Computer Recommendation?

[bikinpunk]

Okay, took the computer to the shop today. Things are looking bad. Guy said it sounds like it's fried, but he's still going to do some diagnostic work on it to find out for sure. However, my gut's telling me it's a goner too.

Therefore, I'm looking at a new computer just in case. My options are pretty much limited to BB or Dell (I have a BB card already, and Dell is offering good 0% financing for 12 months). I'm looking at a desktop, b/c what I want out of a notebook will hurt the wallet big time. I'd like to stay equal or below $1000 since all I need is a good cpu tower. No monitor, speakers, etc. I previously had a Pentium D 820 w/ 1g ram, 256 mb video, and other stuff. For what I paid for that I can definately get something better now. I'm just not sure of the processing unit. I never play games, unless it's emulated nes games. I mainly need something for video editing, photo editing, and CAD projects. I would like to be able to connect to my TV later in the future. I want something that has plenty of room to expand. I'd like DVI input. I had Media Center previously, but rarely used it, however if I find a good tower w/it already included I'll take it. Do you recommend a Dual processor, or AMD 64 processor? I'm told the AMD's are usually better for gaming (which I'll likely rarely do).

Cliff's Notes: Which do you suggest- AMD or Pentium? (office products, CAD, video editing, no gaming)

[06CivEXJon]

Like i said. I have a friend in the computer business that can do killa deals my friend.

[bikinpunk]

I appreciate the offer, but I can't afford not to finanace right now.

If this hadn't happened the week before school it would be different. I have to buy books and pay for classes. THIS SUUUUCKS!

[Jerlent]

Sorry to hear about your computer. Hope you didn't have too much invested in it. I'd personally recommend an AMD 64 processor over the Intel. You can still get a dual core AMD 64 that will be just as fast if not faster than the Intel chip. However the big problem is that your going to have a tough time finding a good somewhat high end computer that has a AMD 64 processor. Most computer makers will only use AMD on their entry level units. Your best bet might to get a custom computer made. You may be able to finance it depeding on where you get it from. If all else fails, go for the Dell. You'll generally get a good price, pretty good cust svc and enough computer muscle to get through the CAD and vid/pic editing. I've built computers before for friends and family so i do have some background in this. Let me know if you need any help.

[NightKidsGTR]

Paypal me the money and I will build you a computer. LOL.

I'd personally go with Best Buy; Dell's quality and customer service has been lacking lately. Plenty of customer service horror stories out there.

[supersly_jones]

http://www.bestbuy.com/site/olspage....=1149204270227

64 dual core and 2 gig memory lightscribe 320 gb hdd 7200 rpm...can't do much better i don'e think for a grand oh yeah..and built in tv tuner only downside is sharded memory up to 256 which isn't that bad for your purpose

[Lucky13]

go get a DELL

[Cybergypsy]

Mac.....

[Mondo1287]

I've probably built well over 500 computers, maybe close to a thousand. AMD vs Intel is moot, it just depends on the current market and where your budget fits on the price/perfomance scale. Right now, without question, Intel's Conroe based Core Duo chips are THE chips to get. These new chips blow anything from AMD out of the water. They have forced AMD to cut prices by about 50% on their entire line. The problem is there are very few motherboards on the market that support Conroe and the good ones are pretty pricey. In a month or two we should see some midrange boards on the market. My current system is a single core Athlon 64 based, a 1.8 3000+ Venice overclocked at 2.6ghz. A $200 overclocked Conroe chip will completely smoke this system, like a DX civic vs an STi lol. Anyway though, back on topic, for a budget system this is a great time to build a cheap Athlon 64 machine. You can also expect retail branded Athlon 64 sytems to drop significantly in price shortly if they already have not. At work I buy everything from Dell though, we get service and pricing from Dell no one can touch. I'd highly recommend a Dell system, just buy the gold technical support, even if you have to use it once its worth it. No hold times, and you'll get an english speaking american that probably lives in the same city you do. No offence to any overseas call center workers that may be on 8thcivic :)

[ohiocivicracer]

++ for mondo1287 conroe is prob the best bet at the moment, but if your low on cash, amd x2 really dropped in prices, i just bought a 3200 for like 120... which is a good deal, i prefer the opterons over them, but for the price drop on the 3200 because of the conroe is just too good to pass up, anyways

good cheap setup

amd 3200+
DFI Lanparty UT motherboard
1gig ram
xxgb hard drive
ATI x800xt, or X850xt (ebay prob best bet for good prices)
the DFI has onboard sound...
the all you need are drives, and a case...

[Mondo1287]

Yeah I am probably going to pick up an X2 myself here shortly. My main system is almost identical to yours, same motherboard even.

[ohiocivicracer]

well mine...

opteron 165
ATI X1900xtx
3x 320gb 16mb sata
DFI Lanparty UT
Creative X-fi fat1lty or w/e it is.. lol never get the 1 right
2gig pc4000 (/w leds :-P)

[Diablo99V]

www.alienware.com Check their finance offers. Don't drool.

[GameTraveler]

This may be long...my apologies, but you've been warned...

Originally Posted by bikinpunk

Okay, took the computer to the shop today. Things are looking bad. Guy said it sounds like it's fried, but he's still going to do some diagnostic work on it to find out for sure. However, my gut's telling me it's a goner too.

What exactly did he say? And where did you take it?

Originally Posted by bikinpunk

My options are pretty much limited to BB or Dell (I have a BB card already, and Dell is offering good 0% financing for 12 months).

Nothing else? Not maybe a part or two over a short period of time, without financing? Maybe over a 3-6 month period?

Originally Posted by bikinpunk

I'm looking at a desktop, b/c what I want out of a notebook will hurt the wallet big time. I'd like to stay equal or below $1000 since all I need is a good cpu tower.

Total budget is a $1000 or is that $1000 over 12 months?

Originally Posted by bikinpunk

I previously had a Pentium D 820 w/ 1g ram, 256 mb video, and other stuff.

Did that 'guy' tell you if any of this was salvagable? Was your last PC a clone?

Originally Posted by bikinpunk

I never play games, unless it's emulated nes games. I mainly need something for video editing, photo editing, and CAD projects.

It's all relative.

Originally Posted by bikinpunk

Do you recommend a Dual processor, or AMD 64 processor?
Cliff's Notes: Which do you suggest- AMD or Pentium? (office products, CAD, video editing, no gaming)

Tall order.

Originally Posted by Jerlent

You may be able to finance it depeding on where you get it from. If all else fails, go for the Dell. You'll generally get a good price, pretty good cust svc and enough computer muscle to get through the CAD and vid/pic editing.

That is a waaaaaay too subjective and touchy subject. For some, Dell service is awesome...for others, it's a long blog somewhere on the 'net saying Dell is one large POS. *shrug*

Originally Posted by hondadriver

Get a custom tower from a local reputable computer shop. If you do go with a franchise like Best Buy/Future Shop, avoid extended warranty. DO NOT go with Dell. Just go on their online forums, and the problems people experience and how Dell deals with them will definitely turn you off (I bought a laptop from them, and cancelled my order due to this).

As far as AMD vs INTEL: Because you are working with video editing and CAD software, I would recommend Intel. I used to be a network admin for a manufacturing company, and we

always used intel because that is 'the standard' for all the 'mainstream' CAD and video software [we used to make demo videos of our products]. This wasn't my choice - we talked with different consultants and Intel was always recommended for compatibility reasons.

AMD's also get insanely hot, so if the fan died on the processor, you are looking at major damage.

Meh. CPU brand makes little difference, and is a subjective discussion.
Compatibility is not the issue, since they both speak the same x86 language since the very first PC. Intel's run hotter than AMD now-a-days.

Originally Posted by hondadriver

I am not completely against AMD; My laptop I just bought a few days ago has an AMD Turion 64. It is definitely more quiet than its Intel competition, and as far as speed goes, I do light stuff on this laptop so I'll never notice a difference.

Dual core vs single core: All depends on what you are doing. Dual core can be slower if heavy software you are using doesn't take advantage of the dual core feature... in that case it is running heavy processing through one of the two cores which is typically slower than an actual single core processor (that is in the same price range). If you are chatting, working on a Word doc, and using light CAD software with a small-medium size file, I imagine dual core would work to your benefit. For Nintendo emulators, I would think that dual/single core doesn't matter since the games aren't heavy right? If you are
into "modern" computer games, single core is the way to go - much more powerful for heavy games.

That's just plain wrong, no offense meant. I can't even sugar coat that. Does a stock V8 run slower than an stock I4? On the other hand, Intel's HyperThreading is a complete bust. If you have an Intel Xeon with Hyperthreading enabled, running any type of SQL database, it will run slower. Hyperthreading creates a virtual processor, but is *not* a true dual processor technology.

As for gaming, most games aren't written to take advantage of more than 1 core, virtual or otherwise. At best, games that recognize dual cores, show a 10% performance boost.

There's no mention of which operating system, Windows or something else. In windows, the processor affinity can be set, so *ANY* application can be stuck with processing on only 1 core.

Originally Posted by Mondo1287

AMD vs Intel is moot, it just depends on the current market and where your budget fits on the price/perfomance scale.

Right on!

Originally Posted by Mondo1287

Right now, without question, Intel's Conroe based Core Duo chips are THE chips to get. These new chips blow anything from AMD out of the water. They have forced AMD to cut prices by about 50% on their entire line. The problem is there are very few motherboards on the market that support Conroe and the good ones are pretty pricey. In a month or two we should see some midrange boards on the market.

This is very close, but it's highly dependent on what you're using it for. AMDs have tended to demonstrate a better math ability, so you'll find faster calculations for math heavy apps. Intels have had the faster memory access--doesn't matter how fast the math is if you can't get it from main RAM into the CPU to get worked on; gas in the pump does nothing for your engine if it doesn't get into the tank.

Originally Posted by Mondo1287

Anyway though, back on topic, for a budget system this is a great time to build a cheap Athlon 64 machine. You can also expect retail branded Athlon 64 sytems to drop significantly in price shortly if they already have not. At work I buy everything from Dell though, we get service and pricing from Dell no one can touch. I'd highly recommend a Dell system, just buy the gold technical support, even if you have to use it once its worth it. No hold times, and you'll get an english speaking american that probably lives in the same city you do. No offence to any overseas call center workers that may be on 8thcivic :)

I suppose. I get e-mail newsletters and codes all the time from Dell for Home/SOHO, Small Business and Enterprise purchases, since it's easy enough to get a Dell account. With a $1000 budget, I highly doubt he'll order the gold support.

Anyway, what did tech guy say at the computer store? Is there anything in there you can still save, to possibly use on a new computer? The case? The power supply? Hard drive? Video card? RAM?

There's no mention of which specific applications or operating system.

Photo Editing - Photoshop?
Video Editing - Anything specific? Premiere? Final Cut?
CAD - AutoCAD? SolidWorks?
Office apps will work even on a lowly Celeron/Sempron...so this isn't much of an issue.

You could take the BestBuy card or find some bargain on Dell parts to rebuild your machine.

Find a techie at your school or work, and see what they say. Get a second opinion as well, though.

For the photo/video/CAD apps, those are dual core/processor aware; plus lots of RAM and a fast hard drive wouldn't hurt. Lastly, a good video card would go along way to render or work with what you're doing easily. There's a reason that nVidia and ATI have encroached on the professional workstation market that used to only have SGI and 3DLabs to represent professional video cards. The larger RAM on the video card, the larger the resolution you can display.

And if the machine can play the lastest games fast with a high resolution, then that same machine could render CAD or manipulate video as well as the rendering stations that graphic designers only dreamed of years ago. Even if you don't play games, consider that all those pixels on the screen to render a realistic scene in real time, with an interactive response.

Try this:
* Research, research, research. If it's worth it, spend the time to make the right choice.
* Adobe apps tend to create their own temporary file space to work with outside of the Windows pagefile. Get more RAM to offset this, and use that less. I'd suggest getting 2 GB of RAM to start with.
* Video editing...you don't like dropped frames or going below frames per second; something like 24 fps at least, right? Look to a faster hard drive and better video card with more video RAM (256 MB on the video card is a good start, but more will help). The faster hard drive will store the video quickly and easily. Western Digital Raptors are expensive, or you can create a RAID--more on this some other time though.

My $.02

P.S. Oh, it isn't the number of machines I've built--stopped counting years ago--nor the computer jobs I've had--the resume would be longer than this post, and certifications that would leave a stack of paper. Gamers and graphics/CAD designers/artists are two sides of the same coin, since they use the same uber machines for different tasks.

P.P.S. Hmmmm, comparing, um shoe sizes too...well:

AMD Opteron 170 dual core 0550 UPMW CCB1E mild OC to 2.6 Ghz
Thermalright SI-120 & Panaflo 115CFM 120mm fan
Asus A8N32-SLI Deluxe
OCZ 550W PSU
2 GB OCZ EL Gold XTC PC4000 3-4-3-8
eVGA e-GeForce 7950 GX2
Chaintech AV710 7.1
SysKonnect 9E21D PCIe x1
Areca 1230 SATA PCIe x8 RAID controller 256 MB cache + BBU
4 x 74 GB Western Digital Raptors in RAID0
1 x 200 GB Seagate sATA JBOD
BenQ DW1640 DVD-RW/CD-RW
Thermaltake Armor full-size ATX, black
Hitachi CML174 17" LCD
WinXP SP2




Just a small machine of mine...