pc system recommendations

Hi Guys,

This is my second post on the subject so perhaps what I'm looking for
doesn't exist??I'm looking for sites or resources that have recommendations
for computer systems i.e. Systems that folks have already
purpose built under certain criteria or categories and can be recommended.
You know,heres what I built,why I built it,and how it turned out.
Any help appreciated



--
Kind Regards,
David

Not sure if something, like that, exists. Forums/NG's may be your only
resource, for that. Some threads can get fairly long and have lots of
info.

I'll start the ball rolling...

Why I built it:

Finally recovering from financial disaster caused by taking a 'sabbatical'
(read: I quit my job and moved to the beach). Last box, before I did
that, was a very outdated Duron 950/576MB PC100/GF3Ti200.

I like gaming. Never (not overly) did, before. But, recently, I'm
getting lots of games for free and I love the eye candy. I, also, love
the fact that it's a very good test of system stability/performance at
that fullest. Old box would run the games fine (the GF3Ti200 is o/c'd to
250/550). However, would get kinda choppy where heavy shading/lighting
was used (e.g. at night, in Mafia. snow, in Flytrap mission in Comanche4.
Postal2, period lol). And, anyway, it's my hobby. Just was broke for a
year and a half.

What I built:

Decided that AMD is just not my cup of tea, lately. Been loyal to them,
for 5yrs. Heard about 800MHz FSB, 400MHz memory bus, and Hyperthreading.
Decided to give it a whirl....

Intel D865GBF Motherboard (fried 3 CMOS chips in the Asus PC4800 board,
with the [ASUS!!!!] GF3Ti200...reason for getting the Intel board. Store
wasn't getting the 875 Intel board, until next day. After 3 boards, I was
****ed...not waiting Glad I did that. Only diff, as far as I know, is
Gigabyte LAN and $100 bucks more).

Intel P4 2.4C Processor
2x256MB Samsung PC3200 (CSL 3.0...it's all they had)
Allied 400W PSU
Sony CRX220E1 CD-RW

Left everything else intact [(generic 52x CDROM, floppy, case, GF3Ti200,
WD 40Gb 7200rpm HDD (ATA5/66), WD 20Gb 5400 HDD (ATA4/33)]

How it turned out:

After 4 weeks, I'm still very pleased. I can't think of one thing this
box can't do, except make my breakfast. In 3 weeks' time, I will be
slapping an ATI 9700 in. I can, already, enable all FSAA and VSync in
games. But, performance suffers. My GPU, for once, is my bottleneck.
Overall, I'm VERY impressed. Installing, defragging, burning/ripping,
anything CPU-intensive, anything memory-intensive.....it's all, still,
blowing my mind.

YMMV


-
David Lewis stood up, at show-n-tell, and said:

Hi Guys,

This is my second post on the subject so perhaps what I'm looking for
doesn't exist??I'm looking for sites or resources that have
recommendations for computer systems i.e. Systems that folks have
already
purpose built under certain criteria or categories and can be
recommended. You know,heres what I built,why I built it,and how it
turned out.
Any help appreciated

--
Strontium

"Shortcuts are self-defeating. Mean. If you cannot do it,
clean, you'll never reach your reward..." - 311

Ooops, forgot to add that my transition was not as drastic as it seems.
My girlfriend has an XP 2100+ box that I've used quite a bit. I can't say
that I was 'wow-ed'. So, while it's definitely a 'leap', it's still
impressing me on lots of points.

-
Strontium stood up, at show-n-tell, and said:

snip

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 22:11:28 GMT, "David Lewis"
wrote:

Hi Guys,

This is my second post on the subject so perhaps what I'm looking for
doesn't exist??I'm looking for sites or resources that have recommendations
for computer systems i.e. Systems that folks have already
purpose built under certain criteria or categories and can be recommended.
You know,heres what I built,why I built it,and how it turned out.
Any help appreciated


Why do you want a thing like that? Do you expect the info provided to
be objective - NOT. People will tend to only give you the goods and
skip the bads. If one spend enough time to write an objective
treatment to his built, frankly by the time he finishes, the hardware
is been outdated, and not something you would likely to purchase
anyways. Try another road to your destination.





-bobb

-
bobb stood up, at show-n-tell, and said:

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 22:11:28 GMT, "David Lewis"
wrote:

Hi Guys,

This is my second post on the subject so perhaps what I'm looking for
doesn't exist??I'm looking for sites or resources that have
recommendations for computer systems i.e. Systems that folks have
already
purpose built under certain criteria or categories and can be
recommended. You know,heres what I built,why I built it,and how it
turned out.
Any help appreciated


Why do you want a thing like that? Do you expect the info provided to
be objective - NOT. People will tend to only give you the goods and
skip the bads. If one spend enough time to write an objective
treatment to his built, frankly by the time he finishes, the hardware
is been outdated, and not something you would likely to purchase
anyways. Try another road to your destination.


What you are saying, is that discussion is futile? You lost me, on this
one, bobb.









-bobb

--
Strontium

"Shortcuts are self-defeating. Mean. If you cannot do it,
clean, you'll never reach your reward..." - 311

On Thu, 10 Jul 2003 19:30:30 -0500, "Strontium"
wrote:

What you are saying, is that discussion is futile? You lost me, on this
one, bobb.


Once again, how old are you kids???

I am saying open-ended, "I really don't know what I want" discussion
is useless. At least you should have an idea what kind of PC do you
want - small footprint? large capacity? overclocked? multimedia? a
Video composer machine? Email and Surfing only? a Gamer?

There are lots of sites with home built machines and I have never,
ever seen one where the author when into the logic why he did it ('cuz
it was fun?) and what kind of troubles he encountered. Basically they
all just post a couple of jpg's and go ta-da! that was fun.

Go here http://www.bluesmoke.net/viewGallery.php?id=case and look at
one-of-a-kind boxes. It's fun to look at, but don't try to understand
why they did it without consulting your psychologist.





-bobb

Hi Strontium, thanks for reply..see inline

Strontium wrote:
SNIP

Intel D865GBF Motherboard (fried 3 CMOS chips in the Asus PC4800
board, with the [ASUS!!!!] GF3Ti200...reason for getting the Intel
board. Store wasn't getting the 875 Intel board, until next day.
After 3 boards, I was ****ed...not waiting Glad I did that. Only
diff, as far as I know, is Gigabyte LAN and $100 bucks more).

Interesting.I was also looking at intel vs Asus motherboards.I wonder if
others had same problems with the Asus?

Intel P4 2.4C Processor
2x256MB Samsung PC3200 (CSL 3.0...it's all they had)
Allied 400W PSU
Sony CRX220E1 CD-RW
Left everything else intact [(generic 52x CDROM, floppy, case,
GF3Ti200, WD 40Gb 7200rpm HDD (ATA5/66), WD 20Gb 5400 HDD (ATA4/33)]

How it turned out:

After 4 weeks, I'm still very pleased. I can't think of one thing
this box can't do, except make my breakfast. In 3 weeks' time, I
will be slapping an ATI 9700 in. I can, already, enable all FSAA and
VSync in games. But, performance suffers. My GPU, for once, is my
bottleneck. Overall, I'm VERY impressed. Installing, defragging,
burning/ripping, anything CPU-intensive, anything
memory-intensive.....it's all, still, blowing my mind.

YMMV

OK Thanks.I will be including more RAM and faster processor,so nice to know
how the above worked out for you!:-)


--
Kind Regards,
David

Strontium wrote:

What you are saying, is that discussion is futile? You lost me, on
this one, bobb.

He lost me too.
--
Kind Regards,
David

-
David Lewis stood up, at show-n-tell, and said:

Hi Strontium, thanks for reply..see inline

Strontium wrote:
SNIP

Intel D865GBF Motherboard (fried 3 CMOS chips in the Asus PC4800
board, with the [ASUS!!!!] GF3Ti200...reason for getting the Intel
board. Store wasn't getting the 875 Intel board, until next day.
After 3 boards, I was ****ed...not waiting Glad I did that. Only
diff, as far as I know, is Gigabyte LAN and $100 bucks more).

Interesting.I was also looking at intel vs Asus motherboards.I wonder
if others had same problems with the Asus?

I don't think so. The owner of the shop (I've used this place for about
4yrs, good people) said they've sold a lot of those boards, and have not
heard of any problems. I'm thinking it's my card's overclock /shrug.
Needless to say, I felt pretty damned foolish returning 3 boards in two
days! Ended up buying a cheap GF4 MX440SE just to be sure, with the Intel
board. Then, got tired of non-hardware support for gaming and tried my
luck with my GF3 The Intel board is nice and stable. But, if you want
to overclock, Asus is the way to go (more options in CMOS). However, I
don't see why anyone would even want to overclock such a fast system. I
o/c'd the GF3, purely to get more out of it. And, it's not proven to be
an unworthwile endeavor.


Intel P4 2.4C Processor
2x256MB Samsung PC3200 (CSL 3.0...it's all they had)
Allied 400W PSU
Sony CRX220E1 CD-RW
Left everything else intact [(generic 52x CDROM, floppy, case,
GF3Ti200, WD 40Gb 7200rpm HDD (ATA5/66), WD 20Gb 5400 HDD (ATA4/33)]

How it turned out:

After 4 weeks, I'm still very pleased. I can't think of one thing
this box can't do, except make my breakfast. In 3 weeks' time, I
will be slapping an ATI 9700 in. I can, already, enable all FSAA and
VSync in games. But, performance suffers. My GPU, for once, is my
bottleneck. Overall, I'm VERY impressed. Installing, defragging,
burning/ripping, anything CPU-intensive, anything
memory-intensive.....it's all, still, blowing my mind.

YMMV

OK Thanks.I will be including more RAM and faster processor,so nice
to know how the above worked out for you!:-)

Yep, it's pretty sweet!


--
Strontium

"Shortcuts are self-defeating. Mean. If you cannot do it,
clean, you'll never reach your reward..." - 311

Strontium wrote:
-
bobb wrote :

Once again, how old are you kids???

I'm a 34yr old kid. How about you?

I'm a 48 yr old kid and like most sensible people trying to resist the
pressures to grow up too quickly! vbg

"No man loves life like him that's growing old. " Sophocles (496 BC - 406
BC), Acrisius.Perhaps the trick is growing up without growing old!

Again, you lost me. OP was wanting some baselines. You could've
provided one. But, instead prefer to try and sound superior. Not
very helpful, IMO.

Maybe he was having a Bad day ? I must confess I've never really understood
the psychology of the "Rant". If Bobb thought my OP was ridiculous-and many
Newbie posts probably are-then why not reply in a helpful many instead?..You
know,"Hey buddy I think you're barking up the wrong tree here,maybe try this
approach instead..."

BTW I have come across a few sites with pc system recommendations so others
must find it useful also.Trouble is they are sometimes over a year
old...which is great if your shopping for formerly top stuff at now bargain
prices but not if you want the latest and greatest and willing to pay the
price premium.

--
Kind Regards,
David