Need Pricing Help!?

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 5:41 am

okay you guru's heres the deal. i need to sell my current rig to make the last amount of $$$$ so i can buy and build my wish list rig. newegg says it will cost me ~1900 and tigerdirect says it will cost me ~1800.

im set in stone what parts i want so dont bother changing my mind, (yes i will post the latest in parts list later) and ill put a couple pics also

here is my current rig that i need a FAIR but REASONABLE Price on.

HP 763n mATX Case (plenty of Stickers and decorations (will remove if necessary)) decent condition, no hard mods to the case

Asus P4P800-VM Intel 865G AGP8x DDR400 Motherboard

Intel Pentium 4 Extreme Edition Skt 478 3.4GHz w/ 2MB L3 Cache

eVGA 7800GS AGP w/ 256MB VRAM 256Bit

2GB A-Data PC3200 DDR400 RAM ( 4x - 512MB )

Xion 600 Watt PSU (Soo big it has to sit on top of the case )

1x Samsung 80GB HDD ATA-133

1x Seagate 120 GB HDD ATA-133

2x Asus 2014S DVD Burners ATA-133

Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer 7.1ch Sound Card

that pretty much sums it up. REMEMBER THIS IS A EXTREME EDITION CPU!! eBay still has these SL7CH 3.4 GHz CPU's for 400 almost 500 $!

now,

here is what im planning on building:

Case: Thermaltake VH8000BWS Armor+ MX ATX Mid-Tower Case

Power: Cooler Master / Real Power / 850-Watt / ATX v2.2 / 135mm Fan / SATA Ready / Quad SLI Ready / PFC/EPS / 20/24-Pin / Power Supply, 80Plus

Motherboard: EVGA nForce 790i SLI FTW Motherboard - NVIDIA nForce 790i SLI, Socket 775, ATX

CPU: Intel Core 2 Quad Q9550 Processor

CPU Cooler: Masscool 8W501B1M3G / Socket 775

RAM: x2 Patriot PC16000 2000MHz 4GB DDR3

Video: EVGA GeForce GTX 285 Video Card - 1GB GDDR3, PCI Express 2.0, SLI Ready

Primary HDD: x2 Western Digital WD5001AALS Caviar Black

Secondary HDD: Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB SATA ( I may just get one of the above drives and use this one from my old rig )

Optical: x2 Lite-On IHAS124-04 Internal DVD Writer

Sound: Creative Labs Sound Blaster X-Fi XtremeGamer PCI Sound Card

OS: Windows Vista Ultimate 64-bit OEM DVD

sooo please let me know what a good price is. and REMEMBER!!! Extreme Edition CPU's when they first released were ~ 1000$

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:50 am

I wouldn't expect more than $300-500 for the whole system, regardless of how impressive the P4 EE was in its day, these days a C2D or an i7 will outperform it by more than double. I've built considerably faster systems for under $500, you may have more luck if you sold the components off separately. That chip is on the performance level of the celerons of today, except on power draw which the celerons likely destroy it in every way imaginable. Any potential buyer is going to know that.

**********************************************************

As for the new computer you are building, it looks decent but there are some things that you should definitely be warned about.

First and perhaps most importantly is your choice in memory: there are major QC issues with virtually all DDR3 / 2000 MHz and higher kits, the odds of that memory failing within days or weeks is extremely high. Just read the article on anandtech and the trouble they had with 2000 MHz kits: http://www.anandtech.com/memory/showdoc.aspx?i=3596
Also you absolutely do not need a 2000 MHz memory kit with that CPU.

Second, save yourself $20 and drop that CPU cooler, it doesn't look any better/different than the Intel cooler that comes with your boxed CPU.

Third, the Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500 GB drive is the only single platter 500 GB drive on the market that I know of. This is worth mentioning because single platter drives run cooler, quieter and on less power than drives with more platters. And because of the greater areal density they are also usually faster, which is why I would recommend just using it as your primary drive.

If you are planning on running a RAID0 or 1 on those WD drives and then booting from it, I would strongly advise against it. RAID arrays do not improve the feel of an operating system, and may in fact do more to slow it down than speed it up because of the nature of OS reads/writes. RAIDs perform the worst at small random operations, which are what general day to day computing generates the most of. A single drive will likely be faster at booting and launching applications than a RAID purely because the average latency will be lower. If you really want to speed up your OS disk access; get a Flash SSD. The best compromise for storage currently is to get a fast SSD, and pair it with a gigantic HDD.

Also it is pretty hard to justify paying $65 each for 500 GB drives when you can get a 1500 GB drive for $120 shipped. Look at the price per GB first when making storage purchases.

If you want RAID for the redundancy, then by all means build a RAID1, but I would suggest that the best price/capacity tradeoff would be in the 750-1000 GB range of drives. And do not boot from it, use the RAID as the secondary and just backup your data to it regularly.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 9:47 am

okay, thats not very high.... but ill take my chances with 400-500$

im not going to use RAID, i dont even like RAID. and i bumped down the ram to 1333 MHz. ill use this:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications ... u=C13-7084

i may use the Seagate drive, or i may just use two WD Black drives, on SATA Channels.

i took off the cooler.

is there any chance i could get more with just the components being sold out of the case? i mean look at this: http://cgi.ebay.com/New-Intel-Pentium-4 ... .m20.l1116

thats my only reference to how much these chips are still going for.

anyways, ill see what i want to do.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 11:46 am

Ahh ok, if you aren't using a RAID then dump the 2 drives and get a single 1.5 TB drive since it would actually cost less for 50% more storage capacity. I got my 7200.11 / 1.5 TB drive for $114.99 shipped a few months ago, they tend to hover around the $120-130 mark but if you snoop around you can find them for $115. Even worst case it is still 50% more capacity for the same price as your two 500 GB drives combined, not to mention power/heat savings.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 2:25 pm

i always have preferred dual drives for a simple reason, if my OS takes a dump, i wont lose any data if i have to format.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 2:32 pm

Something you can accomplish just as easily with partitioning...

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 3:13 pm

got a point there.... (duh)

Spidey · Post by **Spidey** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 3:46 pm

I always use 2 drives a primary and a data backup drive, partitioning can help if your OS craps out, but does no good if it’s the drive.

But that’s just me, I also backup on an external drive…because my data is very important.

Zantor · Post by **Zantor** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 4:20 pm

Krom wrote:Something you can accomplish just as easily with partitioning...

True, that.

I use two drives for such purposes (rather than using partitions), as well as dividing the load to improve performance. I've had as much as a 30-40% performance boost by keeping windows on a separate drive from everything else (your results may vary). I have a small IDE drive for windows (XP doesn't demand that much in terms of transfer rate), and a SATA drive to put all my big programs and games on. This helps divide the load up so that there is less waiting and more doing.

A dedicated drive for the paging/swap file would help, but that's almost moot with the high speed and low access/seek latencies; I once used such a setup, but with a SATA drive and keeping windows separate from everything else, it's a moot customization.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 7:15 pm

Having your programs and files on a separate partition of the same drive as windows can perform poorly on IDE drives and SATA drives in IDE compatibility mode. Unfortunately most motherboards these days still ship with the SATA ports set to IDE mode in BIOS (in order to maintain out of the box XP compatibility). For the maximum performance from SATA drives in all conditions this setting should be changed to AHCI mode. The only thing to note is setting your controller to AHCI will usually prevent Windows XP from booting as it doesn't support AHCI without a driver which usually has to be loaded when you first install it.

I used AHCI mode on my Seagate 7200.11 / 750 GB drive for my Windows XP install and it definitely sped up XP to faster than I have seen any other Windows/desktop OS run in the entire 15 years I've been working on computers. Even on the same drive it was noticeably faster on boot up and application load. Actually I had an unusual issue because of it: Windows XP was booting so fast that icons in the system tray would get lost because the applications were starting before the systray could start up. I had to disable automatic login and wait several seconds to login so it wouldn't happen anymore (or if it did happen I had to log out, then log back in to get all the icons back). Literally the computer was starting up too fast.

Having your OS on a separate drive from applications and games is unlikely to deliver much of a performance benefit, the reason being is virtually all software out there is designed to operate on a single disk. Situations where the system is going to be hitting the disk from multiple directions at the same time are almost entirely limited to swapping to the page file, and by then the performance of the system is going to hurt regardless.

Currently my system is set up with 3 hard drives:
A 320 GB drive that has Windows 7 RC 64 bit installed stand alone and acts as C: while Windows 7 is running and G: while XP is running.
A 750 GB drive partitioned in two: 98.5 GB that acts as C: in XP (or G: in Windows 7), the remaining 600 GB is D: where I keep all my downloads/workspace.
And last is a 1500 GB drive as E: for archival/mirroring.

Eventually this setup will give way to a 120+ GB SSD as C: with Windows 7 on it. The 750 GB will be re-partitioned as a single volume (D:), and E: will remain the same. That way the SSD will handle everything that requires lots of small random reads/writes (namely the OS and applications), and the HDDs will be left to what they are best at: anything that's big and or sequential.

Admiral LSD · Post by **Admiral LSD** » Thu Jul 23, 2009 8:30 pm

Also, from what I understand, Core 2 gains virtually nothing from running DDR3 over DDR2 so unless you're getting a really good deal on the mobo/RAM you're probably better off saving a bit of money and dropping back to a DDR2 setup. A better idea though is to wait a few more weeks and see how Core i5 will turn out. As near as I can tell, it'll offer most of the performance of i7 with a lower overall cost.

edit: Forgot to mention that Windows 7 has been RTM'd with general availability due for October. It's probably not worth buying Vista at this point unless you get a copy that qualifies for the free upgrade dealie MS are offering.

Sirius · Post by **Sirius** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 1:48 am

Should be possible to get the free upgrade in most places by now.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 3:39 pm

the board im getting is a DDR3 board. 132-YW-E179-TR eVGA FTW 790SLI

soo back to my topic subject.... what is a good price for my current rig? im prolly going to hit 350-400 on eBay. or i may part it out and get the value of each device

AlphaDoG · Post by **AlphaDoG** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 7:26 pm

I'll give you a buck 250 for it.

Admiral LSD · Post by **Admiral LSD** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 8:39 pm

If the CPU is as valuable as you seem to think it is then you should probably sell at least that seperately. Given current pricing for DDR1, you might be able to get a bit for that too. The rest of the system isn't going to be worth all that much given its age, but it's still probably worth more seperately than together. You could probably take the sound card and power supply over to the new rig but if the latter doesn't have any SATA or PCIe power connectors then it's probably easier to buy a new one since adaptors get messy quickly.

I realise the board you've chosen is DDR3, I'm just curious as to why. In real world applications, the gains from DDR3 over DDR2 on Core 2 are limited, only about 10-15%. For that, you're paying about a third more for the RAM and about 20% more for the board. Even if you stick with eVGA/nForce (I wouldn't, but hey), you can drop back to a 780i DDR2 board and get 8GB of 1066MHz DDR2 for only USD$4 more than the DDR3 setup will cost you. A 750i board would be cheaper again seeing as you don't appear to be using SLi (and 3-way SLi is a waste of money), but it supposedly only offers 4 SATA ports natively which may be limiting given your setup. I'm not trying to preach, I just feel you're spending more money than you really need to for no real reason.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Fri Jul 24, 2009 9:13 pm

Admiral LSD has it a little off, the real life performance gain going from DDR2 to DDR3 is more like <1-3% not 10-15%.

The old power supply very likely does not meet the ATX 2.2 / EPS12V standards required by modern boards, don't bother trying to reuse it in the new system.

Admiral LSD · Post by **Admiral LSD** » Sat Jul 25, 2009 10:41 pm

I couldn't remember what the exact numbers were off-hand, I just had the number '10%' and '16%' in my head for some reason. If it's actually lower then that just reinforces the point.

As for the PSU, I wasn't 100% sure about that either. \"600W\" should be enough for that system, even with the 285. However, if it doesn't offer all the requisite connectors then you're right, it wouldn't be worth bringing over to the new one.

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 8:44 am

Yeah, I agree 600W should be more than sufficient, odds are that system will run fine even on a 400W PSU most of the time (at stock speeds mind you). Just finding one with all the necessary connections would be a major uphill battle.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 9:38 am

Alpha, are you saying 125 for it? or something else?

so had this PSU i have now be a ATX 2.2 i would have enough power for the system i want to build?

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 3:08 pm

Assuming you weren't going to overclock that systems peak draw is likely going to be under 400W. The ATX 2.2 standard alone isn't sufficient though, it must have the additional EPS connectors for modern systems or the motherboard will be unable to power the CPU.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/EPS12V

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 4:06 pm

here is the PSU i have.... is it sufficient?

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6817190007

after reading the wiki, my PSU does have the 20+4 and the 4pin and 8 pin ATX12V connectors. im lost lol

Admiral LSD · Post by **Admiral LSD** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 10:51 pm

Looking at that, it has most of the right connectors already. The 285 you linked only needs a pair of 6 pin power connectors instead of 6 + 8 like some of the other higher end cards, so you're covered there. The fact it only has a single pair of SATA power connectors would be annoying, but you can get adapters for that, including ones that don't require the use of molex connectors. It'd be one hell of a mess as you'd need two, possibly three, to power all your drives, but worth considering given the rest of the supply seems up to the job.

The one potentially major issue I see is the board has an 8-pin secondary power connector while the PSU you have only offers a 4 pin. To be perfectly honest, I really don't see why single CPU boards even need the 8 pin. It's basically two of the 4 pin connectors moulded into the one plug and was originally meant for dual/multi-CPU setups where each half of the plug powers a seperate CPU. A bit of googling indicated you might be able to use the 4 pin plug in the 8 pin socket (several board ship with a sticker over the \"spare\" pins to indicate this, but I couldn't see anything like that on the pics in the ad you linked) but I wasn't really able to find a firm yay or nay on the matter. You can buy adaptors that turn the 4 pin or a molex into the 8 pin, but depending on how the board handles its power distribution, I'm not sure how that'd go...

Krom · Post by **Krom** » Sun Jul 26, 2009 10:56 pm

Admiral LSD wrote:You can buy adaptors that turn the 4 pin or a molex into the 8 pin, but depending on how the board handles its power distribution, I'm not sure how that'd go...

If it goes well it works fine, if it goes poorly it melts the wires.

AceCombat · Post by **AceCombat** » Mon Jul 27, 2009 5:39 am

it actually has a 8 Pin inline with the 4 pin. ill grab a few photos of it. its one long wire that has the 8 pin plug first, then it goes on even further to the 4 pin plug.

i have plenty of SATA-Molex adapters.

hang tight for the photos.

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