(OT) Shopping For Computer: Help?

[zorlag]

Videocards

If you want so called "future-proof" videocard, I'll suggest one of these:

1. Radeon 9700pro or Radeon 9700 128 meg

- Fastest chip available at moment. Driver situation bit shaky, but getting better fast. Great picture quality and fast anistropic filtering (very good rendering texture quality). If you want to use highest graphics settings in games, this is your ticket.

2. Geforce4 Ti4200, Ti4400 or Ti4600 128meg

- Fast and reliable. Somewhat cheaper than 9700 radeon and drivers are more reliable. Poor anistropic filtering speed (quality is good) but has pretty good FSAA (Full Scene Antialiasing, smoothens out jagged edges in 3d games).

3. Radeon 9000pro, Radeon 8500 or Radeon 8500le 128 meg

- Good casual gamer and user cards. These have good picture quality, decent drivers and are very affordable. Speedwise rated they are: 8500 > 9000pro = 8500le (le is faster if you overclock).

Other chipsets are either too expensive (Matrox Parhelia), have poor rendering quality (Sis Xabre) or too slow (Kyro II) to recommed. I suggest you buy card with 128 memory since there already are games that are faster with 128 memory than 64 (Unreal Tournament 2003, Jedi Knight II for example).

Z.

 

[Psionicist]

with 512 mb pc 2700 memory (any more than this is a waste of money at this moment, unless you are running a server)

That is one of the most ignorant and false statements in this whole thread. If you encode lots of music, do heavy graphics/modelling and video editing, you will surely benefit from more than those 512mb RAM, and these are far from "server" tasks.

And now for something completely different (... or not really):

Videocard
As zorlag said, sort off. The FSAA performance of nvidia's cards basically, sucks. At least compared to Radeon 9700. The performance of a Ti4600 WITH 4xFSAA is 70% slower than without any FSAA. Compare this with 40% slower fro the Radeon 9700.

However, also not that those cheap ass Ti4200 ($150 or so) can overclock to at least Ti4400 speeds (not to hard to push it past the Ti4600 cards). That's $150 for good performance. The Radeon 9700 is $350 or so?

Anyhow, if you want the best, get the Radeon 9700 Pro, not something offbrand like powercolor, go Hercules or Ati (but those Ati-engineered cards are f**king expansive).

The combo of a fast P4 or Athlon XP, 512 MB of DDR 333 memory (don't bother with RAMBUS unless you've got money to burn), and a GeForce 4 Ti or Radeon 8500 (or better) will be a good box for quite a while. Generally speaking, the price premium for the absolute best isn't worth it.

We all know that RAMBUS stinks as a company, but the memory technology is still way better than one channel DDR, particularly for the quad pumped P4 platforum. You see, with DDR, the memory bus will get out of sync from the CPU bus. This is not the case with RDRAM. DDR, the first D is for dual. Lets say the FSB is 133 and you use a memory timing of 1:1, that's a memory clock of 266 MHz. The CPU bus is quadpumped, or 133*4, or 533 MHz. That is not so good.

However, with some nice quadpumped PC1066 RDRAM at x4 (133 fsb), the memory frequency is 533, the same as the CPU.

P4 with RDRAM is much "snappier" and feels more responsive and faster than a P4 with DDR.

If you can hold off you might want to wait a few more months for Serial ATA to shake out, and the new intel core to be available maybe with some nice tweakable chipsets.

I hardly belive we will se Serial ATA here in "the west" this year. Sure, Maxtor have created some disks and a whole lot of mobo companies put SATA support on their newer releases, but the technology is still in a very early state and I doubt there will be any noticable performance increase in "todays" SATA disks. However, I do belive the technology has some potential, but... not this year.

If you want a decent storage subsystem, get SCSI. You can get a really nice 36GB Cheetah (U160 interface, 15000 RPM - Yes, I am aware of U320, NO, don't bother with your 32bit PCI slots) and a controller card (LSI or Mylex perhaps? A big no for overpriced adaptec crap) for $300-$400.

And then get something large for datastorage. Put the apps and OS on SCSI and everyhing else on one of those 120GB (or so) IDE disks.

 

[Zappo]

You want dependability? Why not get a Macintosh and play all your games on an Xbox or PS2?

You know, I won't flame you. Instead, I'll just agree. Get a used computer at, say, 800 Mhz. You save literally thousands of dollars, since if you don't game 800 Mhz will be enough for anything (save video editing), and you get to play games that are just as good and more reliable. Since you've survived with a 433 Mhz until now, I reckon you are not really a heavy gamer, and as such you won't really suffer if every now and then a title comes out which you can't play. Unless you only play adventures, RPGs, and RTSs, you can game happily with a console and spend that money on a nice holiday or whatever you feel like. And by the way, with a 833 Mhz computer, a decent video card (Radeon 8500, eg), and a good bunch of RAM, you can play any current game. I have that configuration, and I run Morrowind fine, which is considered one of the heaviest games around, and any other game I tried excellently (or, it can run browser+email client+paint shop+word+excel+visual C+zangband+antivirus+firewall+something else without noticeable delay).

 

[Heretic Apostate]

Two things that pop into my (computer semi-literate) mind.

1) If you're buying a warranty (and that's important enough to consider), find out where you'll have to take it to get serviced. I found out that the two closest places to get my computer serviced were 60 and 80 minutes away. (Which contributed immensely to my getting hit in a rear-end collision....)

2) Don't obsess with top-of-the-line stuff. There is a pricing structure used in electronics and computers. When stuff comes out, it's high priced. VERY high priced. That's because there are people out there who will pay top dollar for stuff just for bragging rights. (Keep in mind, also, that games take years to develop, so most games start out designed for older components. If you spend all that money on top-line components, it may be a year or two before anyone puts out something to challenge the components. And even then, the publisher of that game would be shooting themselves in the foot, because how many people are REALLY going to be able to play the game with their older components?)

I'd rather buy older but reliable components, which have serious discounts compared to initial release. And NEXT time, I'm going to find someone who has associate authorized repair centers closer by. 30 minutes would be nice.

 

[Xeriar]

For one, you probably don't need more than half a gigabyte of RAM. Modern PC's will top out at 2-4 gigs, it's better to start on the lower end of that and wait until getting 2-4 gigs is pretty cheap.

If you're not seriously into gaming or rendering, there's no need to get their fastest card.

Try to get as little software as possible... Compaqs are terrible about this.

Perhaps the two most important components of your PC are your power supply and your motherboard. If you have the option of getting better MB's / Power Supplies, go for it. A good motherboard and power supply will take very very good care of the rest of your computer.

Once you've got your PC, you should find a friend who is comfortable with the run settings in your registry. They should be able to walk you through and filter out unwanted junk programs that start up without your knowledge.

 

[Psionicist]

For one, you probably don't need more than half a gigabyte of RAM. Modern PC's will top out at 2-4 gigs, it's better to start on the lower end of that and wait until getting 2-4 gigs is pretty cheap.

If you're not seriously into gaming or rendering, there's no need to get their fastest card.

Try to get as little software as possible... Compaqs are terrible about this.

Perhaps the two most important components of your PC are your power supply and your motherboard. If you have the option of getting better MB's / Power Supplies, go for it. A good motherboard and power supply will take very very good care of the rest of your computer.

Once you've got your PC, you should find a friend who is comfortable with the run settings in your registry. They should be able to walk you through and filter out unwanted junk programs that start up without your knowledge.

True, the motherboard and power supply are very important compnentes in your computer. For power supply, I'd recommend Antec Truepower or almost anything from PC Power & Cooling (www.pcpowerandcooling.com). Asus and Abit create good motherboards, so do Epox, MSI and a whole lots of other companies.

If, and note IF you buy a preassembled computer from one of the larger companies, I'd suggest you to call your local computer geek friend, do a format c: and reinstall the OS and all drivers. Most OEM companies install a whole lots of crap, old/bloated drivers, odd operating systems and so on.

 

[DarkJester]

What is a network card? Will I need one to get on the internet or anything important like that?

I worry about not geting something top of the line..... I bought this computer (Not top of the line at the time ...or ever for that matter) to play games on and it only took a few months for me to not be able to play any of the games I wanted to.

I rather pay 3000$ for something I can still play edgy games on in 2-3 years than 2000$ for one I can't. Or is that not the case?

I really don't want something that will be obsolete quickly, because I probly won't be able to buy another computer for a couple years.

 

[drothgery]

By your comments, I'm pretty sure that you don't even want to think about building your own box. Here's what I'd keep in mind

1. A fully decked out system (over $2500 before shipping and taxes) might have six months more usable life on the latest games than a more reasonably configured (about $1500 before shipping and taxes) one. And regular minor upgrades (like spending <$150 on more RAM or a new video card) can extend the useable life of a PC by a year or two.

2. No matter what you buy, in six months there were be significantly faster CPUs and video cards available for the same amount of money.

3. Even a low-end new system today is much faster than what you've got, and is probably quite capable of playing the latest games, or would be with inexpensive upgrades.

4. As other have mentioned, there's a large price premium for the highest-end products.

5. Adding memory or a new video card is not difficult, and next year's "budget" video cards will perform the same as this year's high-end cards.

So what I'd recommend doing is deciding how much you're going to spend, and if there are any components from your old computer that you want to keep (if you've got a high-quality, large monitor, there's no point in getting a new one). Then go to Dell.com and Gateway.com and configure a system that fits in your budget.

Hint: if you're spending over $2500, look at Dell's Dimension 8250 line, otherwise look at the Dimension 4550 line; stay away from the Dimension 2300 line, which has an overly budget-oriented design that makes it a terrible gamer's machine, and the 8200 line, which isn't significantly faster than the 4550 line, but costs more. I don't think the extra cost of the 8250 (which uses PC1066 RDRAM) is worth it, but if you're a hardcore gamer with money to burn, you might thing otherwise.

 

[Lord Zardoz]

My advice...

The amount of money you intend to spend on your computer is secondary to what you need to be able to do with it.

For the processor, you do not need a bleeding edge processor unless you like to frequenly recompile the Linux Kernel or other large programming projects. For most applications, the bottlenecks are no longer CPU dependent.

For the Ram, you can get by just fine with either 256mb or 512mb unless you do one of the following:

1) Heavy PC gaming
2) Heavy Graphics work (Photoshop or 3dsMax type of stuff)
3) Mass Data Manipulation (work with Databases and such)

Your choice of videocard should be governed by items 1 or 2 on the criteria for getting alot of RAM. Get at least a GeForce2 card. That will allow you to at least attempt to play most of the currently available games.

For the Hard Drive, get at LEAST 40 megs. If you tend to collect alot of mp3's, and movie clips, get alot more, especially if you do alot of peer to peer file sharing (like to use applications like KaZaa or Gnutella)

If you intend to watch dvd drives on your PC, then get a player. If you like to burn cd's, get a burner. If you like to burn profane amounts of cd's and often have your burner wear out, get an EXTERNAL cd burner. Its easier to replace external peripherials then it is to replace internal ones. As a bonus, you can bring the burner over to a friends house if the need arises.

For sound cards, I cannot really offer much advice. Getting the latest / newest thing from Creative Labs is always a safe bet.

As for a pre-packaged computer (Dell, Gateway) vs a custom job assembed by your self, there is only really one word of advice. Unless you are comfortable taking your computer apart or have a friend that is, get a pre-packaged one. If something fails on the pre-packaged one, then its probably under warranty.

One last thing. Since you post to this board, I can assume you play D&D. As such, you will probably be intrested in getting a printer. If you also intend to buy a new printer with your new computer, then for the love of all that is holy, do not get a cheap Inkjet printer. Get a laser printer if you can. With sub $100.00 Inkjet printers, you can end up paying more for ink refills then you did for the printer.

END COMMUNICATION

 

[Psionicist]

I myself will soon order some components for my new box:

Motherboard: MSI K7D Master-L. Why? 2cpu.com and generally everyone who have tested at least some dual athlon boards agree that this board... rules.
CPUs: 2x Athlon XP 2100+. Why? They are almost as cheap as the 2000+, however, the 2200+ is pretty expensive. This is the sweet spot, like 14 in an ability with point buy.
RAM: 512mb Kingston DDR (Reg/Ecc). Why? Less problems with registered RAM on multiprocessor setups. I am used to 256mb so this will be enought - for now.

Then we have case and power supply (antec performance series with a nice 430W true power PSU). Sound card (hercules fortissimo III). Video card (Ti4200 is enough for my needs, I don't game that much, and when I do it's generally older or "slow" games such as NWN, BG, War3 and so on).

So, why dual athlons? I multitask - alot. That, and I want a responsive system. I don't really care if I don't get the fastest possible gaming system around (say P4 2.8Ghz with a Radeon 9700), but I want a snappy system that can handle heavy load without "lag". Try to run an antivirus scan while you play and older game. It doesn't work that good right? It will soon though.

Also, when I sell my current computer, I will most likely buy a decent 64bit/66mhz SCSI card and a cheaper 10k disk (no, I'm not made of money).

I am one happy geek.