New computer pipe dreams
Oct. 8th, 2003 11:08 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
robotech_masterWell, what with that award of yesterday, and the promise of (58% of) $500 floating in the air before me, I'm giving serious thought to purchasing a new computer system to last me the next few years...this Celeron 300A/450 MHz overclock is getting kinda old and staid, and I can't even run the latest Sims expansions without freezes and crashes anymore—let alone Half-Life 2 when it comes out next April.
The money won't come in 'til the end of the month, which gives me plenty of time to ponder and research possible hardware choices 'til then. If any of you know stuff about this kind of thing and have warnings or recommendations, please feel free to sound off.
Tentative Hardware Choices:
CPU: AMD ATHLON XP 2500+ "Barton" 333 FSB PROCESSOR CPU- RETAIL (1.83 GHz), $90 or AMD ATHLON XP 2600 /333 FSB PROCESSOR CPU- Retail (1.9 GHz), $104, at NewEgg.com.
Both of these, being the retail kits, include the fan and heat sink. I believe that either one of them would be amply fast enough to play all the hot new games for at least another couple of years. I haven't quite decided which yet, given that the price difference is so low. All I know for sure is that I want that 333 MHz bus for the best possible performance.
Motherboard: Albatron Nforce2 Motherboard for AMD Processors, Model KM18G PRO 2.0 Retail *With TV out function* (micro-ATX, integrated ethernet, 5.1 surround sound, and GeForce 4 video w/ TV-Out, 3 PCI slots, 1 AGP, 3 DIMM slots, USB, etc.), $94 at NewEgg.com.
Reviews of this board seem to be mostly positive. There are a couple of other micro-ATX mobos which have IGP and are $10-20 cheaper (and one even has Firewire), but the feature that most draws my eye to this one is the TV-Out. Combined with the general small and lightness of the micro-ATX form factor, this means I could cart the box around with me to anime conventions or friends' houses and show DivX movies (or DVDs, for that matter) on their TV sets (or, for that matter, my own VCR and TV set, since I'll no longer need the DVD decoder card that lets me do that now). (I could also take it to LAN parties and such, but that's a lesser consideration.) Some of the reviews do seem to cast doubt on the performance of the integrated sound and video from a game-fanatic perspective...but I'm not a game fanatic, and the only video card I have right now is an old TNT/TV 1 that was obsolete two months after I bought it—so it'll still be a step up for me. And at any rate, if the graphics really are all that bad, I can always get a better card and slap it down in the AGP.
RAM: 2x PC2700 256 meg 184-pin DIMMs, $47.99 each at Crucial.com.
Crucial is the place to buy RAM...you might pay a few bucks less somewhere else, but Crucial is synonymous with quality and name-brand, and RAM is something you just don't want to take a chance on with generic. 512 is probably less than would be most optimal, but it should get me by until I can afford to blow money on more. And, at any rate, due to the dual memory channel thing, I need to have two DIMMs in the board for optimal performance.
Other Stuff: I'm kind of still up in the air on case and hard drive.
Ideally, I'd like to spend $40 to $50 on a decent case with a 300-350 watt power supply. (My current case, with a 230-watt supply, just wouldn't cut it for a newer, faster computer.) My friend who is advising me in this matters wants me to be sure that the case is "Athlon-certified," too...whatever that means. So far, none of the cases I've found on New Egg say anything about that certification one way or another.
As for hard drive, I have a 40 gig and a 7 gig drive in my desktop (well, "deskside" if you want to be technical about it) box now, split among several partitions including Windows and Linux and so forth. I'm not entirely sure whether I want to leave that there and simply reformat it and buy a new drive for the Windows box, or buy a new, larger drive for the Linux box and take the 40 (and perhaps the 7) for the Windows one. At the moment, according to Pricewatch, I can get an 80 gig drive for $60 (assuming that the dealer is reputable).
See, since I'm going to have to get a new case anyway, I'm figuring that I might as well keep my desktop box largely as it is (well, I'll pull the DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives over to my new mini-ATX box, if they'll both fit) and turn it into a Linux-only server which will handle my email and USENET and other terminal-related tasks, as well as serve mp3s to my local network. That way, I'll be free to go Windows-only with the new box, and no longer need to dual-boot between Windows and Linux in order to get stuff done.
So the total estimated amount thus far for my fantasy computer is $90 (to $104) + $94 + (2 * $48) + $40 (to $50) + $60 = $380 to $404, not including shipping.
And it strikes me just how preliminary the estimate truly is, given that I don't yet know just how much money I really will be getting for my Top Rep performance. My supervisor's guess is $500 (which works out to be more like $300 with the gift tax), but it could be higher or lower than that. My main reason for setting down these estimates is simply so I have a better idea of just how much money I'm going to need to work with to get something relatively close to what I want. With these facts in hand, once I actually have the money I can figure out if I need to pull some out of savings, or lower my expectations.
And anyway, it's fun to window-shop.
The money won't come in 'til the end of the month, which gives me plenty of time to ponder and research possible hardware choices 'til then. If any of you know stuff about this kind of thing and have warnings or recommendations, please feel free to sound off.
Tentative Hardware Choices:
Both of these, being the retail kits, include the fan and heat sink. I believe that either one of them would be amply fast enough to play all the hot new games for at least another couple of years. I haven't quite decided which yet, given that the price difference is so low. All I know for sure is that I want that 333 MHz bus for the best possible performance.
Reviews of this board seem to be mostly positive. There are a couple of other micro-ATX mobos which have IGP and are $10-20 cheaper (and one even has Firewire), but the feature that most draws my eye to this one is the TV-Out. Combined with the general small and lightness of the micro-ATX form factor, this means I could cart the box around with me to anime conventions or friends' houses and show DivX movies (or DVDs, for that matter) on their TV sets (or, for that matter, my own VCR and TV set, since I'll no longer need the DVD decoder card that lets me do that now). (I could also take it to LAN parties and such, but that's a lesser consideration.) Some of the reviews do seem to cast doubt on the performance of the integrated sound and video from a game-fanatic perspective...but I'm not a game fanatic, and the only video card I have right now is an old TNT/TV 1 that was obsolete two months after I bought it—so it'll still be a step up for me. And at any rate, if the graphics really are all that bad, I can always get a better card and slap it down in the AGP.
Crucial is the place to buy RAM...you might pay a few bucks less somewhere else, but Crucial is synonymous with quality and name-brand, and RAM is something you just don't want to take a chance on with generic. 512 is probably less than would be most optimal, but it should get me by until I can afford to blow money on more. And, at any rate, due to the dual memory channel thing, I need to have two DIMMs in the board for optimal performance.
Ideally, I'd like to spend $40 to $50 on a decent case with a 300-350 watt power supply. (My current case, with a 230-watt supply, just wouldn't cut it for a newer, faster computer.) My friend who is advising me in this matters wants me to be sure that the case is "Athlon-certified," too...whatever that means. So far, none of the cases I've found on New Egg say anything about that certification one way or another.
As for hard drive, I have a 40 gig and a 7 gig drive in my desktop (well, "deskside" if you want to be technical about it) box now, split among several partitions including Windows and Linux and so forth. I'm not entirely sure whether I want to leave that there and simply reformat it and buy a new drive for the Windows box, or buy a new, larger drive for the Linux box and take the 40 (and perhaps the 7) for the Windows one. At the moment, according to Pricewatch, I can get an 80 gig drive for $60 (assuming that the dealer is reputable).
See, since I'm going to have to get a new case anyway, I'm figuring that I might as well keep my desktop box largely as it is (well, I'll pull the DVD-ROM and CD-RW drives over to my new mini-ATX box, if they'll both fit) and turn it into a Linux-only server which will handle my email and USENET and other terminal-related tasks, as well as serve mp3s to my local network. That way, I'll be free to go Windows-only with the new box, and no longer need to dual-boot between Windows and Linux in order to get stuff done.
So the total estimated amount thus far for my fantasy computer is $90 (to $104) + $94 + (2 * $48) + $40 (to $50) + $60 = $380 to $404, not including shipping.
And it strikes me just how preliminary the estimate truly is, given that I don't yet know just how much money I really will be getting for my Top Rep performance. My supervisor's guess is $500 (which works out to be more like $300 with the gift tax), but it could be higher or lower than that. My main reason for setting down these estimates is simply so I have a better idea of just how much money I'm going to need to work with to get something relatively close to what I want. With these facts in hand, once I actually have the money I can figure out if I need to pull some out of savings, or lower my expectations.
And anyway, it's fun to window-shop.
