New Computer

[Spire]

Hi everyone. I'm building a new computer for university, and this is what I plan to get. I'm pretty ignorant of all things hardware related, and hope that those more knowledgeable than me are willing to verify whether or not my choices are good.

Here is what I'm thinking of buying:

• Asus P4P800 Deluxe motherboard (integrated gigabit NIC, and sound card)
  
• Pentium 4 2.8 w/ HT (stock fan)
  
• 2 * KingMax 512MB DDR400
  
• ATI Radeon 9800 (not the 256 meg one)
  
• 2 * Western Digital 36GB SATA 10k RPM hard drives (will be RAID 0)
  

I'm undecided on my case, power supply, monitor and whether or not I should buy a sound card. I probably won't overclock anything.

The main thing that I am wondering is whether there are any significant weak parts of the system, or parts that are too strong relative to the rest.
The computer will have to do quite a bit, between compiling for Gentoo (justifying the processor, and RAM), running games well (the Radeon), and making me cool (the SATA RAID).

Are all of these choices decent and well balanced, and will everything be supported by Linux by next year or so?


Thanks

[dberkholz]

Gigabit networking seems a bit overboard, since you'll probably be on 100Mb network, but it can't hurt to think for the future. Also I'd recommend a non-integrated sound card, you can get a cheaper one for $30 and you have the option to trade it out for something better later. I'm a big fan of Corsair RAM, but that's a personal preference. The amount/type of RAM and the video card look good.

And with the RAID 0, if one of your disks dies you lose everything. I'd recommend RAID 5 (3 drives) or 1+0 (4 drives) instead. 5 is a little lower performance, and 1+0 is the same performance as 0 but with backup mirroring. Here's a little page on the difference between 1+0 and 0+1: http://www.pcguide.com/ref/hdd/perf/raid/levels/multLevel01-c.html.

You'll probably want at least a 400W power supply. Check out this site, they have great motherboard/processor combos, pretested, in addition to tons of other stuff: http://www.monarchcomputer.com. I bought my computer there and would fully recommend it.

[niki]

For the SATA HDs be sure that there is Linux support for the controller. I got the SIL 3112 Chip and wasn't able to get the drive working in DMA mode. The drive works in PIO mode which is about 20x times slower the DMA. Search the forum for more about DMA/SATA!!!!
https://forums.gentoo.org/viewtopic.php?t=56931&highlight=3112

For the case i would choose a http://www.chieftec.com
They aren't cheap but I like to have a good case.

For the monitor i would recommend an EIZO LCD.

[Malakin]

That would make for a really fast system :)

You might want to read this though:
http://www.theinquirer.net/?article=10085

Looking over the specs it's true that they're using a 3com NIC, gigabit performance greatly suffers from this.
http://www.asus.com/prog/spec.asp?m=P4P800%20Deluxe&langs=01
The P4C800 also uses the 3com chip.

[dberkholz]

[Spire]

spyderous: Yeah, I'm a little worried about the monitor. It's going to be in a crappy university 'res' room, with a tiny desk so a decently sized CRT is out of the question, but the price and blurriness of LCDs is a problem too. I think I may just get a smaller high-end LCD monitor. Would capping the frame rate in games that support it help too?

Malakin: Hmm.. that's weird. The P4P has the ICH5R even though it is a cheaper board. I just might buy that new one though.. it's coming out right when I'm planning to actually buy this. What do you mean about the gigabit performance suffering? Is it because it's running on the PCI bus?

niki: Thanks for the warning. Apparently, support is planned, but searching here, it doesn't look like anyone has it working yet with this chipset. The best I have seen is with a chipset like yours, and without DMA
Maybe I'll just get IDE adapters, or keep my current hard drive for a little longer or something. That would have been terrible if it had ended up not working. Thanks again.

Sorry I didn't put quotes or anything. It seemed like I would be pasting your entire posts for the most part.

[dberkholz]