My wife has decided that it's time for us to get a new computer; the one we're using now is getting a bit pokey, particularly for the things we use it for (or, rather, would like to use it for--in addition to the ordinary stuff, we do a fair amount of digiphoto stuff, Photoshop, PageMaker and other electronic publishing-type programs, and I wouldn't mind playing some 21st century games occasionally). Back when we bought our now-six-years-old PC, we had essentially three choices: the 133Mhz Pentium, the 166Mhz Pentium, or the 200Mhz Pentium (we split the difference and got the 166). Now there are Pentiums and Celerons of numerous Ghz-ages, and a whole bunch of AMD chips with various undecipherable monikers and mysterious clock speeds, not to mention the new 64-bit AMD. How do I compare/choose amongst them all? Does clock speed trump all? Are AMD chips "just as good" as Intel? How does, say, an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ compare to an Intel Pentium 4 at 2.4GHz (or the Pentium to a Celeron @ 2.5Ghz, for that matter)? As a practical matter, will I ever really care that I got the P4 at 2.6Ghz instead of the 2.8Ghz? Will the new AMD 64bit chip change the landscape to the extent that any 32bit chip I get now will be obselete a whole bunch sooner than the old horse I'm riding now, and therefore I should go cheap on the chip and and look to get a new PC three years down the road instead of six? Any advice or opinions would be welcome...18 responses total.
You can buy the parts and put something together yourself. It would be cheaper to get a 1-2 year old motherboard than the latest one. They you could afford to upgrade more often and be more up to date on average. MCRI sells components and they are nice people. Or try eBay.
Unless you do a lot of gaming, you almost certainly don't need the latest and greatest computer. Nearly anything on the market today will be a huge improvement over what you're currently using and will be acceptable for your needs. > As a practical matter, will I ever really care that I got the > P4 at 2.6Ghz instead of the 2.8Ghz? Very unlikely, though you *might* notice a difference between a P4 system with a 300Mhz front side bus and a 533 Mhz front side bus. > How does, say, an AMD Athlon XP 2700+ compare to an Intel Pentium 4 > at 2.4GHz (or the Pentium to a Celeron @ 2.5Ghz, for that matter)? It's even more complicated than that. Thanks to differing bus and RAM speeds, you can't even necessarily expect the same performance out of two different 2.4GHz systems. > Will the new AMD 64bit chip change the landscape to the extent > that any 32bit chip I get now will be obselete a whole bunch sooner > than the old horse I'm riding now, and therefore I should go cheap > on the chip and and look to get a new PC three years down the road > instead of six? I think it's unlikely that the new 64 bit chips are going to be fully embraced for a while but once they become the norm they will have an effect on the software that gets sold. I wouldn't care to predict a timetable for when they become dominant in the market, however. But I'm generally in favor of going cheap anyway. In my opinion, everyone focuses far too much on processor speed when purchasing a computer system. An astonishingly high percentage of the time that processor is idle anyway, waiting for input from you or from peripheral devices. Most of the time *you* spend waiting at the computer (unless you are highly atypical) will be waiting for programs and data to load from, or save to, disk. I'm therefore usually in favor of saving a little money on the processor and spending it for a faster disk or better disk controller technology. In any case when I buy a new computer I tend to prefer to put the bulk of the optional money into performance peripherals that I may be able to use in the next system -- high quality sound or video cards (though video offerings seem to change faster than system CPUs these days..), SCSI or SATA disk controllers, big fast drives, high quality keyboard and mouse, etc..
Personally, I think if you're running Windows or Linux and doing general desktop stuff -- word processing, web browsing, image editing -- the best bang for the buck is adding RAM. RAM is really cheap right now and I wouldn't buy anything with less than 256 megs. For typical desktop work available RAM is more important than processor speed. (Within reason, anyway. Above 512 megs you probably won't see an improvement unless you edit large image, sound, or video files on a regular basis.)
With enough RAM, you could put stuff on a RAMdisk, improving performance even further.
re #4: I find it's very rarely worth the extra effort to do that these days.. re #3: I agree with gull that you should buy as much memory as you think you could ever reasonably need and then buy half as much again. Extra RAM probably is the cheapest and most effective thing you can add to boost performance for most home or office usage.
Re resp:4: Most modern OS's are good enough at disk caching that I don't find that worth the trouble. Linux does a particularly good job of it. On a Linux laptop system with 256 megs of RAM, I've closed Mozilla, then opened it again several minutes later and seen the entire application load completely out of the disk cache. It didn't even spin up the hard disk.
Circuit City recently had, during their sale Friday morning, 256 MB RAM for $7 after rebates. Unfortunately, it doesn't work in my computer (machine's too old for 133MHz RAM). The right kind of RAM would be $70 (this is cheap?), which I don't have right now (paying my tuition bill is a slightly higher priority right now. . .). :-|
I consider it cheap. I once paid $20 each for four 1-meg SIMMs.
I recently bought a new computer. I ended up going with either 2.6Ghz or 2.4Ghz Pentium (can't remember for sure since I'm not at home). I did a decent amount of research, and right now pentiums are beating athlons at every point in the price/performance curve that I was interested in. Basically, I discovered that for a fixed amount of money, say $200, I could get more performance (based on reviews, mostly from tomshardware.com) from the pentium chip that cost that much than from the athlon chip that cost that much, and that this was true for pretty much every dollar amount that I looked at between I think $150 and $300. That kind of surprised me, since in the past Athlons have done well in that kind of comparison. Right now the best reason (IMO) to buy an Athlon instead of a pentium is to support competition in the marketplace. Which is a good reason, but... Now, that was maybe a month ago, so things have probably changed completely by now. ;)
First thing I ask is, "how much are you willing to spend?" Once that's known it's easier to get the best bang for the buck. Speaking of which, if your buying online, I reccomend using www.pricewatch.com for hunting down deals on components. I've used it a number of times and even if I couldn't find the deal I wanted, it was useful to see how the market was headed.
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tims cascade style will kick the ass of any dip. I MEAN IT.
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i meant that the CHIPS would stand up to any dip. i dunno if tim's makes a dip. btw, have you noticed that ALL dip out here sucks?
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my wife makes a dip out of mrs. grass onion soup & sour cream. it's as close to bernea as we can get out here.
I like Knorr's Leek soup mix with sour cream. If I am making a double size batch, I use the Leek soup and a package of Knorr's Onion soup mix.
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