Need help narrowing down brands that have delivered stable products in the past

[foocoding]

I'm building a new PC, and I'm currently deciding which brands will give me the most stable system-- performance is not a big issue.

Hard Drives -
IBM- Heard terrible things about the deskstar series. Probably going to stay away from them
WD- Heard good things, I have a WD right now and has never caused problems. Doesnt support ata133?
Maxtor- Another good brand? Not sure
Seagate- No Idea


Video Card -
NVIDIA- Great, but need better 2d so no..
ATI- Good all around? Probably going with them for 2d quality and DVD. Will a 8500le or even 7500 give me good 2d and DVD performance?
Matrox- Good 2d but crap 3d? How is stability?


Motherboard-
Soyo- Heard lots of good in terms of stability. Probably going with the kt333 dragon ultra. Might wait for kt400
No idea about stability with the others-- MSI, epox, etc etc...


Ram-
Crucial- Heard nothing but good about them-- But too expensive? Is it worth the price?
Corsair- Same as above



Thanks a lot guys. I've searched google, but it's not as though there is a master list of stability ratings.

 

[SOSTrooper]

Abit and Asus are also good motherboard brands

 

[foocoding]

Thanks, I'll take that into consideration.

bump

 

[cmdrdredd]

I don't see why everyone complains about Nvidia's 2D...Nvidia cards are not built to read email and stuff. You buy an nvidia card for games unless you go cheap with an MX. I've never had trouble with any of my geForce cards and quite frankly the ATI cards I've used (8500) don't look much better to me.

 

[PH0ENIX]

Well Foocoding...

Hard Drives -
IBM- Heard terrible things about the deskstar series. Probably going to stay away from them <--- Good call. It's been covered a bit in these forums, so I wont go into it, but several models have had atrocious failure rates...

WD- Heard good things, I have a WD right now and has never caused problems. Doesnt support ata133? <--- nope, at present only maxtor support ATA133.
WD have come a very long way since the old 'caviar' days, but still from past experience I have trouble reccommending them. In saying that, their 100&120gb drives with the 8mb cache are... for want of a better phrase, hot sh!t

Maxtor- Another good brand? Not sure <--- again, they've come a long way. Im not too sure what effect the quantum buyout had on them, but I haven't heard nor experienced many bad things recently. Whereas 'back in the day' they were the bane of my systems...

Seagate- No Idea <--- Seagate are arguably the best HDD manufacturer out there. Aside from low failure rates, on the odd chance that one DOES fail their RMA procedure is excellent, and efficient. Their Barracuda ATA series drives are incredibly quiet, and very, very tough.
I took my coat off one morning and rolled it up - the 20gb drive that I bring to work almost every day went flying out of my coat pocket and bounced along on the pavement.
Naturally I was somewhat peeved by this - but the drive never missed a beat and works to this day...

-----

Video Card -
NVIDIA- Great, but need better 2d so no.. <--- as far as I knew the 2d quality issue was to do with a pair of banks of resistors and capacitors, placed just before the VGA output... which means that buying a decent card like a Leadtek will probably overcome this, and if you're interested in hardware mods - so will shorting out the caps.

ATI- Good all around? Probably going with them for 2d quality and DVD. Will a 8500le or even 7500 give me good 2d and DVD performance? <---- DVD performance being much of a muchness - I'd hope any card available for purchase right now would be able to handle DVD playback more than adequately...
ATI I have to say I haven't had many dealings with - I better leave that for someone who owns one. My only advice on this point, is look at some reviews. MULTIPLE reviews

Matrox- Good 2d but crap 3d? How is stability? <--- if 2d performance is your priority, then matrox may have just gained another customer
Matrox are good at what they do - they would have vanished by now otherwise - and the parhelia is a pretty good product considering it's the company's first venture into gaming GPUs (well not 100% gaming but u get the idea).
But if you want something with more grunt than a GF3 Ti500 for 3d apps - then you dont really want a parhelia.

-----

Motherboard-
Soyo- Heard lots of good in terms of stability. Probably going with the kt333 dragon ultra. Might wait for kt400
No idea about stability with the others-- MSI, epox, etc etc... <---- I must say that this is really the part you MUST put the most thought into.
It doesn't matter what anyone says, if your mainboard isn't up to scratch, your system never will be.

Soyo i've heard mixed results, but personally I haven't heard enough either way about them to bother doing any research.

Aopen - I'd reccommend, solely because they have a habit of releasing their products a few months after all their competitors - so that they can remove any issues the public experiences with the competing products...

MSI - previously I've been wary, but if you check out my system rig - Im running a 645 Ultra, and I can tell you i'm very impressed.
First MSI-based system i've built - and so far I haven't encountered an issue attributable to the mainboard. (except AC97 audio, but thats a long story, and in no way unique to MSI or the SiS 645 chipset)

Asus - great boards, shocking service. Personally I haven't seen much from them in the last 12 months, but several of my collegues swear by them. The last Asus board I saw was running a Duron 1.2g - never faulted in stress tests, but I only had my hands on it for about a week. If you care a lot - I can probably dig up what model it was.

Abit - I have yet to see an Abit board, actually... seem to be a LOT more common in the US than they are here in aussieland.

Intel - Stability Plus but very limited in 'tweaking' options generally. For a system you want to run @ stock speeds and stability is a premium, go intel.
Unless, of course, you're planning to build an AMD system - it probably wouldn't be a very sound choice then would it

Epox/ECS - put it away. I think it might have been Xbit that showed one of ECS' P4 boards actually factory overclock the FSB to keep their boards competitive. That's pretty poor, and a good indication of bad componentry.

FIC - same story as Abit. I can go by what i've heard - but you just dont see them over here.

PC-Chips/PC100/whatever the h3ll they call themselves now - i'm still convinced that their CEO is satan himself.
There was a thread on this topic already, and I maintain my opinion that they are second-rate, cheaply manufactured, poor quality, buggy boards. I dont care if they only cost 10c for an all-in-one solution; Things like faulty I/O ports on a whole SERIES of mainboards just can't be overlooked. Even if they did provide a fix.
Try finding any info on the PC100 M747. it's an AT/ATX slot1 board, one of their most popular... yet try getting them to admit they ever made it...

-----

Ram-
Crucial- Heard nothing but good about them-- But too expensive? Is it worth the price?
Corsair- Same as above <----- Corsair I dont know about, but Crucial, Micron, and Kingston get my vote.
You CAN get good-quality generic ram (samsung, hynix), but it's much more luck-of-the-draw when it comes to overclocking.
For stock speeds, generic is usually fine, but avoid 'Legend' if it's available where you are.

----

I hope that at least gives you a bit of insight...

Good Luck!

Ph0.

 

[foocoding]

PH0ENIX-- Thank you very much for typing all that out. I really appreciate it; gives me a base from which I can make decisions on.

You aussies always are the nicest people I meet on various forums

Thanks again!

 

[PH0ENIX]

No worries - it's always good to see someone going to the effort of researching parts before they build - rather than just listening to the first zealot who gets to them...

Ph0.

 

[Vinny N]

Allright here's my two cents...

Hard Drives-

My opinion is to weigh WD, Maxtor, and Seagate on approximately equal ground as far as stability goes. By and large, most of the three companies' drives run just fine. You hear complaints now and then of drives going bad from all three, but nothing major. Heck, you might even go so far as to make that claim for IBM's 120GXP. Complaints here and there, but nothing as major as in the past (a la WD Caviar, pre diamond+ Maxtors, Medalist Seagates, IBM 75GXP/60GXP).

My personal bias? Seagate drives. It's the only thing I'll put in my mother's computer and the only SCSI drives I adore and put in my own system

If you want to really have some people battle it out for you, check out the forums at storagereview.com

Video Card-

Figure out what kind of 3d Performance you want and what kind of 2d quality you want. You don't mention anything about what resolutions you'll be running or what you'll be doing with the video card precisely.
If you're talking about stability and only stability, Nvidia has a great track record of pumping out drivers to keep everything running smoothly. They tend to keep supporting products for a long time. ATI is pulling their driver act together pretty well but I'm not sure what kind of support older products will get if they keep radically changing driver architecture when they promised unified drivers. Matrox has fairly good driver support as well, they don't push out as many updates as Nvidia, but they have a good track record and support products for a decent length of time.


Motherboard-

Don't know what to tell you unless you pick AMD or Intel. If you pick Intel, the obvious choice for stability tends to be Intel. Their boards rarely go bad and as far as I've seen have not been problematic or DOA out of the box ever. Asus, Tyan, and Gigabyte all get a vote for stable solutions as well. Epox has a steady record though I think these forums are a bit too happy about the 4g4a+. I personally still wouldn't pay for an epox unless I couldn't afford something else. MSI...their recent boards seem to be doing fine. They had quite a rash of baaaaaad K7T Pro2-As that die out of the blue months down the road after running fine. Check newsgroups and archives of forums to read about it. I've gone through 2 Pro-2As, so you can guess my bias.

ECS - I haven't known them to factory overclock any FSB, if they did, it's probably by a little just as Abit, Asus, and co do to get the 1%-4% edge in website reviews. In fact, their K7S5A's underclock the FSB a bit. (132.77 instead of 133.34) for whatever reason. But either way, that's no reason to discount them. Their boards do seem to be of slightly weaker construction, but they've surprised enthusiasts with boards like the K7S5A. Check out the forums at ocworkbench.com. There's tons and tons of stuff all about that one board. I'm running one myself without a single problem and I've set one up for a friend without any problems but I'm not sure I'd recommend to just anyone unless they couldn't afford anything else.

FIC isn't half-bad, I probably rank them as a huge grey area between ECS and Abit.

RAM-
Crucial is great stuff.
Corsair is pricey, and probably not worth it.

You care about stability? Make sure you get ECC if your board supports it. Why wonder if random bits of your information are blown away by radiation or emissions unnoticed?

Don't forget to get a good power supply.
Antec (and apparently Channelwell?), Enermax if you can afford it.
Sparkle (and all derivatives), HEC.

If you've got to go cheap. The Enlight 300W and 340W PSUs are pretty good too.

 

[grrl]

I'd also recommend a Maxtor HD.

I have an Abit KT7A mobo and it's stable, but Abit seems to have a high defective rate. I'd also suggest looking into Iwill brand. I've read several good reviews about their boards although they are a lesser known name since they do lots of OEM production like Tyan.

For RAM I actually bought 3 sticks of Hewlett Packard for cheap on eBay. They have worked very well on my machine. I've also used Micron and Kingston with no problems.

I can't say much about the video cards. I have an old Diamond S540.

 

[Bovinicus]

Harddrives: IBM harddrives have been prone to problems lately. I have a 75GXP that hasn't crashed for 3+ years now as does a friend of mine, but I don't deny that others have had problems. Maxtor, WD, and Seagate are all worthy manufacturers. I like the Seagate Baracuda IV's. They are fast all the way to the end of the drive and totally silent even during drive intensive situations.

Video: ATi has improved their drivers dramatically lately. Their products are now safe buys in my opinion. I have owned my Retail 8500 for quite some time and the drivers have progressed nicely in terms of performance, stability, and features. However, they are still not quite on the level of NVIDIA's drivers. Of course, NVIDIA has the best software team in town. Both the 8500 and 7500 offer high quality 2D output and partially hardware accelerated DVD playback. Matrox is not an option unless you need some of the very niche features (Triple Head, 40-bit color, super high quality RAMDACs) that the company's cards offer.

Motherboard: Soyo is a good company. A teacher of mine recommended them to me once. I bought an SY-7VCA for my P3. Worked with flying colors. I also currently own an EPoX 8KHA+, which is even better in terms of tweaking and performance. ASUS always makes a stable board and the performance is top notch too.

Memory: Crucial is excellent. If you are not overclocking, don't waste your money on Corsair. Corsair is of higher quality, but Crucial is excellent and for a much lower price. My 2x256MB PC2100 DIMMs can reach 150MHz with strict timings if I so choose. Mushkin also has good deals sometimes and they use high quality memory chips too.

Good luck.

 

[foocoding]

Thanks a lot guys-- This is some great info.