ianjeffs

Hi Everyone,

I'm in the process of ordering parts for a new machine. I've beeen out of IT for quite a while, and my knowledge is rather dated. Hopefully some of you can answer some of my Techie questions. Here are the parts are as follows:

Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 Socket 775 2.13GHz

Asustek S775 Intel 975X ATX Audio Lan

Corsair Memory TWIN2X2048-6400 2x1GB 240-Pin DIMM XMS2-6400 CL5

Western Digital Caviar 400GB S150 16mb 7200rpm

DabsValue Alien Gaming Case 480W -Silver

I have a few questions that i cannot find answers to anywhere.

Question 1:
Easy one to start with - Having not really built from scratch before i need to know if the Processor listed above will come with the heat sink and fan to provide it with cooling? I presume they provide this sort of stuff as standard but i need to be sure!

Question 2:
The tower is listed as a 480w PSU - will this be sufficient to power the RAM - HDD MB and CPU?

Question 3:
The HDD says it has Serial ATA 150 compatability, but i can only see ATA 300 listed against the MB - will i be able to conenct them? ie will there be the correct number of pins? (i have never dealt with Serial ATA before) I presume they will link up, but only work up to ATA 150 rather than the full ATA 300 speed. can anyone shed any light on this!?

Question 4:
I have a fairly good graphics ccard in my current machine, however it is AGP as far as im aware. I can't see AGP mentioned in the MB spec - does this mean i will not be able to use it, or will it fit into the PCI-E slots??

Many Thanks

Ian Jeffs

tijnema

Answer 1:
Normally a site would say if a processor is Boxed or Retail, but as far as i know are Intel C2D always boxed.

Answer 2:
I'm not sure which GFX card you will put in, but if you don't buy the 8800GS/GTX it probably runs:P

Answer 3:
SATA I & SATA II are compatible in connectors etc, only transfer rate would be 150mbps, instead of 300mbps for SATA II. So this hdd will work.

Answer 4:
PCI-e and AGP are not compatible. The motherboard has 2 PCI-e slots, and no AGP slots, if the graphics card you currently using is AGP, you need to buy a new one.

I hope these answer will help you with your choice, if you have anymore, just ask!

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2oo7

ianjeffs

Thanks a lot for your help

I've ordered a PCI-e graphics card as my old one is AGP - its only a 512mb card so hopefully this will not drain the power to bad.

I've changed the HDD to a Serial ATA 300 one, so i will get full performace.

However the new HDD has only 8mb of buffer instead of 16mb - do you think this will make much difference - how useful is this buffer? - i've not seen it on a HDD before.

jammerdan

The step from the 2mb to the 8mb was big but the step to the 16mb is not that big...but will make a difference with the use of pro Video/Audio applications.

JD

tijnema

a huge buffer is quite useless, unless you are requesting a lot of files from the hdd at the same time. 8MB is fine, i have also 8MB on my 300gb hdd, and my other one is 400gb with 16MB, and i don't note any difference between them.

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2oo7