\'t see any mention of you using Seagates, so how do you know that what you perceive as \"silent\" wouldn\'t just be percepted as \"half silent\", compared to Seagates? As for \"my model\" of WD - I am pretty sure it\'s the same as yours. It\'s not like they make a new 80GB disk model a month. It\'s the \"Special Edition\" (8MB cache) you mentioned yourself. Same drives as you are using. Just different perceptions of noise levels, apparently....

Check those figures in Jon\'s link - they will also tell you that Seagates are by far the most quiet.

JonFairhurst

07-08-2003, 04:12 PM

Note the the graph shown in the link above is for noise at idle. The seek noise is also an issue for Giga.

I used to have an old 10,000 rpm 9 GB Seagate SCSI drive as my sample store. When I played a note it sounded like I turned on a blender full of bolts. I could hold the sustain pedal to find out exactly how long the samples were - the disk kept grinding after I could no longer hear the note :-)

I then replaced it with an 8 MB / 120 GB WD. It was way quieter, but the armature movement was still audible. More recently I traded it out, so my system is 100% Seagate. Much better. I strain to hear the thing seek, but all I hear from the computer is faint fan noise. (The Fortron/Verax supply is by far the loudest component in the system. ps_noise (\"http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20021021/powersupplies-08.html#noise_level_at_maximum_load\") )

MDesigner

07-08-2003, 05:41 PM

Change of plans for the motherboard. Some techies are very highly recommending the Epox 8RDA+ motherboard. They claim it\'s more solid than the ASUS one, and it has Firewire (not that I really need it). Any experiences with this board?

JonFairhurst

07-08-2003, 06:07 PM

I\'ve got A7V8X and A7N8X boards. Both have firewire. But I don\'t have any Epox experience. Is it also fan-free?

MDesigner

07-08-2003, 08:29 PM

The board I was first interested in was actually the A7N8X-X. Different from the A7N8X. (no Firewire)

Sovereign

07-09-2003, 01:41 AM

Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
\"Having used Maxtors for the past three years...\" - so... This must mean you have used the OLDER Maxtor models. How can you compare those to the new WD\'s?So the past three years do not include the past few months? images/icons/wink.gif I purchased my last Maxtor in January, it went bad within a week, I switched to WD.

We are obviously talking about the new models of all brands here. Sure NEW WD\'s are not as noisy as OLD Maxtors. And odd - I don\'t see any mention of you using SeagatesRead back a couple of posts, I wrote that Seagates are the quietest drives, that\'s not even a point of discussion!

As for \"my model\" of WD - I am pretty sure it\'s the same as yours. It\'s not like they make a new 80GB disk model a month.If you Google on usenet you\'ll see some posts from people buying WD drives, with one being noisy and the other not in identical systems. Could very well be production issues related to certain drive batches.

Check those figures in Jon\'s link - they will also tell you that Seagates are by far the most quiet. [/QB]Well, as I said, that was never a point of contention. images/icons/wink.gif They are slower in performance though.

Simon Ravn

07-09-2003, 02:21 AM

Sovereign - yes they are slower in performance - nothing you will ever notice in real world applications though...

JonFairhurst

07-09-2003, 08:16 AM

Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
Sovereign - yes they are slower in performance - nothing you will ever notice in real world applications though... Agreed. If you can get 160 sustained voices, that\'s all you need. Today.

It will be interesting to see what GS 3.0 is capable of. At that time we may all be buying Raptors. Or quiet SATA-VIII drives from Seagate. We\'ll see. I\'m not holding my breath, but Summer NAMM is just around the corner.

Simon Ravn

07-09-2003, 12:25 PM

I can\'t always get 160 sustained voices. Far from it on any of my GS machines with any HD... HD\'s are just too slow.

JonFairhurst

07-09-2003, 02:02 PM

Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
I can\'t always get 160 sustained voices. Far from it on any of my GS machines with any HD... HD\'s are just too slow. Really? I\'ve just got GS96, so I\'ve never been able to test up to 160. I\'ve used a 10K SCSI, a WD 120 and a Seagate 7000.7 120, and they all achieve 96. What have your HD ceilings been Simon?

rediesisminore

07-10-2003, 12:33 PM

Last week I\'ve finally made a jump from a Pentium 100Mhz (yes, 100 !!!) to a Pentium 4 2.6 GHz system. I\'ve bought one 160Gb Maxtor hard disk with 8Mb cache and it is NOISY. Period. In idle state you cannot hear it but on read or write access is MUCH more noisy that my old IBM SCSI2 external drive.

Two years ago I had built a system for a friend of mine with 2 IBM 60GXP HDs and they are virtually noiseless. Imagine my reaction when everything was up and running with my 2 years newer and noisier Maxtor HD.

Only today I\'ve read Simon\'s and other users\' comments about HDs noise and all I can say is that I totally agree, stay away from Maxtor (if noise is an issue - they perform very well otherwise).

Now I think I\'ll keep it as a system drive and buy 2 more Seagate HDs for audio. My question: should I use them in RAID-0 configuration? Should I go U-ATA or S-ATA?

Thanks,
Roberto Rega

Nick Batzdorf

07-12-2003, 09:27 PM

One of the two mistakes I made with my XP Giga machine was buying a motherboard with only two RAM slots instsead of three, so going to 2GB means using two 1GB sticks instead of 1 and 2X512.

The second mistake was ordering it with two 512MB sticks instead of two 1GB sticks. Right now I have 1.5GB installed, so one stick is going to waste; when I go to 2GB, the other one will be wasted as well.

Simon Ravn

07-13-2003, 02:49 AM

Originally posted by JonFairhurst:
<blockquote>quote:<hr />Originally posted by Simon Ravn:
I can\'t always get 160 sustained voices. Far from it on any of my GS machines with any HD... HD\'s are just too slow. Really? I\'ve just got GS96, so I\'ve never been able to test up to 160. I\'ve used a 10K SCSI, a WD 120 and a Seagate 7000.7 120, and they all achieve 96. What have your HD ceilings been Simon? <hr /></blockquote>I don\'t know if there\'s a specific ceiling. It depends on what samples I use. How many repetitions of the same shorter samples I play and such (since this can be cached in vcache). Sometimes I can get 160 voices, but with always changing, long sustained samples, it\'s usually closer to 120-140.