Buyer's Guide - Entry Level to Mid-Range, March 2005
by Jarred Walton on March 15, 2005 1:30 PM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Hard Drives
With native SATA support provided by the chipset on all of the recommended motherboards, it only makes sense to go with a SATA hard drive. The difference in performance is generally negligible, but noise levels and storage capacities still vary. We're basically looking for a quiet drive with as much capacity as we can find without going over $75. 80GB models are the sweet spot these days, with 40GB models generally costing only a few dollars less and having higher noise levels.
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Price: $59 shipped
The Hitachi drives aren't the quietest hard drives around, particularly in terms of seek noise levels. Ball-bearing noise is not a problem, thankfully, as fluid dynamic bearings are used. With a price that's $15 lower than the competition, we're going to give the Hitachi the nod as the basic recommendation. If you want the longer warranty of a Seagate as well as a lower seek volume, the price will go up to $75 with shipping - still not bad at all, considering. Samsung 80GB drives cost about the same as the Seagate, and we would say that their seek noise levels are the quietest of the bunch. If you're using a quiet case that's located on top of your desk, you might find the noise of the drive heads seeking to be irritating on the Hitachi and even the Seagate. It is worth pointing out that various revisions of the Seagate and Hitachi drives may be more or less noisy, however. Some users still have bad memories of the "Deathstar" 75GXP IBM drives, but the latest models from Hitachi (who purchased IBM's hard drive division) have not shown any propensity for early failure, so we're okay with recommending them.
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Hard Drive Alternative: Seagate 160 GB 7200 RPM 8MB SATA
Price: $94 shipped
Jumping up to the larger storage capacities, the price differences between the various brands tend to disappear. Given the longer 5-year warranty on the Seagate, it's the natural choice. We'll leave that up to you, but the same noise rankings as above still apply in our experience, with the Samsung having the least seek noise and the Hitachi having the most. The price for SATA and IDE versions of the 160GB drives is close to identical as well, should you feel the need to go with an IDE interface.
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LoneWolf15 - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
Note on the Hitachi hard disk drives:Hitachi is the ONLY major company that does not allow advance-exchange RMA of their hard disks. To me, this is huge when looking at a hard disk. Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor all have advanced exchange. After the nightmares I have had with IBM and Hitachi technical support, I could not in all honesty recommend them in a system. Personally, I can't afford that kind of downtime, having an advance replacement makes it easier to try and recover data from a crashed drive if necessary, and you aren't waiting in limbo while someone receives your defective drive, checks it in, diagnoses it bad, then sends you out a replacement, also placing you at the mercy of their stock-on-hand or whomever they choose to ship to you the replacement drive.
neologan - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
There's another buyers guide at http://www.pureoverclock.com/review.php?id=9 but it doesn't choose its recommedations due to a really strict budget. Worth a read though i guess.JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
26 - Thanks. Identity crisis indeed! I was originally looking at upgraded S754 instead of S939, but decided against it. :)As a side note, RAM prices have suddenly taken a massive cut. The PDP 2-3-2-5 is now $20 less than last week, and it's about $50 less than a couple months ago. Heck, you can even get 1GB (2x512) of Corsair CL2.5 for under $100 now - again, $50 less than last Guide!
chrisd154 - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
"Socket 754 Alternative Motherboard: Chaintech VNF4 Socket 939""Socket 754 CPU: AMD Athlon 64 1.8 GHz 512KB L2 90nm socket 939"
Your socket 754 motherboard and cpu are having a bit of an identity crisis (i.e theyre 939). You might want to correct that mate.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
24 - you want benchmarks of the speakers? Sorry, that's *way* beyond the scope of this Guide. Speakers costing $60 or less aren't being purchased primarily for their quality; they're being selected for price.If you mean benchmarks in general, that's something that would be great to have but not practical to do. Our various hardware reviews are meant to address the theory of what makes a good component/computer. For many of the parts in a budget system, price is a bigger factor than the final performance or quality. Sure, we'd like to have both, but the truth is you're not going to get SLI in a budget system. We do not have all of the parts available in one location for testing, and some of the parts may not even be in AnandTech's possession [anymore]. This is especially true of entry-level Guides, as many of the parts were new a year or more in the past
If you'd like specific information or you have a specific question, feel free to email me.
crimson117 - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
I'd appreciate if you could add some benchmarks to compare "beeps and boops" quality. This guide is pretty much worthless without them.JarredWalton - Wednesday, March 16, 2005 - link
The MSI uATX is the only ATI Xpress 200 board currently available, and it's basically the same price as the Chaintech. Given that it's still pretty new, I'm a little hesitant to go with that over the "proven" nF4. Oh, and there are *no* overclocking options on the MSI board right now. Is that a BIOS problem or a chipset problem? I don't know. If you really like ATI or if you want a uATX form factor, it's definitely an option.kmmatney - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
I'd consider the MSI ATI Radeon XPRESS 200 motherboard board for a budget system as well. From reviews I've read, using the on-board video doesn't seem to degrade overall 2D performance.Pair it with an Athlon 64 3000+ winchester for $235. A decent system for the non or light gamer, and you have the option of upgrading the video later. Too bad there aren't any budget 939 cpus.
JarredWalton - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
I haven't had issues with the Chaintech, but that's only one person's experience with a specific RAM/GPU setup. The documentation is pretty lacking, but other than that it works well. Are you speaking from personal experience, and if so, what was the exact configuration (RAM, CPU, PSU, etc.)? It works well in the following configuration, although I had to manually set the RAM timings:Athlon64 3500+
Chaintech nForce4 VNF4
ATI X800 XL 256MB PCIe
1GB (2x512) Corsair DDR400 CAS2.5
Antec True430 PSU
NEC ND-3520A DVD±RW
WD 200GB SATA
SB Audigy 2 ZS
As for the DVD+RW, why save $20 when there won't be anything faster than a 16X burner, and the ability to backup 4.5GB of data rather than 700MB can come in handy? (And if that sounds like too much data, consider that a lot of people take digital pictures these days. A few hundred high quality images will fill a CD.) I mentioned the possibility to downgrade the optical drive, but I'm not going to recommend it.
mostlyprudent - Tuesday, March 15, 2005 - link
Are you serious ... recommending a motherboard with compatability and stability problems just to save $10? And why put a DVD-RW drive in a budget system? Optical drives are quite simple to upgrade down the road. You would have to be crazy to skimp on the quality of the motherboard to fit in an upgraded optical drive. You can get a DVD-ROM/CD-RW combo drive for about $20 less than the NEC drive you suggest. I would take that $20 dollars and invest it in a stable/reliable motherboard -- there is nothing worse than a finiky mobo as far as I'm concerned.