Suggestions for my new PC

Hi all,

I'm building my first pc and would love some input from people in the know,
there are too many options for me to narrow down myself. This pc will be
used for gaming, 3d modelling, rendering and animation and sound work (using
cubase and cakewalk). I have decided to get a motherboard bundle from
novatech.co.uk which is the ASUS P4P800 deluxe socket 478 motherboard with
intel p4 3ghz with 800mhz fsb ht enabled, it comes with 512mb 400mhz ddr
ram, heatsink and fan, the board contains 8xAGP 5 pci slots, serial ata, 4
dimms dual channel, 8xUSB2 & firewire all for £299.63. I'm then going to get
another 512mb ram, all this I'm decided on, what I would like is some feed
back on are the graphics cards and sound cards to get. As far as the
graphics card goes I have kind of narrowed it down to either the Leadtek
GeForce FX5950U 256Mb with memory bandwidth of 30.4GB/s for £282.00 or the
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256Mb with memory badwidth of 23.4GB/s for £334.88. I'm
not really sure which sound card to get except it needs to be 24 bit and
have left and right RCA outputs to go straight into my hifi, I have an
Edirol UA-20 for my laptop which is ok but not as good as a desktop sound
card could be.

Thanks for any replies, they will be much appreciated

Shiva

On Fri, 2 Apr 2004 15:54:31 +0100, "Remo-Shiva"
wrote:

Hi all,

I'm building my first pc and would love some input from people in the know,
there are too many options for me to narrow down myself. This pc will be
used for gaming, 3d modelling, rendering and animation and sound work (using
cubase and cakewalk). I have decided to get a motherboard bundle from
novatech.co.uk which is the ASUS P4P800 deluxe socket 478 motherboard with
intel p4 3ghz with 800mhz fsb ht enabled, it comes with 512mb 400mhz ddr
ram, heatsink and fan, the board contains 8xAGP 5 pci slots, serial ata, 4
dimms dual channel, 8xUSB2 & firewire all for £299.63. I'm then going to get
another 512mb ram, all this I'm decided on, what I would like is some feed
back on are the graphics cards and sound cards to get. As far as the
graphics card goes I have kind of narrowed it down to either the Leadtek
GeForce FX5950U 256Mb with memory bandwidth of 30.4GB/s for £282.00 or the
ATI Radeon 9800 XT 256Mb with memory badwidth of 23.4GB/s for £334.88. I'm
not really sure which sound card to get except it needs to be 24 bit and
have left and right RCA outputs to go straight into my hifi, I have an
Edirol UA-20 for my laptop which is ok but not as good as a desktop sound
card could be.

This is very fine highend stuff, all of it.
If I went for spending that kind of money on a 32-bit system, I'd be
happy with all of it.

The choice between FX5950ultra and R9800XT (for your mobo) is a tough
one. But it's IMO, mainly a choice between ATI's very nice adaptive
Anisotropic Filtering, - which delivers almost the same quality as
full AF, but with much less performance penalty, - and nVidia's
superior OpenGL.
Since you are going to do "3D modelling" & "animation" and these kinds
of applications use an OpenGL interface, I suggest the FX5950U.
(The provider of my own OpenGL working application, takes a very dim
view of ATI. For stability issues, they strongly recommend NOT using
cards with ATI graphics. And their competition, which I also speak to
occasionally, completely shares that judgement.)

ancra