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Shude

Hardcore MB Enthusiast
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I have had some problems with my pc for the last few weeks, and yesterday it died forever. I thought it was the power supply but I swapped that for another one and it still won't power up; I'm guessing I've either fried the board (ASUS P2B-F) or something is shorting the board so it won't power on.

I had been holding off for a while but now I really do need to get some new PC bits!

This is what I have planned, can anyone see anything wrong or make any comments?

Coolermaster ATC-500 (No PSU)
ATX Ultra-Quiet PSU 300W AMD Approved
Asus P4G8X "Granite Bay" (Socket 478) Motherboard
Silent Motherboard Heatsink NB32J
Intel Celeron 1.8GHz Retail boxed (Socket 478)
Pentium 4 S478 Flower Cooler CNPS6500B-ALCU
Corsair 512MB DDR XMS2700 TwinX (2x256MB) Platinum CAS2
Leadtek Winfast A280 TD MyVIVO GeForce4 Ti4800 128MB DDR TV-Out DVI (AGP)
Silent Video Card Heatsink ZM17-CU
Ultra-Quiet 92mm Case Fan, 3 pin connector
Seagate Barracuda ATA IV 80.0GB UDMA100

I already have a 15" TFT and keyboard/mouse etc.

The processor is basically just the barest minimum one I could find to work on that board etc until the 3ghz hyperthreaded one comes down to a less hilarious price, and the other hardware should more than make up for it's shortcomings for the time being.
 
I would personally only use IBM HDD's.

Experience and preference.
 
We have a batch of brand new Compaq Evo PC's:

- P4 1.8Ghz
- 256 MB RAM
- 20GB HDD
- CD ROM
- 100MBit LAN card
- 32MB Graphics
- On board Sound
- No OS

£280

We only have 55 left :)
 
Sorry to hear your problems with the old pc.
I have just built a new one. Can recommend the Lian Lu cases bought a mini one £60 really nice PC050 I think.

Regards
Ian
 
Originally posted by GrahamC230K
I would personally only use IBM HDD's.

Experience and preference.

I have 3 IBM HDs in my current (broken) PC. One is a 20gig and two of them are 8s. They are too noisey and I think the 20gig drive has developed a fault (started "finding" bad clusters for no readily apparent reason, I believe this is why they are sometimes known as the "deathstar" rather than the deskstar! ) . The Seagate Barracuda IV has fluid bearings and is silent, it's also quite quick :D I would previously have only used IBMs but I fancy a change.
 
Ive had 5 Deathstars all died and returns

The Seagate Barracuda IV 0wnz jo0!! I have 3 of them!
 
Originally posted by rirhill
Sorry to hear your problems with the old pc.
I have just built a new one. Can recommend the Lian Lu cases bought a mini one £60 really nice PC050 I think.

Lian Li make some nice looking cases. I have always wanted a coolermaster and now they make one that stands a chance of fitting on my desk I'm buying one!

Lian Li do a drive cooler with an avantgarde grill! :D

rh-600.jpg


The trouble with mini cases is I will struggle to get all my stuff in there - I won't have a fan on the cpu but a massive heatsink, I will be using two SCSI cdrom drives and I will have a LOT of cables in there (that reminds me...I need to order some rounded ones! ) . Mini cases are always fractionally too small for my liking, that's why I thought the coolermaster one would do (also the exact same size as my old case, which fits in the gap perfectly) .

EDIT:

OMG rounded cables are expensive!

http://www.kustompcs.co.uk/product.php?subcat=8

Anyone know of a cheap place to get them or should I start hacking away at the old ones with my craft knife?
 
IBM HD's were so unreliable that they had to reduce the 3 year warranty down to one.

This was still a loss leader to IBM so now they no-longer make Hard Drives at all.:eek:

All IBM HD's are now made by Hitachi ;)

As for the Celeron processor, I dont know how you can justify going celeron given that the price difference is so slim. Personally, I swear by AMD but I am increasingly impressed by the new P4's.

Maff: How come you got so many Evo's?? I am evaluating the Notebook Evo range at the moment, what do you make of Compaq's range and more importantly what is their support like?
 
Last edited:
Originally posted by Sp!ke
As for the Celeron processor, I dont know how you can justify going celeron given that the price difference is so slim. Personally, I swear by AMD but I am increasingly impressed by the new P4's.

That board I have chosen is optimised for the P4 3ghz hyperthreading processors, as soon as they come down from about £450 I will buy one, right now I have chosen one of the cheapest processors that will work with that board :)
 
Originally posted by Sp!ke

Maff: How come you got so many Evo's?? I am evaluating the Notebook Evo range at the moment, what do you make of Compaq's range and more importantly what is their support like?

We use them as mini servers. They perform well, and have a small footprint so fit in the data centre quite good. They also have 100Mbit NIC on board, and work great with Linux.

Our supplier buys in 600 at a time, and we take a chunk for the server business. Must admit never really liased with their support, however their website is useful and gives us what we need.
 
Yeah, we can do - at the price I mentioned above.
Plus shipping costs.

Don't know too much more about them, however have a look at compaq's website under P4 Evo desktop SFF (small form factor). They are great little machines. :)
 
Originally posted by Maff
Yeah, we can do - at the price I mentioned above.
Plus shipping costs.

Don't know too much more about them, however have a look at compaq's website under P4 Evo desktop SFF (small form factor). They are great little machines. :)


Apart from the one in our company that caught fire :(
 
Maff

Whats the warranty like on these machines i may be interested in a few?

Tan
 
One year return to base as far as I know.

CDRW is + £15 BTW.
 
Maff, there's loads of EVO's, Cant find SFF anywhere, My boss wants to buy one of you....
 
Yes, they are the D510's. We don't usualy sell them, however i'm willing to send some the way of MB Club members if they are interested. We can always get another batch in, so numbers aren't a problem.

These are base units only, no keyboard, mouse, monitor.
I'll try and get some more details when I get back tonight.
 
I buy the D510s for my outfit. It's good kit. We've had no problems with them at all. And it's genuine Compaq clobber, unlike the D310s, which are re-badged HPs.

Matt, how would we go about purchasing one or several from you?

Cheers, Jukie.
 
Guys, I have just moved (last week) from a tower unit to an SFF shuttle pc. Here are some pics to give you an idea of size.

dcp_0354.jpg


dcp_0355.jpg


dcp_0356.jpg


It's about 20cm wide x 23cm deep x 18cm high.

Spec, P4 2.4 northbridge, 256mb pc2700 ram, 2 x 40gb drives, Ricoh DVD/CD writer, MSI NVidia 9200 garphics card and an ADSL modem. Cooling via 1 80mm case fan keeping system temp in the 40's.

Not bad for such a small unit.

Cheers.
 

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