On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 21:48:03 -0500, kony wrote:

On Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:29:48 GMT, Jaser
wrote:

I'm a home/small office user. No games. Some multimedia. Music is
important.

I haven't bought a PC in years and first of all I'm trying to
sort out which processor family I should go for. The chipset is
important and I want one that is modern and provides a good range
of features like multiple PATA/SATA drives, lots of USB, good
onboard sound (or I'll have to buy a sound card). Has onboard
video come of age enough to handle movies easily?

Most chipsets these days support only 2 PATA drives, to use
more you would need to add a PCI or PCIe IDE controller
card. Most now handle several SATA drives, typically 4 or
more, and have varying levels of RAID support if that is
desired.

Most now have more USB ports than a normal person needs,
though of course a USB hub can be added and is convenient to
locate more ports within easy reach instead of having to
muck around behind the PC if you have several devices you
frequently remove (more than your case front USB could
handle if so equipped).

Since you wrote music is important, I would advise a
midrange or better PCIe sound card unless you only use
digital output, the analog on most boards leaves a lot to be
desired.

Onboard video is capable of handling HD movies easily,
though some of the lowest end chipsets don't do HD
acceleration which offloads some of the work from the CPU.
More important is probably whether the video includes the
output ports you need for your current and any future
monitor such as HDMI or DVI, at some point there will be no
good reason to buy a video device with analog output (at the
loss of the other digital outputs) and unless that is what a
present monitor you own has to use, that point is already in
your past.


Power consumption and noise are quite important.

All else equal unless you buy a high end system or
overclock, they are reasonably power efficient compared to
yesteryear's systems... some actually have lower power
consumption with a lot more performance. All integrated
systems (sound, and video especially) with a minimal number
of drives tend to be least power hungry, roughly 60W idle /
100W under load is not unusual. To get substantially lower
than that you would probably end up making concessions that
reduce the system's viable lifespan due to a large
performance hit to attain further power savings.

Noise goes along with power consumption, if picking a
pre-built PC from an OEM they tend to optimized for low
noise, with a local shop build you should specify you want
it as low noise as reasonably possible. Given a decent case
that doesn't impede airflow and has a suitable number and
size of fan mounts you can always swap a fan later, though
with an OEM system swapping to a lower RPM fan for noise
reduction could void the warranty and either way you would
want to monitor the change in temperature, but a basic PC
with only ~ 100W power consumption isn't hard to cool with
only a PSU exhausting and a low RPM 92mm or larger rear case
exhaust fan.




Value is important because I don't want to spend a lot. I'll pay
more up front if it's cheaper in the long run. But I don't want
obscure or little known hardware because getting help afterwards
can get lonely!

I had the impression you wanted a ready built OEM system.
To some extent they are all a little obscure, though if you
stick with a standard format (case) like mATX or ATX,
eventual upgrades or replacements need not be the same OEM
part if the warranty has expired so the replacement can
normally be found more expediently and less expensively.
There's really not one clear choice of OEMs here, many of
them have a standard desktop line which is positioned at the
lower price ranges depending on your chosen CPU, memory,
video, etc.




I saw a good page about processors but it's a bit too complicated
to help me. http://www.directron.com/howtochoosecpu.html


Generally the best choice for long term use is to fix the
budget for the whole system then see what is left for the
CPU after other requirements are met. In other words, for
what will seem a small difference in performance a couple
years from now you could easily pay twice as much for a
system, but ultimately you can consider your most demanding
uses and whether those justify allocating a larger % of
system budget towards CPU, more memory or storage, etc.



Can anyone advise on my points above and help with the steps I've
listed below.

STEP 1) I'm tending to go for Intel because AMD doesn't seem
significantly cheaper. (I still have glitches with my elderly AMD
cpu and XP's ntdll.dl and I don't want anything like that again.)

You're not likely to come upon a problem like that again,
whether AMD has more performance depends on exact range of
prices, at the very low end they can be a better value but
as you wrote, to most people the price difference as seen as
% of total system cost isn't much... but for specific models
you still have to look at what the budget allows, or bundled
pricing considering the possibility of OEM purchase.




STEP 2) Will I need 64 bit? Last time I looked the lack of 64 bit
apps was said to be a problem. Should i go for 64 bit?


Do you have need for more than 4GB memory, how long do you
anticipate using the system and do you have legacy
peripherals you can get drivers for to support a 64bit OS?
If you have no problems moving to 64bit, do so. If you do
have issues, as always their cons have to be weighed against
the pros.


STEP 3) What about mutliple cores/cpus? How do I narrow down the
selection in that web page. I read about extra cores/cpus not
helping unless there were certain types of workload. Without a
ton of detail about multiprocessing and threads and all that,
what's the bottom line?


... there isn't one. It does depend on the software you
run, a dual core system is highly preferred, quad core more
appropriate once you get beyond the lowest-cost systems, but
ultimately the more cores you have the less often you will
utilize them all especially if you aren't running modern
premium software. In the end you need to focus on most
demanding use, exact software title and version to see how
much additional CPU cores would benefit you, but for long
term use a quad core system is probably the best value as
future software will tend to make more and more use of
multiple cores.

I tend to agree with most of this but if price is important I wouldn't
bother with a quad core CPU. You can get some good low power CPUs
from AMD and a low power system will be easier to keep quiet.

And I find a lot of OEMs tend to build down to a price, so you are
likely to get a noisy system with cheap components.
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