new pc advice

[Laffertytig]

well ive decided its time for an upgrade and this lot below is what ive came up with. im gonna be using an asrock motherboard as the base when i build it

DABSVAL, 550 PSU
PHILIPS 160W 5.1 speaker system
CRUCIAL 4GB 240dimm ddr2 SDRAM
SUMSUNG 320GB 7200RPM S300 8MB harddrive
SAPPHIRE RADEON X1950PRO 512MB AGP DVI graphics card
AMD athlon 64x2 6000+ am2 3.00ghz
terrarec aureon 5.1 pci sound card

2 questions, 1st is about the hardrive. are samsung harddrives reliable, and are bigger hardrives more efficiant or are smaller ones better to have?

and whats the big difference between 5.1 sound cards/speakers and 7.1 systems? what would people recommend, is it reall worth the extra cash for 7.1?

thanks in advance

[antikristuseke]

For hard drives id sugest a seagate, these are reliable. Dont know anything good or bad about samsungs.

[Skybird]

Using three Samsungs HDs myself, one on active duty, two others as external image backups. Never had a problem with any of the three. If one can trust the press, Samsung HDs have a good reputation anyway. Also, they are silent. Very silent.

Make several partitions, else defragging can become a time-consuming affair with HDs of today's sizes. Think about in advance how to sort your software to make it less likely that each time you did something you need to defragg several volumes. I for example use separate partitions for windows, swapfile, non-gaming/office/working software, working data & and save games, games, Flightsim. I do so for no other reason than to keep things in clean order and to minimize defragging times. Also, if you have all save games and working data in just one place, it helps you tremendously when doing regular backups to CD-RWs, you just copy the complete partition, and that's it.

Sound question: No, it is not worth it, imo.

One question you might want to ask: what do you want to do with 4 GB? Video editing? Okay. Anything else: think again about it.

[Laffertytig]

the main reason for all that ram is that i play a lot of sims which require lots or ram, plus i want this rig to last me at least a couple of years and what with game requirements goin up all the time im thinkin why not just get 4gb instead of 2

better havin more than less right? and more opinions on the sound issue would be great. id like to hear from people who play sims like SH and others on a 7.1 surround system. is it worth an extra £20 or £30 as opposed to a 5.1 system?

[SUBMAN1]

One question - Why AGP? PCI-E boards are not only cheaper, but faster.

-S

PS. Samsung drives are pretty quiet. Samsung and Seagate are the only two drive manufacturers I would buy anymore. Hitachi, Western Digital, etc are all noisey.

[Laffertytig]

i have an asrock socket AM2 nforce3 250 ATX audio LAN motherboard which i dont believe supports pci devices. i got the motherboard last year and thought it would be ok to keep it and upgrade everthing else. is there anywhere i can check the performance of pic cards compared to agp cards? would i notice a big difference in performance if i upgraded the motherboard as well?

also is it worth gettin a new sound card as this mother apparently has onboard 7.1 surround sound already?