The last peecee I bought was in 1997 or so. Since then, I haven't really kept up with stuff too well. As such, I need some help deciphering all the technology so I know what I should get.

I prefer to get pieces and parts because I'm built that way and, in this case, it also facilitates me retiring my current one to my wife in a much less costly manner than would otherwise happen. (At least that's what I've convinced myself of.)

What I need to figure out is what sorts of stuff to buy. I think I'm okay with peripherals (video card, hard drives, etc.), but I'm at a loss on CPUs and motherboards.

So, I've heard that while AMD processors feel as if they're running as fast as Intel processors of the same ``number'', that if you're doing real number crunching, the Intels are faster. If that's true, then I definitely want to go with Intel. Not to mention the very bad experiences I've had with non-Intel chipsets. Feel free to tell me that my experiences are currently invalid.

Also, while researching it just now, I notice that Intel has out a 3.0GHz CPU priced much higher than their 3.06GHz CPU. The big difference I notice is that the 3.0 CPU has an 800MHz bus, whereas the 3.06'er has a 533MHz bus. What sort of real-world difference will this make (especially given that 60MHz at these speeds is bound to be irrelevant)? And what bus is being referred to? A memory bus?

Who makes good motherboards these days? I think that I can understand all the different features they provide, but I want something super stable. I am totally uninterested in overclocking. My current motherboard is a Tyan, with which I have had zero stability issues, but they do tend to be pricy. I should point out that my criteria for stability are expansive. It ranges from the general ``don't crash for no reason'' stuff to making sure that IDE devices function properly (no need to disable DMA -- a problem I've run into before), etc., etc.

And I need to have an understanding of memory types, I suppose.

Any other relevant information would be super, too. It continues to amaze me that this sort of information is so hard to find. Thanks to anyone who can summarize for me.

I'm not looking for someone to pick something out for me. I just need to be informed as to what the different options mean, plus a little advice on product quality.

Oh, and games is not really a huge concern if that makes much difference. I'll probably play some, but that's not really what I'm looking towards.

Do you have a preference for form factor? I've always built towers (full or mid). My latest two systems however are Small Form Factor. And I don't have any plans to go back to a tower for a personal/workstation system any time soon.

Motherboards: have always been fond of ASUS. Never had any problems. Have done Intel as well as AMD Athlon.

Memory: Buy what you can afford and what your mobo will use. Underspecing your memory is going to cost you the performance you may be paying a premium for with your mobo and processor. For instance, hyperthreading CPUs with 533 or 800MHz front side bus.

Someone in another forum I sometimes read posted a link to a decent PC building FAQ. If I can find it I'll update in here.

How many plexi windows do you want in your case and how much are you willing to pay for neon, glowing fans and VFD or LCD?

Save yourself some cash and buy one model down from the top CPU model from whichever manufacturer. Also keep in mind that people will recommend slightly different components depending on whether you intend to run Windows or Linux. That may be worth considering. But as long as you choose ATI for graphics I'll back you on anything else you decide.

Current mobos have so much integrated that you'll likely not be looking at component based NIC, firewire, USB 2 nor perhaps audio. From personal experience, pass on a floppy drive and go treat yourself to a few milkshakes or something.

My 2 cents. I'm waiting till I get settled at my new place before picking up CPU and memory for my "other" Shuttle system currently living under my coffee table as a shelf.

Bruno

Ditto on the built-in components. I've got dual network ports on my mobo, letting me be connected to my network and hook up my empeg at the same time. Quite nice.

Like I said, I've got the peripherals down. And a case isn't an issue, as I'm going to be using the one I've already got and taking the current stuff out of it to later be used in another case for my wife (but I need to get an LCD monitor for her for space reasons and I don't have the scratch for that right now).

All I really need is advice on what processor, motherboard, and memory to use. And I'm not looking for a ``go get this one''. I want to vaguely understand the issues so that I can come to a reasonable conclusion on my own. It's just that I'm so out of touch that I don't know quite where to start.

As far as your Asus suggestion, I'd have agreed a while back, but a friend of mine had a lot of problems with two different Asus motherboards he got. One required him to solder a jumper wire onto the motherboard because they implemented AGP incorrectly. Another had real weird memory issues. I don't know if he ever got to the bottom of that -- it may have turned out not to be a motherboard problem. One or the other of those also had that can't use DMA thing I mentioned above.

Now, I don't have a problem with Asus, but (after I make a determination as to what specs I want) I'd rather have a specific model suggestion with real-world experience than a brandname liking. I've just come to the conclusion that brands aren't that consistent any more.

Also, I've plotted some price per GHz charts, and while the knee in the curve is not as significant as I was expecting (except the second one for the fastest AMD processors), it's well before the next-to-fastest CPU. As shallow as the curve is, I'll probably be taking final price into consideration more than the price to performance ratio.

If you are going with an AMD chip, I would have to advise you not to go anywhere near a mobo using the nForce2 chipset. Personally, I have had nothing but problems with the couple nForce2 boards I had the displeasure of working on. I would have to say the VIA KT400a chipset is the most stable, modern chipset for AMD.

I am not really a big fan of VIA (some problems with early K7 chipsets), but I own a VIA VPSD mobo for my Pentium 4. I must say, it is the best board I have ever owned. Never EVER has it given me crap and it's fast as hell. This is my board. I've had it for about 4 months now. Excellent.

Of course, as with many things, I have had the opposite experience. My nForce board has performed beautifully, whereas my VIA board was a pile of steaming dung.

I was thinking, though. Hasn't AMD released their final Athlon processor? And will the P4s be stopping? I just wonder if Bitt would like to wait for the next lineup, or get the current technology at a cheaper price...

So I suppose that would also be a useful question. What level are you looking to upgrade to? What are you upgrading from?

Really, nothing has changed much in the past five years about building a PC. What I mean to say is that the parts available to you have not grown exponentially. You're not going to be shopping for any old stock. Of the new parts, you're going to choose whether you want to run Intel or AMD. Then you can start looking at which motherboard based on your CPU brand (motherboard choice will definitely involve evaluating the chipset used, be it VIA, SIS, Intel, NVIDIA, whatever).

Make a decision as to whether you'd like to restrict yourself to a 533 MHz FSB or whether you want to plan ahead for your future CPU suporting 800MHz. It may not be worth it to look this far ahead for mobo only, so let that information guide you.

Hyperthreading and the newer and faster FSB are likely to be what you'll want to investigate as a "premium" factor. Memory will be chosen to complement the CPU and mobo (the faster the better, single DIMM better than two for non dual-channel systems, brand not usually a critical difference except when trying to squeeze the last ounce of performance - amount if up to you, I wouldn't go with anything less than 512MB at today's prices and usage requirements)

Price was a concern for me so I picked up a 1.7GHz P4 and some PC2700 memory late last year. I paid a premium for the Shuttle system, but I ended up not breaking the bank and with a level of performance I'm hapy with for this machine's intended purpose (it's my living room/TV PC).

Once you've decided on a few of the choices above, take a look a round-ups of some current motherboards one a couple of the review sites. As well as some practical tests comparing different CPU's within a similar configuration.

The latest mobo's I've heard good things about: MSI and AOPEN (can't recall specific models). YMMV of course.

Oh, but put in any component starting with NV-anything and you'll throw any performance advantages out the window. Have I stressed that enough?

Bruno

How here is my 2 pence worth

If you in't bought a PeeCee for about 5 years you are not going to need something screamingly fast as far as i can tell most tasks apart from game playing runs just fine on a 1Ghz machine.

Up until just recently my fastest machine was trundling along at a mighty 400Mhz the new PC is a screamer at 2.4Ghz and how much faster is it at most of the stuff i do. Honest answer not very much, it goes no faster online, it takes pictures off my camera no faster it prints no faster it talks to the empeg no faster, but everyone things faster is better. well the jury is still out as i have yet to do anything real heavy on it like ripping etc.

So i would be tempted to go for a quality pc of real good bits instead of a screamer.

If that's true, then I definitely want to go with Intel. Not to mention the very bad experiences I've had with non-Intel chipsets. Feel free to tell me that my experiences are currently invalid.

I think these days you can get lucky with VIA kit or with Nvidia kit, but IMO stability still equals Intel chipset on Intel motherboard. (Plus branded RAM and branded PSU.)

Also, while researching it just now, I notice that Intel has out a 3.0GHz CPU priced much higher than their 3.06GHz CPU. The big difference I notice is that the 3.0 CPU has an 800MHz bus, whereas the 3.06'er has a 533MHz bus. What sort of real-world difference will this make (especially given that 60MHz at these speeds is bound to be irrelevant)? And what bus is being referred to? A memory bus?

It's the bus between the CPU itself and the "North Bridge" chip -- the memory, PCI and AGP controller. This means that all memory and PCI accesses (except direct PCI-to-RAM DMA) go over this bus. So you need to worry about 533 vs 800 if you've got a fast memory subsystem (e.g. dual channel DDR400) and intend to use it hard (i.e. intend often to have a working set larger than the CPU's cache).

In other words, the difference between 533 and 800 is very unlikely to affect you. For almost all usage patterns the extra money would be better spent on more RAM or a faster winchester.

I guess the latest 800-capable motherboards will be newer than the 533 ones, and maybe have more modern features such as Firewire or SATA -- but I think all the 800-capable motherboards can run at 533 too.

Peter

This website was extremely useful to me for selecting the correct mobo, processor and memory to work together (although I bought from newegg instead).

http://www.motherboards.com/catalog/ccc.php?PHPSESSID=9455388c4a49f3969fc20e5cba8742f3

Click "Start" and the "Custom Combo Creator" will step you through the process.

I went with the Gigabyte 8KNXP Ultra, the 3.0GHZ Intel Processor and a gig of the corsair ram (bad choice on the ram; it was DOA).

It's just that I'm so out of touch that I don't know quite where to start.

Well, in *that* case, let me help you by telling you about the *wonderful* 8086 I have for sale!

Seriously, I kicked around some of the same issues recently, and my decision was mostly economy-driven. I wanted as many integrated IO/Bus elements as I could get (to make room in PCI slots and to have 2 separate sound cards) but didn't want to spend a bundle. I would have liked integrated 1394 (doubly so since my Adaptec Duoconnect seems to be dying on me) and I decided I'd try an Athlon (for the first time).

I had good experiences with Asus in the past. For some small reason that escapes me, though, I bought a Shuttle mobo, a KT333 chipset-based AK38N. I did not get either Asus' or Shuttle's more bleeding-edge Athlon mobo based on the KT400 chipset because it looks like Linux support for many of the features just ain't fully cooked yet, and Linux is now what I am running 95% of the time.

I *was* also tempted by the SATA RAID on some of the KT400 boards, but I already had a 3Ware controller I could recycle. The Shuttle has been great so far (sample size = 1). I bought the mobo, a "sweet spot" Athlon (1700?) and a 512MB stick of PC2100 RAM for under $200 from KnowledgeMicro.

I can't say much about one motherboard vendor versus another, although I would like to take a moment to gripe about generic PC parts. A few years ago, I built some then-screaming 1.3GHz AMD Athlon PCs using Gigabyte motherboards with the AMD chipset. Then they started going flakey. Turns out the chipset fan was a piece of crud and got itself stuck on occasion. Also, turns out the ECC RAM I bought refused to run at full speed without occasionally having errors. And, they were mind-numbingly loud. Those PCs are now downclocked to 1GHz and running in the lab.

Our new desktop PCs are Dells. They're whisper quiet and they just work. The fan's only go into high gear when the CPU is slammed.

If you insist on rolling your own, I'd probably recommend going the Intel route, and make sure you get one of the newer Hyperthreading CPUs. When you're running EAC or grip to import your music, you can have it run two copies of lame at once, and you should get noticable improvements in encoding throughput. Also, you might want to put serious effort into noise issues. The difference between a quiet PC and a generic PC can be stunning.

Personally, if I was doing a from-scratch PC myself, I'd get a Shuttle XPC. They're pricier than generic PCs, but they have a nifty and quiet cooling solution, and they've got all the ports you could ever want on board. All you need to add is a graphics card, hard disk, cd-rom, and memory. You can get finished systems at GamePC, or just play with their online configurator.

The last peecee I bought was in 1997 or so...but I want something super stable. I am totally uninterested in overclocking.

I'm going to echo the economy suggestions. Firstly, living at the bleeding edge is expensive, and secondly, it means you get to alpha/beta test all those new bioses and drivers. Since you've done ok with a '97 PC (~200MHZ??) for so long, I guess that don't have excessive processing power needs.

I'd be tempted to look into the 2-2.5GHz range. Tried and tested, and probably around the best bang for the buck.

Dual 333MHz, with the second added several years after the fact.

I had ``decided'' on a 2.6GHz, I think. I charted price per Hz vs. Hz and that seemed to be the sweetest spot.

For stability issues, get an INtel CPU on an Intel chipset. Even better, get an Intel CPU on an Intel motherboard. Those motherboards have improved tremendously over the last few years. There was a time when I wouldn't even consider touching one of those motherboards, but now they're practically my number one choice. The only reason why I'm not using an Intel board now is because they lack the overclocking abilities I want because I'm using a watercooled setup. (something you've said doesn't interest you)

If I wasn't using that watercooling rig, I'd change back to an Intel board in a heartbeat. The board I used before the one I'm using now (an Aopen - also a very stable board) was an Intel and it was hands down THE BEST board I've ever used. Rock-stable and with all the necessary integrated peripherals. Alll the bells and whistles you could ask for (including 1394 which is kinda strange since intel opted to not implement that into their chipset) are now included on those motherboads.
The best bang for the buck are the i865 Springdale motherboads right now (and for some time to come).

I would also like to add that I'm not that big a fan of Asus motherboards. I've used them a few times with varying results. Sometimes very stable, other times nothing but throuble and instability. (I also had that issue where I had to solder that jumper wire onto the motherboad). Abit is even worse. The best motherboards that I've used that aren't Intel motherboards are Aopen. I've used 6 different models of them myself up till now (all intel chipsets), built hundreds of systems based on their motherboards for other people and have never encoutered any problem.

For CPU, get an Intel 2.6 or 2.8Ghz, but make sure it's a Hyperthreading CPU. Those run on 800Mhz and don't cost that much more than the "older" models.

For RAM, make sure to get DDRAM-400 memory from a good brand like Corsair or Infineon. Don't bother with ECC Ram's : the i865 doesn't support them. (in fact that's practically the only difference between the i865 and it's much pricier bigger brother the i875). Remember that with an 800Mhz bus CPU, you'll need to install your sticks of DDR-400 RAM in pairs again to be able to use them to their fullest potential !! (just like we had to do with Simm's with the Pentium 1's)

I'm an AMD guy, but I've always liked the underdog. It's true that an Athlon 2600 is running fewer Gigahertz than an Intel 2.6, but I will say that every benchmark I've seen says that they are the same. It will pull up programs, code MP3's, zip files, everything just as fast, and cost about half the price to buy. I think that you're right there at about 2600 too, the AMD is about $100 there, and the others start to ramp up pretty quickly. I like the new Barton cores as well, faster FSB and less heat produced than the older T-breds.

I also like the VIA KT400 chipset, mine works fine and cost less than any comparable nForce board. On brands, my best luck has been with MSI and Gigabyte, and I've had nothing but trouble from Abit. Gigabyte's my favorite - great support on things like BIOS updates, etc. (you can even do it over the web if you can believe it). I have a 7A-VXP with RAID 0 & 1 built in (which I just use as IDE channels 3 & 4 so I can have up to 8 "things installed", it's got built-in firewire, USB 2.0, Ethernet, 5.1 sound with optical ouput, etc. and was only about $100.

For RAM, if you go with AMD - any chips running their 266 only need PC2100 RAM (both run at a 133 multiplier), anything faster ont he RAM will just be dumbed down to the slower speed to match the chip. If you get a 333 Barton core, you would need PC2700 RAM (both at 166), and the new new XP3200 runs at 400 (needing PC3200). Where I'm going is - just don't get any faster than you need. Corsair, Crucial, and the Kingston Hyper-X line are all good names, and I've had great luck with Buffalo and Dane-Elec too. It seems to be less about the name on the RAM, and more about the chips used on the stick itself.

Wow. I didn't even consider an Intel mobo, since they used to be way overpriced and way underfeatured. But they are the same price as many others now with just as many features. Thanks for the heads up on that one.

No problem ! And yeah, compared to Asus boards they're actually even "cheap" now.
And since your #1 requirement is stability, I don't think you'll find anything more stable than an Intel CPU on an Intel chipset on an Intel mobo.

you can always read up on the technology at Tom's Hardware. Regardless of what you think of their biases are, they at least do a good job of explaining some of the technology and what it means to the end user in terms of performance.

I've found that Tom's does a poor job of actually organizing that information and keeping it up to date, though. So I end up searching around for chipset information (for example) and when I finally find it, it's six months out of date with no updates.

I agree. For that reason I've always liked Anandtech better.