Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler PC Component Advice Wanted

Okay, I read the techreport.com review on the 3870, and I think I'll go that route. I wasn't planning on REALLY getting into PC gaming, anyway.

If you're not REALLY getting into PC gaming, why get a 3870?

Because it's not a bad price, I'll inevitably want to play a few games, and HD video performance.

Hey, I finally got the processor through my friend. I put off the motherboard, memory, and video card purchases until now. I'm still leaning toward the 3870 for the video card. I've been reading through reviews, but I'm still not finding everything. Does anyone know a lot about replacing stock fans on video cards? I want to make it as quiet and effective as possible.

Also, I imagine I'll be going DDR2 for memory. I'll probably go with 4 gigs. I'm going to be using Vista Ultimate 64-bit. Do you think it could be worth it to get 8 gigs? It's not like DDR2 memory is outrageously expensive, like DDR3 still is.

Also, if anyone has any insight on eSATA, I'm all ears. It seems like going with a DDR2 board I probably won't be able to get onboard eSATA. Information about eSATA cards seems to be scarce.

I'd love updated recommendations now that I have the processor and can finally finish my computer in the next month. I'm researching on my own, but it's hard to find all of the information I want.

Thanks for any and all help!

For all your silent computing needs check here

Ahh, I go to that site, but I've never bothered with the forums. Thanks for the tip.

If you want as quiet and effective as possible, water cooling is a fun project. Definitely the quietest solution and it is very effective if you buy good gear. Glowing blue or green water tubes gets you the ladies too. Well, Ok maybe not.

All said though , I didn't bother on my last PC. I just made sure there was lots of airflow. It's not quiet at all but noise wasn't a concern for it's application.

Those forums are great for help in choosing components. A bit of overkill sometimes though. Tom's Hardware Guide is another very informative sight that I like.

Regarding RAM, doubling your memory will get you much better results than waiting for faster RAM. You mentioned you are not a high end gamer so your biggest concern in RAM is in making the hard drive do as little as possible.

I'm really behind the times though so I'm mostly just commenting here to relive my PC glory days. Kinda like an old man talking about his 409 big block to a group of kids racing tricked out four bangers.

I have a side bar utility on my Vista box and it monitors amount of Ram used. I never see it go much above 900mb and runs mostly in the 600-800mb range. 2-4Gb should be more than enough for a HTPC.

Water coolers are nice but there is still a fan that can make noise just like regular CPU coolers, it is just the fan/radiator is now remotely located. The water coolers are more effective for overclocking.

I went with a fanless power supply to help keep the noise down on one of my recent builds. The other build had a large 120mm fan on the P/S, both boxes are running the same cpu cooler, I think they make the same amount of noise, about as much as a laptop when the fans are kicked in.

If you haven’t already I found this thread very helpful when building my HTPC last year.

http://www.avsforum.com/avs-vb/showthread.php?t=940972

Lots of info without even having to post and risk getting flamed.



This might also be fun but I think he already bought the case:

http://www.pugetsystems.com/submerged.php

Yeah, I already have everything except the motherboard, memory, and video card. When I was talking about getting something effective and quiet for cooling, I was only talking about the video card. It just seems like the stock fans for those aren't as great as they could be. I'm going to try the stock fan with the CPU. Intel included a note saying they'd been listening to customer feedback about their fans, so I want to see how good it is.

Liquid cooling scares me too much. It seems like too much work, and then there's still the noise of the pumps. Why can't all chips run cool enough to only need heat sinks?