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Technology Stocks : Disk Drive Sector Discussion Forum -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stitch who wrote (2787)	3/12/1998 2:36:00 AM
From: Pierre-X	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 9256

=-= OFF TOPIC =-= I build boxes for friends all the time. For the best bang for the buck today I recommend: AMD K6-233 (~$150) Abit AX5 (~$110) Maxtor or IBM 8.4GB UDMA (~$300; ~$350) Maxtor has better customer service but the IBM disk has gotten better reviews. An excellent source of technical info is at: tomshardware.com If you plan to overclock then you'll need 8-ns SDRAM and the TX5 motherboard. Note that these are TX chipset motherboards and don't have AGP support. Voodoo is an add-on board. You still need a main video adapter. Some people like a combo of RIVA 128 and Voodoo (e.g. Diamond Viper 220 + Diamond Monster 3D, ~$200 and ~$180) but all the RIVA boards are AGP. I myself avoid Diamond products at all costs after they screwed me a few years ago with the original Viper boards based on Weitek chips. The Millenium II (~$180 with 4MB) is reputedly the best 2D board out there. I just got one and I'm not all that impressed. The driver situation at Matrox is a nightmare, and the contrast isn't noticeably better than my old piece'O-crap Virge. It's suppose to have an outboard 220Mhz RAMDAC which purportedly improves the image quality ... If you don't need cutting edge performance (and really, how many people do??) then an old generic Virge board (~$35) will do the trick just fine. The original Virge only has a 120Mhz RAMDAC integrated into the chip, limiting you to 16bpp at 1024x768. If you don't need 24bpp then Virge is your budget board. Be warned, the driver situation with S3 is also ugly--even worse than Matrox. Be prepared to tinker a lot. If you play a lot of 3D games like Quake II/Jedi Knight/F22/Need For Speed etc. then you want a Voodoo board. Voodoo2 is just starting to come out now: next-generation.com ...so you should see Voodoo prices falling. My advice to you as a system buyer: get the $35 Virge board, it does the job. For the price of one Matrox Mill2, you can buy TWO Virge boards AND a spare monitor, to extend your desktop under Win 98 <G>. My advice to you as an investor: get EVERYTHING, and play around. <G> God bless, PX