Need a new comptuer...what to get? - Page 4

microdmitry · #46 11-01-2005, 01:16 AM

I'd hold off buying a Mac for now, until Intel versions come out. I've sold my G5 shortly after the announcement, and I'll buy an Intel one a couple of months after the release. Yeah, they're a bit more expensive than comparable PC. But they're works of art, inside and out. PC just doesn't cut it anymore.

m0p · #47 11-01-2005, 05:43 AM

Anyone tried OSX x86 yet? I've got it running on a second HDD at the moment, but Quartz Xtreme don't work on my gfx card (it only supports nVidia GeForce 7800 series on x86), so it doesn't look as good as it could do.

klp2332 · #48 11-01-2005, 06:53 AM

yeah i tried a x86 xp, on a 840. It was ok, a quater of the programs i used supports it, some dont but still run fine and some have bugs with it. It was ok, ran smooth.

red5 · #49 11-02-2005, 03:54 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by jemsite

AMD sempron is fine... P4-like chip. Not a concern of yours for that price. I'd try to get a box with at least one PCI-express (or AGP) slot but that is probably beyond what you'd expand anyways and only a few low end boxes have them (gotta open them and look in the superstores emachines, HP, etc.).

Sempron and P4s should not be compared. Semprons are far inferior in speed but use less power than a P4. I would not even think about getting Sempron in a desktop. Honestly it is not much of an upgrade (if not a downgrade) from a faster P3.

Kennydoe - what is the model name and manufacturer of your p3? I had an old P3 733 Mhz box, and I replaced it with a 1 Ghz P3 chip ($45 on pricewatch). Previously I had added a lot of RAM to it. The speed difference was incredible, and I kid you not it is much faster than my Pentium4 3.2ghz laptop for everything except very large tasks like video editing. But my laptop will not run Counterstrike Source remotely playabily, and the P3 box will run it in low res mode playably so it is with an older video card in it! While the P3s are a little slower, they are just more stable. If you let me know what you have, I will see what upgrades it will accept for you.

And I recently bought a cheap motherboard with 2 GB RAM and 2 CPUs on **** and built a system from it. The CPUS were single processor CPUs - 1.2ghz Pentium III-D so I had to replace them with 2 Pentium III-S 1.4GHz. I could sell you a 1.2ghz CPU for cheap but I am not sure if the Tualatins will work in a Coppermine board - I can try it for you because I have a coppermine board and I have been meaning to try that for a while!

Anyway the dual P3 machine is insanely fast for anything that will use both CPUs. Does various tasks like compling large code projects and loading Windows and 100 Internet Explorer Windows faster than my laptop again and my friends Athlon 64. The only thing that my laptop does faster on is re-encoding a MPEG so I can put it on a DVD, but when I re-encode a video file on my laptop, I cannot do anything else with the computer.... it takes about 10 minutes just for me to hit stop or set the prioritty to idle, where it only uses 1 CPU on the desktop and is maybe 33% slower but I can still browse the web, check email, etc.

And of course replace your sound card with a M-Audio Audiophile if you have not already

Anyway my point is that less money in upgrades will go as long of a way as a $400 box as long as your board will support a faster CPU

If you need extra hard drive storage, try getting an external hard drive and a usb2 card for it. That way when you finally do get another box or if you need to move files to any other box, you can do that. I got one in August and I do not know how I survived this long without it.

red5 · #50 11-02-2005, 04:02 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by m0p

Now, what you shouldn't do is buy an HP or a Dell, both of them are flawed.

I would not recommend anyone ever buy a dell at any costs. I work at the helpdesk of my college and they now have a laptop requirement for freshman. We have got a ton of laptops in with bad everything already and they are only a month old (and some are not even that old).

HP screws you too. You are definitely best off building your own as the parts that companies like Dell use are parts that they buy from the manufacturer's for cheaper because they are what we call grade 3 parts. They are the lowest grade of parts that at one point before companies like Dell and HP found they could buy them cheaper, they would be thrown into a dumpster. Grade 3 parts are either defective to begin with and will never work at all, never work properly, or may work fine for a little while before they die. HP does it too, but I don't think anyone has made as many cost cutting moves as Dell.

red5 · #51 11-02-2005, 04:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by microdmitry

I'd hold off buying a Mac for now, until Intel versions come out. I've sold my G5 shortly after the announcement, and I'll buy an Intel one a couple of months after the release. Yeah, they're a bit more expensive than comparable PC. But they're works of art, inside and out. PC just doesn't cut it anymore.

The only reason I would buy a Mac would be to get the PowerPC. They are slower by clock speed than the x86, but they are ever so much more efficent and better coded processors which is why they are so commonly used in video editing. They can access RAM in half the clock cycles required by an x86 and perform vector operations in a small fraction of clock cycles required by an x86. Only problem was that Apple's partnership with Motororola and IBM screwed them as IBM, as with everything these days could not produce enough CPUs nor allocate the resources needed to get them up to speed.

For the overkill price of Apples, when they go x86 there will be absolutely NO reason to buy them. When you get into higher end machines, you can buy a "high end" gaming machine from Dell for $4500 made from Grade 3 parts or build the same thing made with Grade 2 parts (retail grade) for $2200 or less. Apple will probably charge roughly the same - $2200 for an upper end workstation (not gaming machine) that you can build for about $1200.

red5 · #52 11-02-2005, 04:07 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by kennydoe

well, i got the 6412 yesterday. what a total piece of crap.

Quote:

The one i'm using now is going to go to the kids' mother's house for them to use (they don't have one at their disposal there), but i want to keep the 160GB HD i just put in there for the music computer which only has a 20 GB hard drive. Gotta swap those out...and hope that Windows XP will work in a transplanted environment. I think there's only so many times microsoft will believe that i've installed XP on the same system

Thanks again for the help.

~K

If you need help getting it to work, send me a private message and I will be glad to help. You should be able to pt the 160GB in the new box and use your reinstall CDs and it should work fine.

ukwan · #53 11-02-2005, 04:34 PM

apple imac g5 :P

shredmaster · #54 11-08-2005, 03:18 PM

new pc's released at the time of kenny's thread posting are now outdated technology.

**jaxadam** · #55 11-08-2005, 03:41 PM

"Re: Need a new comptuer...what to get?" ----> Something with spellcheck... just kidding!

Just to give you some fun ideas:

This is what I'm doing to my gf's comp:

motherboard:
GIGABYTE GA-K8N Pro-SLI

>Socket 939 (AMD64)
>nVIDIA nForce4 SLI chipset
>FSB: 1ghz

Processor:
AMD 64-Bit x2 4200+/2.20GHz
Bus: 2ghz

Memory:
Corsair VS Dual Channel 2048mb (2x1024)
PC3200 DDR (400mhz fsb)

Video Card:
Asus GeForce 6800 GT

>256mb DDR3 Ram

Harddrives (2):
Western Digital 250GB SATA

>Spindle RPM: 7200
>Buffer: 8MB
>Seek: 8.9 miliseconds

Enemax 600-watt Dual Cooled

I'm going to partition hard drive to run something similar to Windows Vista (you coders out there probably know what I'm talking about) and Mandrake Linux.

It sounds like a lot, but it really isn't going to cost that much.

shredmaster · #56 11-14-2005, 11:11 AM

Quote:

Originally Posted by red5

I would not recommend anyone ever buy a dell at any costs. I work at the helpdesk of my college and they now have a laptop requirement for freshman. We have got a ton of laptops in with bad everything already and they are only a month old (and some are not even that old).

i have never had an issue with any of the 5 Dells i own or the Dell's here at the pc lab i work in daily....about 3000 Dell laptops and workstations. But maybe you got a bad batch. i will say that we have a desk set aside for the IBM tech that comes in EVERY OTHER DAY to fix or repair our IBM latpops and workstations. if it's not nic cards it's motherboards and if not that it's video cards. it's been constant for 2 years. i wouldn't take an IBM if you gave it to me.

JESTER700 · #57 11-14-2005, 11:33 AM

WRT brand reliability, you can't really rely on brand as an accurate measure, which is why there are so many different "stories" here. I mean, a given brand will have at least a few lines of laptop in a given year, with different LCD, video subsystem, mobo, hard drive, etc. So if one machine (say, an IBM T20, which was notorious for mobos going bad) causes problems for a company (especially if they buy a lot of them - say 100 laptops are due for replacement, and the T20 is what the buyer decides on) they're hosed as long as those PCs are in the pipeline. And you never get this data until the model is replaced by a new one!

My company only had a few T20's (which were problematic), but a ton of T23's (which have been reliable). I've had good experience with Dells, but only personal ones for wife & me, so the sample size is a lot smaller.

red5 · #58 11-17-2005, 02:56 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by shredmaster

i have never had an issue with any of the 5 Dells i own or the Dell's here at the pc lab i work in daily....about 3000 Dell laptops and workstations. But maybe you got a bad batch. i will say that we have a desk set aside for the IBM tech that comes in EVERY OTHER DAY to fix or repair our IBM latpops and workstations. if it's not nic cards it's motherboards and if not that it's video cards. it's been constant for 2 years. i wouldn't take an IBM if you gave it to me.

...and IBM laptops are known to hold up a lot better than Dells. Maybe you had a heavily after market modified bunch of Dells...

fettouhi · #59 11-17-2005, 04:51 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by red5

...and IBM laptops are known to hold up a lot better than Dells. Maybe you had a heavily after market modified bunch of Dells...

They have???? News to me, I would by a IBM laptop today especially since Lenovo bought the whole plus in 6 months IBM laptops are history anyway.

Regards

André

red5 · #60 11-19-2005, 09:50 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by fettouhi

They have???? News to me, I would by a IBM laptop today especially since Lenovo bought the whole plus in 6 months IBM laptops are history anyway.

Regards

André

^^ Yeah that's all they had going for them though was that you could kick them around and they would still, like the Toshibas would in the late 90s. They didn't cheap on the parts in them, but they put in a lot of cheap parts if you follow what Im saying.