TonyTrey

I caught the OC bug many years ago when the Celeron 300A was the CPU to have. I experimented with peltiers, and other cooling schemes shy of water cooling. But that was many years ago. Anyhow, now that I'm past the half century mark, I'm looking to build a system that will boot up before another gray hair turns white. I'm not a gamer, so extreme graphics isn't an issue. With Windows, start apps can really slow down initialization, so I've scaled those back and rarely turn the machine off when I use XP.

I'm considering a system with a single core Opteron with a couple gigs of RAM in a DFI motherboard, a couple of 1OK Raptor hard drives in a Raid 0 configuration, and anything else which will decrease boot up time and give me some bragging rights. I'm thinking of having a multipurpose machine that I can also use in a media room. Whatta you guys think?

In an effort to escape being held prisoner by Microsoft, I've tried different Linux distributions. I'm using Xandros right now and find it to boot up fast. Unfortunately many of the applications I do use, don't have Linux versions. Damn you Bill G!

Thoughts/ideas/comments?

timmay7

tight timings on your ram helps the startup time, and so does the HDDs. Raptors are then a good choice, cause of the 10k rpm. If you want a single core opteron i would go for the 148 or the 150 with higher multipliers. Unless you dont need multipliers for overclocking then a 146 or 144 will do you good. Although if you like multitasking then you definetly should go for a X2 or opteron 165+ that are dual cores.
For graphics i guess a 6800 will do ya good, maybe even a 6600GT. Theyre still pretty nice cards and barely costs anything.

JacKz5o

i would suggest a 7300GS as ur video card, they have all the 7 series features with decent clocks for around $80 perfect for a media type PC . 64-bit interface tho, but it wouldn't matter much if u dont play much games, even though it can still play all games on the market, just not on high detail

if u have 4 rapters in raid 0+1 or raid 5 or just 2 rapters in raid 0 ur boot up speed will increase by alot

also, depending on what you do, you dont need a couple gigs of ram, 2GB is more then enough for most apps