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[WolfWalker]

I am looking to buy a new PC.  The companys I'm looking at are:

Dell
ABS
Alienware

Do any of you know any others I should look at.

Base
4 gigs ram
24 inch LCD display
500 gig c:drive
500 gig d:drive
creativelabs extreme music

can any one else recommend other things

looking to spend about $7,000 IRS was very forgiving this year

[Mike Noe]

Just my $.02, but I'd start with this site:  SPCR

Make sure to check out their forums.  Do a bit of research and build one up yourself.  It's not difficult and would be very rewarding.

With the new low power products coming from Intel in the next month or so, AMD will also be lowering prices.  The time is right to build a very low power, high performance, quiet machine, for a very reasonable price.

[tcman41]

Using www.pricewatch.com i made a little list showing what you should expect to be paying, stayed more or less to the parameters of the system you were talking about.

AMD FX-60 CPU $1,000
EPOX MOTHERBOARD $150
4GB MEMORY $400
(2) 500GB SERIAL ATA HARD DRIVES $500
NVIDIA 7900 PCIE GRAPHICS CARD $475
CREATIVE XFI SOUND CARD $175
24" LCD MONITOR $800
CASE & POWER SUPPLY $150
(2) OPTICAL DRIVES & A FLOPPY DRIVE $150
OEM WINDOWS XP W/SP2 $150

GRAND TOTAL $4,000

The prices above are for individual components, you would still have to put it together, if you can find a similar spec'd system for the same amount of money or less than go for it.

Terry 

[GHammer]

On that kind of system, I'd ask if I were handy with a screwdriver.
Building your own from components will give you an equal, if not faster machine than offered by boutique integrators.

And, I'd guess you could save a few nickels in the process.
I'd wait the announcements of Intel and AMD because I'd hate to buy a system today and have it made less than top of the line in a month.
The other aspect is to decide which religion you will follow. ATI or NVidia.

CPUs, drives, memory, power supply, case, CPU cooler. None are as important to a well running, enjoyable machine as the video card. Especially with that size monitor.

By the way, have you seen any of the 4ms LCDs? Very cool, even on fast action. I've always been partial to ViewSonic anyway. I'm not going your size, but will soon have a 19" 4ms courtesy of a 2 hour photo shoot for a local store. Big difference in the quality of the picture between the 8ms and 4 ms models.

[WolfWalker]

Thanks for the responses.  I don't know if I would like to build one.
You would have to do the burn in and all the other stuff of building a new machine.

[tcman41]

Ghammer, so are you telling me I can run stuff like Fear, Far Cry, Half-Life, Doom3 etc on a 4ms lcd and not see any lag even with lots of action going on and a high screen resolution?

I currently have an ATI x800xl and a 21" G series viewsonic crt, the graphics are freakin awesome but my crt takes up my whole computer desk, if could get an lcd that could run the games i would do it in a heartbeat.

TC

[GHammer]

Thanks for the responses. I don't know if I would like to build one.
You would have to do the burn in and all the other stuff of building a new machine.

Actually quite easy, I can do it after all...

Take the case, install CPU/CPU fan hardware.
Install CPU and cooling unit (fan, passive, liquid).
Install hard drives and DVDs
Seat memory, video card, sound card.
Install power supply (500W+)
Connect power and motherboard jumpers (reset, HDD LED, etc)
Attach cables (video, USB, audio, mouse, keyboard)
Power up
Everything ok? Put the sides on the case.
Make changes to the BIOS (boot order, on board audio disable, etc)
Power off (remove power from the supply)
Power on and install your OS, low level drivers (like Intel inf), device drivers.

Have fun!

I can do this in a bit less than 2 hours from a box of parts.
And, since I do the homework I am certain that when I power it on, it is the best of all possible components that day. Tomorrow of course I see a newer shinier fravistat, but for today, I know I have the ultimate romper stomper.

Two pluses. I save money and I know the system if there is any sort of problem or I want to add/upgrade anything.

Haven't done a 'store bought' in many years.

As an aside, if I were doing this, I'd get a smallish (80 GB) drive for the system and apps.
Things run better alone, whatever the OS wants to load,  games, MC, etc when they are on their own physical drive. Also, if/when it fails you only have to replace and restore that drive. Your large drives are better used as data only.

[jgreen]

Wolf, if you've never fooled around installing PC hardware, don't make your first attempt with $7,000 worth of parts.  Contrary to Ham's assurances, there are variables that can bite you on the south side.  If you are going to try this, get a board and chip combo that are mated.  Try going to Tiger and looking at the user reviews.

That said, I would build one, not buy one.  You'll save around 30% and you can focus the money on parts that will perform for your use.  If you're gaming, go for the dual Nvidia SLI graphics.  The reviews are off the charts.  You'll need a board with dual PCIex slots.  I would spend a lot of money on the board and the Nvidia, for the biggest return on gaming.

If you want audiophile stereo output and you're still on a $7,000 buying spree, have al look at the RME and lynx.  Audigy is a great card, but there's a good argument that these semi-pro cards are using better DACs.

As Ham mentioned, Viewsonic has the best reputation.  But they're mucho expensive, and not necessarily the fastest refresh.  For gaming, it's all about refresh and contrast.  To save about a grand, try out the Samsung.  I would not call them accurate color, but they are high contrast and fast.  BTW--the refresh specs are mostly written by liars.  8ms should be good enough--its faster than the optic nerve--only the spec has softened from on-to-on to on-to-neutral.  So 8ms=16 and 4ms = 8.

If you buy from Dellienware, here's a tip, FWIW:  Buy the RAM from somebody else.  You'll save about a grand.

[GHammer]

Ghammer, so are you telling me I can run stuff like Fear, Far Cry, Half-Life, Doom3 etc on a 4ms lcd and not see any lag even with lots of action going on and a high screen resolution?

Exactly. Look at the ViewSonics though. I did not like the LG or Samsung locally.
I'd also make sure of the seller's dead pixel policy. Who wants a red pixel staring at them in the center of the screen? Not a biggie if you buy locally you can look before you take it home. But online, be aware of the policy.

Though I see someone had good luck with other brands, the two I mention had lousy skin tones when playing videos and one had really bad "dark" scenes, couldn't tell jack when the lighting of a scene was low. The Samsung I looked at also had a slight blur on text.

[GHammer]

A good source of info is Tom's Hardware

[WolfWalker]

Thanks alot guys.  So I quess I should get some tools! (As I put on my research hat on)

[tcman41]

Agree on the viewsonic monitors, maybe a tad more expensive but they are worth it, really wouldn't buy anything else.

And if your not sure about exactly how to build your rig get a buddy or a friend to help you, two heads are always better than one.

TC

[Mike Noe]

Wolf:
Really, not sure what you mean by "burn-in", I've built probably 20 or so machines in the last couple of years and never really worried much about it, just plugged everything up, turned 'em on and then turned them loose to the users.  I've built a few SFFs as of late (Shuttles and AOpen boxes) and so far, they are more of a challenge because of the limitations on RAM support, but if you stick with the standard stuff (AMD, DFI, ASUS, OMZ, Samsung, Seagate, etc.), most things will work together.

It gets very challenging when you get into Over-clocking, either the CPU or GPU, but you probably have no need for going that far at this point.

But I would agree with the other guys, don't make your first build a "guessing" game.  There are many resources, some have been posted here, that will list "optimal" setups for what you're looking to do.  Just spend a bit of time looking around and you'll start to see the patterns emerge and you'll see combos that work together reliably. It's really not that bad and the payback is well worth it.

fwiw, my personal focus as of late has been very low noise (almost silent), low power, audio-phile grade systems.  I am a big fan of the RME product line and I tend toward the low end of the spectrum (Sempron and any low power AMD single core/dual core).  The new Core Duo2 has potential to give AMD a run for their money, we should see some very cool 'n quiet machines in the next few months.

Sorry to ramble on....have fun!

[johnnyboy]

Definitely build your own.
If you're spending that kind of money you can get a totally insane box.

Just ask one of your friends who is computer literate to come over for a drink and dinner when you're building it and he can keep an eye on you as you build it to make sure you're not doing anything wrong.

Again, if you own a system THAT expensive it'd definitely be handy to know what's what and how to do basic maintenance on it.

I'd personally say thats a HUGE budget for any kind of computer.
One bit of advice I would give though is dont just go out and get the best hardware bits and throw them together and expect your system to be super fast.

Think your machine through carefully and you'll get alot better performance.


With that kind of budget I'd get a machine that had 4 SATAII hard drives (3Gb/s transfer rate in theory) and you set them up as Raid 1+0 so that they are mirrored for backup purposes but they are also stripped which will give you hugely increased hard drive performance which is the main thing that slows down most machines.

Doing just stripped alone is a bit risky as if either drive goes you loose all the data on both drives. If you have them both mirrored though then you have a very good backup.
Just doing this alone will increase your performance hugely.


Your other alternative is to think a bit creatively outside of the box and to not just think about "a super high powered machine" but think about what you want to do and then possibly consider a network arrangement. This is something people never really consider that can actually effect their machine they work on alot more than spending another $1000.

Possibly consider if you'll be doing alot of tasks continually on your machine - listening to music, downloading, etc. etc. and if you think you might be, simply use $500 of your money to build yourself a very cheap very basic second box (with no keyboard, monitor, mouse, etc) that you just use Remote Desktop to control and leave that doing all your tasks for you.

This way if you have to restart your box, it lagg's, crashes or whatever else, your music can still be happily playing away on a second box without getting interrupted.
Want to be fancy - then get an 8" touch screen as well and wire it into this second box so you control your music through a full colour touch screen HTPC setup mounted on your wall - how flashy would that look/work?


Basically what I'm saying is dont just rush out and buy the most expensive hardware out there because it's "the best". Half the time the stuff half the price, if cleverly used would give you just as good performance if not better.
Look at the overall picture and not just get stuck in the "a single computer is my box" trap.

www.mini-itx.com is a great example of totally silent boxes you could get / build as a second server to have running 24/7 to do tasks with.

[WolfWalker]

Thanks you guys.  I should say that I can use upto 7k.  I will not spend that much but I want the fast and largest storage I can get. I don't have alot of music right now but it is at 18,800 with alot of music to be added.

[johnnyboy]

Was thinking about this thread the other day when thinking about a setup I had at work.

Two machines: Your ideal dream machine and your workhorse both next to each other.
Both wired into the same keyboard/mouse/monitor via a KVM switch (really cheap to buy - double clicking num lock switches between the two).
Wire the two computers together via a 1Gb/s network.
You have two monitors - one wired into the KVM, the other directly connected to your Main box (needs dual output).

You then have Remote Desktop connection open full screen on your second screen connected to your workhorse as you work on your main machine.
Share the drives between both machines as a mapped drive so it's easy to swap files between machines and you can then work on your main machine and switch without thinking onto the other machine and get it doing jobs for you (compressing an album, ripping an album, processing a video, whatever).

This is what I had going at work the other day and the ability to just get that second machine plodding away while my main machine just blazed was incredible
Got it doing all kinds of long boring CPU intensive jobs I'd usually have left off till the night time when I wasn't using my computer.

[mesue]

I'm with the folks saying build your own… I do it, and I'm a girl. ;-) But one option I didn't see mentioned is that you can save yourself some of the time and hassle of building your own PC by buying a preinstalled, pretested combo with the motherboard, CPU, and RAM that you want. When you do this, they usually update the BIOS, do burn-in, and you can be pretty confident that everything is going to work together when you get it. The company I have used for complete custom systems, combos and parts is http://www.monarchcomputer.com and they do a nice job.

[Shelly]

Alienware has been or is in the process of being bought by Dell.  I bought an Alienware 5 years ago and almost all components failed and had to be replaced within the first year.  On the plus side, I learned a lot about hardware and all of the component swapping gave me enough confidence to build my own.   I took the path suggested by mesue for my first build and purchased a bundle, but used http://www.jncs.com/jnmain.php.  They provided great phone support and made the process quite painless.  I've built several systems in the past three years and no longer feel the need to purchase a bundle.  I'll never order a pre-built system again for my own personal use.  I really like being able to research and select the components that I want to place in the computer.

I just recently assisted a friend in purchasing a Dell, only because I didn't want to provide support in the middle of the night.  However, I reformatted the hard drive and did a clean install of windows, just to get rid of all of the bloatware that comes preinstalled on a Dell.  I called Dell's tech support a couple of times and was not impressed.  One issue is that the CD drive tray wouldn't open.  I figured it was a power problem but trying to limit my time involvement in setting up the PC, I placed the call.  The support agent had me use a paperclip to force the tray to open, which it did.  He then told me to go into the bios and to see if the paperclip worked to open the tray.  He went on to instruct me to shut the power down and to try the paperclip trick again and concluded that since that tray was able to open in all 3 scenerios that it couldn't be a power supply problem and that the drive needed to be replaced.  I was dumbfounded but went along with him and made arrangements for the drive replacement.  After I hung up, I opened the case and was not suprised to find the power connector hanging loose behind the drive. 

The other issue I found with the Dell (an XPS) is that the CD drives sound like jet engines.  I just recently completed a new system build.  My first priority was power, but a very close runner-up was noise reduction.  I didn't want my wonderful music collection to compete with the sound of fans and motors.  I'm very satisfied that both of my objectives were met. 

There's many wonderful resources on the web to assist you in researching your options.  I would advise that you be careful of some that get paid for their reviews. 

Here's a few that I've used:
http://www.firingsquad.com/guides/advanced_system_building/
http://arstechnica.com/reviews.ars
http://www.pcstats.com/articlesearch.cfm?SearchValue=&Search=Search&Category=220&CategorySearch=Get+Listing&sort=date
http://www.mysuperpc.com/build/pc_configure_bios.shtml
http://www.extremetech.com
http://www.silentpcreview.com/index.php
http://techreport.com/
http://www.hardforum.com/
http://www.anandtech.com/
http://www.motherboards.org

Most of the above have their own forums. 

In addition to the vendors already mentioned, prices and service at NewEgg.com are excellent.  Pricewatch.com is a good source for finding competetive prices.