New Computer

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After having a horrible time running Windows Media Center on my 5+ year old computer I finally convinced my wife to purchase a new one. This new computer should be three times faster than my old PC. Here are the stats for each PC. The cost for my new toy was around $1300. Do you guys/gals think I paid too much?

Old Computer – HP Pavilion
Socket A AMD Athlon 900 MHZ
PC-133 256 RAM
Seagate 30GB Hard-drive
4X AGP 8MB Nvidia Video Card
12X CDR Drive
48X CD Rom Drive
17” CRT Monitor
Onboard sound card
Windows Media Center 2004
PS Mouse and Keyboard

New Computer – Order Parts from Tigerdirect (I am so excited)
Socket 939 AMD Athlon 64 3700+ San Deigo Processor 2.4GHZ
PC 3200 1GB of RAM
Maxtor 250GB Hard-drive with 16MB Cache
PCIe 512MB DDR2 SLI Nvidia Video Card
19” Acer LCD Monitor with Speakers
PCIe 8 Channel Audio
Windows Media Center 2005 with Remote Control
16X DVD Rom Drive
12X DVD Burner
USB Mouse and Keyboard
Memory Card Reader

 

This thread should be posted in Technomagic

 

Yeah but still that's an impresive machine you've got, well compared to mine at least. I wish I had a new compy. Congratulation man!

 

Why do you need a remote for Media Player? Also, how are you playing CDs in a DVD drive?

 

DVDs player also read regular CDs.

 

I'm just not quite sure why you'd want to have Media Center on your system to begin with. But that's really up to you.

I don't think you've overpaid, the monitor by itself costs a small fortune. You probably could have gotten something cheaper and less powerful, but at least with this monster you know you won't need an upgrade for the next five years at least, and this is money saved on the long run. You could perhaps have gone for a 300Gb hard drive for a negligible price increase, but that's all right, you're going to have trouble filling up the 250Gb anyway!

Congratulations. I'm sure you're going to enjoy your system the next time you run Doom 3 on FSAA x8 and Anisotropic Filtering x8 at a flawless frame rate

 

Yeah....Here's my $0.02

First off...are you buying solely off of Tigerdirect? You can find cheaper prices and sometimes free shipping on items atNewegg.com or Zip Zoom Fly. I shop at those two places the most often.

Now for your choices on your new computer...
First, are you going to use your new computer as a 'Home Theater PC' (i.e. hooking up a larger screen or a projector to watch TV or movies)? If not, then Windows MC might not be the best choice.

Now as for your SLI video card...I'm guessing that you aim to one day have two connected together. These are video cards for gamming. If you wanted the HTPC, you should have considered one of ATI's All-in-wonder' cards. The ATI AIW Radeon X800XL, is a great card that has TV and FM tuners built in, and it can still handle the newest games.

But that's just me.

 

The new one won't be three times as fast. That's the problem with those MHz/GHz ratings. Doubling the processor speed only provides a 10-15% boost in performance at best.

That said, $1300 wasn't a bad price at all.

 

The amount you paid sounds about right. That's pretty much the specs of a mainstream machine, at a fair price, IMO. So you should be satisfied with the results. LCD monitors are very cheap, atm. So, most of the cost you paid should be in the computer parts.

 

I purchased a newer computer to do a two main things: gaming and video editing.

I have a young daughter who I hope to capture as many unique moments as possbile and with my old PC it is next to impossible to capture those moments. The old PC barely can handle the pictures and short video clips I take on my Cannon G2. I would hate to imagine how it would handle a 30 minutes video from a camcorder. My goal now is to burn DVD movies of my daugther and give them away as gifts to her grandparents for Xmass and other special occasions.

The other thing I am doing with this PC is burning shows my wife watches on TV. Yeah I forgot to order a TV Tuner, but that is only $50, so no biggie.

I am also going to make DVD slide shows from the pictures I take on my digital cameras. I lost roughly 200+ pictures of my daughter when my old computer crashed on me and I would hate to have that happen again.

If my wife doesn't mind the computer is going to be in our bedroom and act as our TV/entertainment system.

GAMING: Who doesn't want to be able to boast about a decently powerful video card, ram to handle the new games and a processor that can be over clocked from 2.2GHZ to 3.8GHZ with the right cooling fan. Of course in my $1300 package I order a high end cooling fan that should keep the CPU cool when overclocked.

The other reason why I upgraded is that the old computer just sucked. As for the Hard Drive I purchased that one over the 300GB one because it had 16MB cache vs. 8MB cache. And for me speed is everything.

 

Yes, I have a Maxtor 250GB HD, with 16MB of cache as well, and it seems a shade faster than my old WD, 8MB SE edition drive. But the WD was a bit quieter and ran a little cooler, from what I can tell. Maxtor drives are pretty fast, but not known for reliability. Nevertheless, I have never had a problem with Maxtor drives, so I would not worry too much about losing your data.

As for the processor and video card - they will be out of date in 6 months anyway, but that's just the nature of the technology game. IMO, a computer is not really out of date until you think it is. But video cards turnover very quickly. A video card that costs $500.00 today will probably be slower than a $200.00 mainstream video card 6 months from now....

 

My brother had two Maxtor drives some year ago. Same model, same specs, bought at the same time. One spontaneously combusted a couple of years later, the other one is still up and running. So I guess they're pretty good. Although if you're looking for reliability I think Seagate has the best drives longevity wise. Hitachi's aren't bad, but they used to be better.

 

Not sure what your Video Card is - but in todays PCs they are the most expensive component. I'm guessing you got some sort of 6800 ultra. Considering the 512mb 7800gtx only came out the other day and probably costs about $700. Still a good PC - and you will easily get 3 times the speed if you look at it in terms of Frames per second you'll probably get 10 times or more. I imagine most of the other CPU intensive tasks you will do will happen much quicker too. At the end of the day an Athlon 64 3700+ not only runs at 2.5 times the speed it is also heavily optimised over an old Athlon 32 bit CPU. There are things that aren't even worth attempting on an old PC like that - like running Far Cry or Doom 3 for example.

 

Yes, they used to be IBMs. But that's a whole other tale.

 

Here are the exact parts I ordered. I know my graphic card is not a name brand but every where I read it was recommended considering the price of $135. My total for this package before shipping was a $1259. Not bad because I built similar systems at other websites and the price is closer to $1800+.

Motherboard – Abit AN8-V - with Abit Audiomax 8 channel audio card
CPU – AMD 64 3700+ San Diego 2.2GHZ
1GB of Corsair PC3200 400MHZ Ram
Liteon DVD Burner
Liteon DVD 16x Drive
Maxtor EIDE 250GB Hard Drive 16MB Ultra ATA-133
Diablotek Geforce 6600 512MB PCIe Video Card
Windows XP Media Center with remote controller
Acer 19” LCD with Speakers
Aopen Black/Silver Keyboard and Optical Mouse combo
2x Corsair 512 PC3200 400MHZ Ram
Just 4 PC ATX Case with 425W Power Supply
Cooler Master Vortex CPU Fan
2x 80mm Case Fans
20 Premium DVD Cases
25 DVD RW Disc

 

You should definitely see quite a bit of speed difference with quadruple the RAM and the huge graphic card. Congratulations!!

Now to the important and most impressive part how in God's name did you talk your wife into getting a new PC? I could use a transcript of that oratorical masterpiece to try on my wife.

 

Brallrock try my logic, but it only works if you have children. My wife and I had a beautiful daughter back in March and we had a old 8MM camcoder that was dropped and destroyed. Since than my wife has been wanting a new camcoder. I told her it would be to have a computer to go along with the camcoder so I could do some video editing and burn the videos on DVDs and pass them out to our parents and grandparents, etc...

My wife liked that idea and we started to check out both camcoders and computers. After about 2 months I convinced her it was cheaper to built a computer than to buy one prebuilt. So I was able to order the parts I wanted for the Computer but it took a few phone calls from a few friends who know computers to get her to trust my judgement with the purchase. After she trusted me I did my research and purchased the parts I felt would be great for video editing and gaming. That is why I went with the San Diego chip set over the venice from AMD. The San Diego is suppose to be a better CPU for Video Editing whereas the venice is the standard single chipset for basic computing. We order the computer a few days before we purchased our camcorder which is a Panasonic PV-GS19. I know it is not the most expensive DV camera they offer but it offers more than enough features for what my wife and I are going to do with the camcoder. Now the computer is suppose to last me roughly 5 years so I should be ok for most of that time, hopefully!

Forgot one thing: My new computer totally makes my old computer look like it is 50+ years old. My system now flys through window applications and averages over 50 frames on my graphic card test. Can't wait to play Fable and the new need for speeed.

[ November 25, 2005, 18:54: Message edited by: Abdel - Bhaal Spawn ]

 

Camcorder for the kids aye? I will have try that one, I have three beautiful daughters 10, 3, 9 months. I would even be happy to get the OK to upgrade. I have a Dell Dim 4500 P4 1.9, 256 RAM, and an Radeon 9000 64 mb graphics card. I would like to go to 1gb RAM and a 256 Graphic card (don't care much about the beand) and add a DVD drive too maybe. I have 2 HD 16gb, and 80gb, small by new standards but I don't mess with very file intensive stuff (have 60gb left on my slave drive)

 

My mobo was crap. It couldn't even read the IDE ports. I updated the bios and still no luck. After trying various things I had the IDE ports tested ($25) and they were dead. I called Tigerdirect and they shipped me out a new mobo on Monday and it should be here any minute now. Can't wait to get this system together to test it. This time I paid $10 more and ordered the AN8 for the firewire ports and told my wife to return the firewire card and cable we purchased at cicuit city. That is going to save us a little bit of money. Can't wait to get my system together and test it out.