Legit Reviews

I am considering building a new PC to replace my current P4 2.8 Prescott running on an Asus P4P800 SE, 1 MB Value Ram, ATI 9200 and 550 MB storage.

Heaviest use: Mostly video editing (pastime), office work, some gaming and video playback.

Needs: fast and economical rendering speeds, video, titles and effects computing.
USB 2.0 x 6, Firewire, GBit Lan, OnBoard Audio, PCIe video, Vista ready,


Considering: Core 2 Duo 6400 or 6600, 7900 GS card, 2 GB Ram CAS 4

Which motherboard (Asus or other) do you recommend ?

Budget?
Overclocking?


Welcome and happy holidays btw!

little overclocking (5 to 10% max), I find it interferes with video quality or DVD burning quality (chapter or scene jumps, bad menu rendering).

I would like to limit myself to US$1200 (CDN$1500) all taxes in.

Not interested in double video cards...

Rocha wrote:little overclocking (5 to 10% max), I find it interferes with video quality or DVD burning quality (chapter or scene jumps, bad menu rendering).

I would like to limit myself to US$1200 (CDN$1500) all taxes in.

Not interested in double video cards...

only if your overclock is not stable will that happen.

Do you need Monitor keyboard, mouse, OS

OS only

ÃŒf your going to get a E6300 or E6400, I would recommend a P965 chipset board like the Asus P5B or the Gigabyte boards.
The lower end Intel chips have a lower multiplier, so you'll need a high FSB to get the most from the chip when overclocking.

If your getting a E6600 or higher, then a 975 chipset board will do fine.......The Asus P5W DH Deluxe is a great board.

My Recommendations are:
Asus P5W DH Deluxe = 975 chipset, it's expensive, but you get what you pay for

Asus P5B-E = 965 Chipset, alot cheaper, can overclock very well, but has less onboard features

Asus P5B-E Deluxe = Same as above, but has more onboard features (wifi etc)

Gigabyte GA-965P-S3 = 965 Chipset again, this is the best overclocking board out there, for people on a budget!
There's more (highend) Gigabyte boards out there, like the "DS4 & DQ6" series, but if I was spending that money, I'd go for one of the above Asus boards.

Heads up.
Intel will be releasing new CPU's soon with support for 1333MHz FSB.
Currently only the Nvidia based boards support it (officially)
There will be a new revision of motherboards coming soon to add support for 1333MHz, it might be worth waiting a month or so.......also the new Nvidia boards are alot better for memory overclcoking than Intel based boards.......but currently there's bios issues with them.........again it might be worth waiting a while to see if those problems get fixed. Ohh and ATI will have their RD600 chipset out very soon......the DFI LANParty UT ICFX3200-T2R.

I'm going to be switching to a C2D setup soon, but I'm going to wait till mid Feb.........I/we should have a better choice then.

Thank you very much for all this good info. I am also looking all over the internet and saw the new chip info you are referring to.

The 6320 and 6420 (double cache size) coming out Q2 seem interesting. And lower prices to boot. So yes, I may choose to wait a few months. I am glad you mentionned the Gigabyte board. I was looking at that one and the MSI 965.

One additional question though. On any of these board configurations with the X3000 graphics intergrated, do you think they are worthwhile considering at all. Isn't most of the work I am doing addressed by the CPU anyway ?

While I am at it is the Antec Sonata II a good case/power supply combo for the components I am looking at ?

Your best of staying away from integrated GFX. Even if your not into gaming. Onboard GFX will use your system RAM, even when in 2D, this increases latencies......therefore lowering performance. Also a cheap PCIe GFX card will "feel" better when in use..........onboard gfx tends to "stutter" when scrolling through web pages etc.

Get an ATI X300 PCIe card, nuthin' special, they only cost ~$50 or less.
The gfx card won't help with video encoding much. ATI has what's called "AVIVO", this allows you to convert into MPEG using the GFX card GPU, but it doesn't give you as much control as something like Adobe Premier etc.

The Antec Sonata is a nice case, they are quiet too. I think Apop used to use one too. The problem is the power supply that comes with it, it is a quality PSU, but it might not be powerfull enough......

450W (what comes with the Sonata) should do fine, but I presume your going to have more than one HDD since your going to be working with video files.
It will proly work perfectly fine for a while, but I'd upgrade it in ~6mths from now, when you start adding more components.

Thanks again for your suggestions.

Say I choose the ATI X300 card, that would save me a bundle. What case and power supply combo would you then recommend?

PS The video editing software I use, with very good results so far, is Video Studio from Ulead, v 9. It's bulky on the OS and RAM and it will crash sometimes. I attribute this to my P4 2.8 overheating. I am now running my current unit with the case open when I am encoding.

Rocha wrote:Thanks again for your suggestions.

Say I choose the ATI X300 card, that would save me a bundle. What case and power supply combo would you then recommend?

PS The video editing software I use, with very good results so far, is Video Studio from Ulead, v 9. It's bulky on the OS and RAM and it will crash sometimes. I attribute this to my P4 2.8 overheating. I am now running my current unit with the case open when I am encoding.

The Sonata case with the 450W PSU should be fine! That case is quiet too, so you can leave your rig encoding overnight with little to no disturbance
It's just later on that you might need an upgrade, after you add more HDD's or if you decide to upgrade the gfx card.

I've used Ulead too, but I also found it bloated and prone to crashing.......usually after I have created multiple chapters etc and of course forgot to save

I use Pinnalce studio (over the top), TmpgEnc DVD Author (doesn't work with xvid), virtualDub (damn good) and a bunch of others..........Nero has now become my mainstay. It's easy to use and gets good results!

Being a PSU man, I would recommend getting a case without a PSU and then getting a seperate PSU.

From my Sticky on PSUS

Brands to Look at When Money is Tight

These are PSUs that can be found for 50-100$ from 300W to 500W.

Antec
Fortron
Sparkle
Enermax