Hardware What Hardware Should I Buy? - Feb 2009

Any good alternatives to the Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L? Looks a good board, almost exactly what I need, just the chipset's 4gig memory limitation puts me off a bit. I like VM's and need quite a few mem hungry apps open.

 

How would the ATI HD 4830 Compare to my XFX 7600GT?

 

Radeon 4830 or GeForce 9800GT packs a lot more firepower than GF7600. My brother has 7600GT and it's barely enough to run games at 1280×1024. 4830 should handle them perfectly at that resolution unless it's limited by CPU.

 

It'd quite frankly destroy it

 

According to the Graphics Card Hierarchy Chart at Tom's Hardware, the ATI 4830 is 10 tiers above the nVidia 7600 GT: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/best-graphics-card,2118-7.html

 

Hey all.

I'd like to ask if BeQuiet has made a dramatic change in their quality in the recent past? At least it has done well in tests here at Bit-Tech.

I'm asking this because I work in a computer store and assemble about 5 computers a day and frankly, BeQuiet would be the dead last PSU I'd pick up for myself. Well maybe second to last, since most Xilence branded PSUs seem to be dead in the water, so BeQuiet would go before them

And to further explain myself, BeQuiet seems to work quite well when new and it's quite good looking and well thought package all in all. Well at least the modular ones are, not too fond of the non-modular design with their ridiculously long wires, which are a PITA to hide in a case since usually you don't need most of them.

So the problems are rare when the unit is new, but BeQuiet seems to hold the questionable number one place in our guarantee department. Of all the PSUs we sell, they break the most. We send about three big boxes full of broken BeQuiet units a month back to the factory.

This is not to bash on BeQuiet, since I know that they were a good PSU manufacturer once and I believe that they can make good quality PSUs, but damn, that's a lot of broken units and the trust is long gone at least for me.

How do you guys feel about this. Also a comment from the Bit-Tech staff could be nice to hear.

Darkened

 

Onboard sound? Ewwweee....

But thanks for the guide, I've adjusted some of my planned parts due to your recommendations. As always, appreciate it.

 

Bit-Tech Staff:

Under normal circumstances, I find your articles are typically informative, entertaining, and very thoughtful in their overall analysis. However, after finishing this article, as an American reader I do wonder: What's up with your US pricing/availability?

The first curious item I found was the Gigabyte P31 board mentioned no US availability. I found it on PC Connection (a distributor linked to a few times in your article) for $83.64:

http://www.pcconnection.com/IPA/Sho...541&oext=1038A&ci_src=14110944&ci_sku=8813541

When I read the high-end hardware list, I noticed something else. While I'm quite aware Be Quiet! is not available in North America, the suggested BFG Tech power supply isn't available either, not even straight from the company. Most well-known North American distributors such as NewEgg or ZipZoomFly stopped carrying it, and PCSuperDeals, the company link included in the article, isn't what I would consider a reputable source for product pricing/availability.

The graphic card citation is rather inconsistent, as well. Your article cites $279 for the XFX GeForce GTX260. The link out is for the Black Edition from TigerDirect. The Scan.co.uk link leads to the stock-clocked 216-core model. That same stock XFX model sells for $245 in the US. The article also recommends the PowerColor Radeon HD 4870 X2, but the US link out goes to the Sapphire model on shopping.bit-tech.net, and the article cites pricing from there. In either case, the pricing is off no matter which brand you go with as the HD 4870 X2 is $429 from either at places like NewEgg.

Speaking of shopping.bit-tech.net, I noticed a lot of the pricing inside the article is based off of the 'Featured Merchant', and not the 'best price' listed. For example: The article lists Core i7 920 at $303 including shipping from TigerDirect when lowest price listed on engine is $289 with free shipping from Amazon (though none of the Amazon.com links work). Then again, there are a good number of companies that have the i7 920 for as much if not cheaper that most Americans would buy from first before even thinking of going to Amazon.

Can someone explain what's going on?

 

Great guide as per normall

Just one question, you mention that it may be a good idea to run raid 1 with two of the 1tb drives. Is raid 1 easy to setup, as I have had a hard-drive die on me before, and don't want to lose of my data again, the problem is I have next to no experince with building a pc. For example would I need to setup raid one when I first format the harddrives and build the machine, or could I put the second drive in latter and copy the data over?

 

Generally, it's just best to not bother with the shopping links on here, unless they link directly. Either they go to wrong product, or the wrong price, or don't exist. Just search around your biggest etailers. Newegg and TigerDirect are fairly good for components price wise.

It's better to buy from one place only anyway, since the extra cost of shipping from several different places negates any real saving one place might have over another.

 

Prices change on, quite literally daily basis, to the point that within a few hours of publishing the article it's out of date, what with products changing price, or just being de-listed. Prices change in our shopping engine too - when we write the article we reference the cheapest one, but often that price will change. Sadly there's nothing we can do about it really, not unless we implement a very complex live pricing system - we just can't have guaranteed up to date pricing.

In response to your queries about American availability, we looked around but could not find the featured Gigabyte p31 board in stock ANYWHERE in the USA. Even the link you provided says "call for availability" -aka out of stock. Faced with no stock available we chose to simply leave it as Not Available and find an alternative when we overhaul the buyers guide next month.

In regards to the Radeon 4870X2, we've linked to pretty much the cheapest card we could find - in the Uk that's a powercolour, in the USA it's a Sapphire, and our best coverage of the card is from our review of the Sapphire. I know it's a bit of a mish-mash but as all ATI board partners offer similar warranties, and the pricing and consensus of the stock card are the same, I'm not sure what the problem is, other than than inciting pedant-rage.

We'll be overhauling the buyers guide next month to include more up to date USA choices - it seems this month quite a few of our listed products hve quickly vanished stateside. A shame, but be assured we're rectify this issue for the March edition.

 

I think a good alternative to the P31 board is the EP45-DS3L, which is by far one of my more favored boards..

The EP43-DS3L isn't too bad either, and I'm sure both of those have at least a 8GB RAM limit.

 

Any idea of anywhere that may be selling one at this price?

 

We checked both and both were too expensive for our budget build. They offer more SATA ports etc than the P31, but for a very inexpensive PC we can't imagine people wanting to spend money on tens of HDDs.

 

In the affordable hardware price list, the Win Vista Home Premium was ~85 pounds. A quick search on ebay and I found some for 66 pounds. http://shop.ebay.co.uk/items/_W0QQ_...Q20homeQ20premiumQQ_armrsZ1QQ_fromZR40QQ_mdoZ
Maybe you need to change the link?

Hopefully this What hardware should I buy guide comes out each month as it saves me time to search components by myself

 

When it comes to ebay software, caveat emptor...

 

My question is: with EP31-DS3L, can we stick a 2 Go DDR2 in the slot RAM or not cause seem it's only accept 1 Go per slot?
Am I right?
I want buy the kit 4 Go: 2x2Go DDR2 8500 but I fear if the motherboard only accept not more than 1 Go per slot.
Someone can confirme if I am right or I am wrong?
Thank.