Preassembled computer vendors

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12-20-2009
CornedBee

Preassembled computer vendors

Hi,

I'm looking into getting a new computer, and have to decide between getting components and assembling it myself, and buying a complete system. I'm not sure which way to go.

The system is intended to dual-boot Windows + Linux, and be a gamer PC under Windows and a work PC under Linux. Since my work obviously involves lots of C++, this means I want 4 cores and massive amounts of RAM. (Compiling big projects is slow otherwise.) On the game side, I also need some graphics power. I'm not looking for a top system here, but I still want to be able to play new releases with decent settings two years from now.

I've looked at Lenovo's desktop offers, but they're useless in this area - Lenovo is clearly focused on business computers. I suspect that the same goes for similar big companies like Dell. Dell's Alienware offers high performance, but I'm not sure if the prices are reasonable.

On the other hand, if I go for components, I have to do all the research and selecting of components. The assembling itself is no problem, but the selection is a significant time investment, and I'm rather out of touch with the hardware market.

So, any recommendations for system vendors?
12-20-2009
abachler

Are you doing a major upgrade, or do you need an actual separate system, i.e. are you keeping your existing system to use for running Seti@home or some such task?

Personally, I would check to see how much a prebuilt system that meets your needs costs, and then check to see if you can build a similar system cheaper. Although for my personal tastes the prebuilt would have to be about $150 cheaper, since I already own several copies of XP and will not run any system using the OS they include for 'free' because of all the trash they also preinstall. So basically unless I'm saving enough on the prebuilt to buy a copy of XP and still break even, I'd go with building it myself.

Other than that, all vendors are pretty much the same. I would avoid HP, Dell, and Gateway though.

The big downside of prebuilt systems is they usually have very poor performance motherboards.
12-20-2009
SlyMaelstrom

There isn't much you have to look into as far as component selection. As far as CPUs and GPUs go, the cost to performance ratio is almost perfect... you can basically decide on what processor and graphics card you want by your budget. Once you've selected those, all other components are easily selected by brand name. If you go top of the line or even middle of the line brand names, you're almost guaranteed to get a good product. You might want to look into reviews if you plan on doing some serious overclocking as certain motherboards and RAM modules tend to be better than others in that aspect. If you're going to keep everything stock or close to stock, however... any good brand will suit you just fine.

Personally, I would build... you're talking about a pretty high-end PC by your description. At that level, any pre-assembled unit will slap on an extra $1000-1200 just to put it together for you. I don't even bother looking at PC manufacturers unless I'm looking at a very, very low end computer which I have no components for.
12-20-2009
MK27

Yeah, when I built from components last year I ended up with something that would have been AT LEAST 50-100% more pre-assembled.* Plus you can pick yourself a fancy case to compete with the xmas tree :p The only thing I'd never done before is mount the mobo in the case, but it is not that hard.

Most of the big on-line sellers (newegg, tiger-direct, etc) have "bare bones" deals like a case + PSU + mobo or mobo + CPU + graphics card; this can help simplify the decision making.

On thing to watch for with the motherboard that I missed is the number of SATA plugs. My mobo only has two, which I have a SATA hd and a SATA cdvdrw, so when I want to put in my extra hard drive (also SATA) I have to unplug one of them.

Another thing which came up here a few weeks ago is wrt the PCIe slot: make sure it is 2.0. I think a lot of boards currently just say "PCIe" and do not refer to version 1.0 or 2.0, which means they are almost certainly 1.0. Almost all new vid cards are 2.0; they can work in 1.0 slots but there are no promises, eg, I had to return a nvidia 220 because it would not work properly in a 1.0 slot.

* I am sure they tack on something for the OS too, which presumably you don't need.
12-20-2009
jdragyn

Quote:

Originally Posted by CornedBee

On the other hand, if I go for components, I have to do all the research and selecting of components. The assembling itself is no problem, but the selection is a significant time investment, and I'm rather out of touch with the hardware market.

If you do decide to build yourself here are a couple links that might help you jump back into the know relatively quickly:

Guide to Choosing Parts
Homebuilt Buying Guide
12-20-2009
jeffcobb

Only thing I would throw in is that distributed compiling can be a lot of fun....but I hear CornedBee about being out of touch with the hardware market. I started in the 80s in the hardware market, by mid 80's was pure software dev, then in the past five years been working on stuff that isn't even on the market *yet* so when it comes time to pick out what is best now, I know very little and tend to wuss out and just grabbed a pre-assembled system or a kit from Tiger Direct (they pick out the parts, you put them together to save money)...
12-20-2009
CornedBee

Quote:

you're talking about a pretty high-end PC by your description

Well, yeah, I'm looking at the first generation that isn't in the "brand new" category anymore. $1000-1500 range in total is what I plan to spend. (Actually, that's €, but hardware still far too often comes at a 1:1 exchange rate.) You can build a pretty sweet system with $1500.

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll probably go for assembling this myself. I can reuse hard disks and case of the old system anyway. I have a laptop, so I don't need the big ones running in parallel.
12-20-2009
Mario F.

Quote:

Originally Posted by jeffcobb

but I hear CornedBee about being out of touch with the hardware market.

I hear you too. At the beginning of this year I did a major update to my systems involving one laptop and two desktops. But for that, had to ask here stuff like what's the deal with XP and SATA drives, or what's a Core 2?

Gradually, with the first Pentium machines, I started to for some reason lose interest on hardware developments. It's become now to confusing for my taste and I prefer to just go with the flow. I just don't buy wholesale.

Quote:

Originally Posted by CornedBee

Thanks for all the suggestions. I'll probably go for assembling this myself. I can reuse hard disks and case of the old system anyway. I have a laptop, so I don't need the big ones running in parallel.

You may also want to check this Hardware Confusion guide, geared exactly towards systems that one wants to remain useful in a couple of years. Between that and the questions I asked here at the time (if you remember), it enabled me to buy 3 new systems, all of which have yet to fail me in any way.
12-20-2009
jeffcobb

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mario F.

I hear you too. At the beginning of this year I did a major update to my systems involving one laptop and two desktops. But for that, had to ask here stuff like what's the deal with XP and SATA drives, or what's a Core 2?

Gradually, with the first Pentium machines, I started to for some reason lose interest on hardware developments. It's become now to confusing for my taste and I prefer to just go with the flow. I just don't buy wholesale.

You may also want to check this Hardware Confusion guide, geared exactly towards systems that one wants to remain useful in a couple of years. Between that and the questions I asked here at the time (if you remember), it enabled me to buy 3 new systems, all of which have yet to fail me in any way.

My falling-down point is video cards seconded only by audio cards. Time was nVidia and Soundblaster were safe bets. Now memory and 101 different configurations and the wrong one will yield either a non-functional system or worse, one that subtly fails...yee-ha.
12-20-2009
cyberfish

Prebuilt systems usually save money on motherboard and power supply, because normal computer buyers look at the CPU, the video card, amount of RAM, harddrive, but not motherboard or power supply. Unfortunately, those 2 components determine the reliability of the computer for the most part, especially as it ages. I've had many prebuilt computers fail after 2 years or so, right after the warranty expires. Also, they modify the BIOS to take out all the fun options (mostly for overclocking), leaving you with much less flexibility.

You can probably build a decent one for $700 or so.
12-20-2009
jeffcobb

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberfish

Prebuilt systems usually save money on motherboard and power supply, because normal computer buyers look at the CPU, the video card, amount of RAM, harddrive, but not motherboard or power supply. Unfortunately, those 2 components determine the reliability of the computer for the most part, especially as it ages. I've had many prebuilt computers fail after 2 years or so, right after the warranty expires. Also, they modify the BIOS to take out all the fun options (mostly for overclocking), leaving you with much less flexibility.

You can probably build a decent one for $700 or so.

I second that; there are however two classes of prebuilt:
1. The kind you would get from your local electronics superstore. These will have barely enough power supply to run the box, let alone anything else you add. More, the motherboard will rarely be of the quality that you pick out yourself. As an example of this most of these machines will populate the memory slots with the cheapest RAM available and use all available slots doing so. Thus if you decide you want to up your RAM you have to (usually) replace ALL of the RAM, costing more money. If you were to do it yourself you would pick a motherboard and populate the RAM with room to grow. For example the store-bought version has (say) four slots for RAM and if you get 2G of RAM on it, it will be 4 sticks of 512M each, using all available slots. If you were to do this yourself you would get 2 1G sticks leaving two slots empty for future expansion.
2. while I am not endorsing Tiger Direct they have barebones kits that come with everything you need and more importantly you know exactly what motherboard/RAM/power supply you are getting before you place the order...
12-20-2009
abachler

Well, you could always just skip all the hardware selection if you just need something to do scientific calculations.
12-20-2009
Elysia

For CPU, I would go AMD. They have the cheapest processors right now, offering the biggest value for the money. The phenom processors have quad core line ups and are basically the high-end cpus. They usually use socket AM3, so that's what you should look for on the motherboard.
As for memory... this is a little trickier. On one hand, there is DDR2, which is cheap. Then there is DDR3 which is newer and faster, but pricier. AM3 supports only DDR3. However, AM2+ supports DDR2, but if you're going to upgrade later, you're still going to have to get DDR3. So for future upgradability, I would say DDR3. It still shouldn't cost a lot to get around 8 GB ($100 or so?). There are several manufacturers that offer lifetime warranty. Sweet, I say. No worries about memory breaking, usually.
Hard drives - anything SATA (3 GBs).
Graphics card - can't name a specific brand, but be prepared that they will suck power like hungry beasts. Count around 200W or so. Unless you underclock them or get an older card. Many of them require 2 PCIe power connectors from your PSU. Make sure you have it!
Audio - well, usually comes on the motherboard. Nothing worth investing in, really. The ones on the motherboard is usually good enough.
Motherboard - I'd prefer ATX, since it has more PCI(e) slots than mini-atx. Make sure the motherboard supports AM3 or optionally AM2+ if you're going AMD. Also make sure it supports at least 8 GB of maximum ram. Checks to see if it has 3 or 4 slots for ram. 4 is better. Then you can put your memory in slows of two for dual channel, which will enhance performance.
It must have at least one PCIe 2.0 slow (all new motherboard do, though). Many PCI slots are a plus, since it will allow you to plug in a lot of other cards, should you need them.
Be sure to check the layout of the board. Many boards have problems with the SATA slots being placed right behind the PCIe slow which makes it difficult to plug in your disks when you have a fat graphics card.
Make extra sure when buying the board since it's a very critical component and everything plugs into it. Prefer to put much into the motherboard than the other stuff, I would say. Make sure it has the specs you need.
PSU - another critical component. Make sure it's quality! And make sure it can put out enough amps along its rails to power your system. Read the reviews! Very important. Also 80+ certification is a nice bonus, to ensure it doesn't waste too much power.

Finding components, especially motherboard and psu can be daunting, but it's worth it in the end. Good luck.
12-20-2009
cyberfish

Make sure you get a NVIDIA video card if you want to run Linux. NVIDIA driver always works out of the box. ATI Linux driver is one huge mess.

As for CPU, go with AMD if you don't want to overclock. Intel if you do. Current Intel CPUs (both Core 2 and i7/i5) overclock like there is no tomorrow, and can save you tons of money.
12-20-2009
jeffcobb

I have always liked AMD procs over Intels since the 386dx days...they ran cooler at the same clock speed and just seemed to last longer...
12-20-2009
Elysia

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberfish

As for CPU, go with AMD if you don't want to overclock. Intel if you do. Current Intel CPUs (both Core 2 and i7/i5) overclock like there is no tomorrow, and can save you tons of money.

And also burn a hole in your electricity bill and your PSU.
12-20-2009
cyberfish

That has always been the case until the Intel Core 2 series came about. It's based on mobile processors, so they were a lot cooler, and a lot faster, while eating a lot less power, with insane overclocking headroom.
12-20-2009
cyberfish

Quote:

And also burn a hole in your electricity bill and your PSU.

I run my $50 CPU at the speed of $200 CPUs. The $200 CPU would have used the same amount of power, since it's proportional to frequency at full load. At idle (which is most of the time), they consume about the same power, because CMOS gates only consume significant power when they switch, so at less than 100% load, the power consumption will be similar.

I can easily test this out actually. I have a clamp-on multimeter. Just need to strip a power cable (from the wall).

My PSU doesn't mind. It's rated for 380W and I'm using a lot less than that.
12-20-2009
cyberfish

I did it.

CPU overclocked to 2.8ghz, memory at 800mhz
idle 1.13A (135.6W)
load CPU 1.59A (190.8W)
load GPU 2.32A (278.4W) (just for fun)

CPU at 1.8ghz stock, memory at 533mhz
idle 1.07A (128.4W)
load CPU 1.35A (162W)

CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300. Load is Orthos (2 instances of Prime 95 stress test to stress both cores). Idle is sitting at the Windows desktop.

Current measured on the power cable (either hot or neutral wire... the color coding is weird. hopefully not the ground wire) using a clamp-on multimeter. Power supply efficiency is ~80% at 50% load, according to reviews.

Power consumptions are calculated assuming the current and voltage (120V RMS, measured using a multimeter*) are in phase, which should be pretty close? I don't have an oscilloscope, so I can't verify that.

Now, assuming I keep my computer on 24/7, with the CPU loaded to 100% 10% of the time (which is a huge over-estimation), the average power consumptions are 141.1W (135.6*0.9+190.8*0.1) and 131.8W. The difference is 9.4W. Over a year, that's 82kWh.

Assuming an electricity price of 6cents/kWh, it will cost me an additional $5/year to run my computer overclocked. A steal IMHO.

*probably assuming a perfect sinusoidal wave instead of actually doing the integration

As for my PSU, it's rated for 380W (at 80% efficiency, that means 475W on the input side), so it won't mind.

EDIT:
Upon thinking about it a bit more, of course the load is not linear. It shouldn't even be sinusoidal - there is a rectifier in there!

Therefore, all my calculated power are greater than the actual power consumed (and you have to pay for). By how much I don't know.
12-20-2009
Neo1

Considering you want the system to last long, the new HD5xxx DX11 ATI cards are what you want, but if Cyberfish is correct regarding the Linux drivers, perhaps you should wait for the nVidia GTX3xx series? My guess is that they will be out before February, just a thought to consider.

PSUs - go for Corsair or Seasonic, high quality.
Motherboards - Gigabyte has some very reliable boards.
Memory - Lots of options, stay away from Elixir, i'd go GeiL or Kingston, their Value series might not overclock well but they sure have reliability and price on their side.
HDDs - WD Black series, don't worry about SSDs.
CPU - Depends on budget really, P55/Core i5 is nice, so is Phenom II, get the 920 or the i5 860. i7 is not a sane choice atm imo.
12-21-2009
CornedBee

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberfish

Make sure you get a NVIDIA video card if you want to run Linux. NVIDIA driver always works out of the box. ATI Linux driver is one huge mess.

I know about the state of graphics drivers on Linux. I still might go for AMD - I think it's cool that they opened up the programming guides, and the blob has improved a lot too.
12-21-2009
cyberfish

I have never used an ATI card myself, so I can't say from experience, but a fairly experienced Linux friend of mine just bought an ATI card, played with it for a week trying to get it to work (searching frantically online and everything), returned it (paying the restocking fee), and got an Nvidia card. I heard there are still instability issues (crashing X once in a while) and their driver doesn't even have full support for some of their later cards. Rumours also have it that 2D performance is poor and 3D is pretty much unusable.

NVIDIA driver is pretty much perfect.

I would really go for NVIDIA. It will at least save you a lot of frustration.

I know someone who actually has an ATI AGP (it was back then) card for gaming, and a cheap NVIDIA PCI card just for Linux.
12-21-2009
abachler

I will never understand ATI's decision to keep their drivers closed source, they sell graphics cards, not driver's. You would figure that they would be thrilled to have the open source community figure out (for free) how to write drivers that actually work. It's not like ATI has cutting edge technology that nVidia is looking to steal by reverse engineering their hardware merely by looking at the driver interface.

ATI cards suck bad enough on their own, keeping the drivers closed source just makes it worse.
12-21-2009
CornedBee

ATI has licensed third-party technology that would be exposed if they open-sourced their drivers. They can't do that.
12-21-2009
MK27

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberfish

Make sure you get a NVIDIA video card if you want to run Linux. NVIDIA driver always works out of the box. ATI Linux driver is one huge mess.

Well, I've tried three video cards under linux. The first two were nvidia, neither of them worked, but (at least) one of them this was because of the 1.0 vs 2.0 slot and had nothing to do with the OS.

The third one is an ATI 4350 and it works fine, I had no problems with drivers, etc. I'm developing GL stuff now and the thing works great; rather than getting frame rates in the teens and maxing out one core, I'm getting rates in the hundreds (simple stuff: over 1000) and the CPU runs at like 25-30%, which is great.

The reason I tried nvidia first is precisely because of stories like cyberfish's, altho when I dug deeper, it seemed to me that nvidia in fact puts up more hassles wrt linux (altho this hopefully does not apply to their own drivers).

That is probably the trickiest part tho. You might want to order everything else on line cheap, then pick up the video card at a store where you can easily return or exchange it.

Quote:

Originally Posted by abachler

I will never understand ATI's decision to keep their drivers closed source,

Nb, according to the developers at xorg, the "open source" version nvidia driver was submitted "badly obfuscated" and has proved such a lemon that they've given up on it and do not recommend it for use, and someone is now developing a version without their help. So to be fair, both those companies are maintaining closed source drivers.

Which perhaps doesn't matter much from an end user perspective: they just build a kernel module and install it, hooray.

Tangent: apparently nvidia is putting up a fuss about the obsoleting of "immediate mode" and fixed pipeline rendering in GL 3.2 and saying it won't be obsoleted on their cards. That is kind of a developer friendly thing, since some software is intentionally developed to run on old pre GL 1.5 cards that support only a fixed pipeline, I imagine in institutions like schools, etc.
12-21-2009
Elysia

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberfish

I did it.

CPU overclocked to 2.8ghz, memory at 800mhz
idle 1.13A (135.6W)
load CPU 1.59A (190.8W)
load GPU 2.32A (278.4W) (just for fun)

CPU at 1.8ghz stock, memory at 533mhz
idle 1.07A (128.4W)
load CPU 1.35A (162W)

CPU is an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300. Load is Orthos (2 instances of Prime 95 stress test to stress both cores). Idle is sitting at the Windows desktop.

Current measured on the power cable (either hot or neutral wire... the color coding is weird. hopefully not the ground wire) using a clamp-on multimeter. Power supply efficiency is ~80% at 50% load, according to reviews.

Power consumptions are calculated assuming the current and voltage (120V RMS, measured using a multimeter*) are in phase, which should be pretty close? I don't have an oscilloscope, so I can't verify that.

Now, assuming I keep my computer on 24/7, with the CPU loaded to 100% 10% of the time (which is a huge over-estimation), the average power consumptions are 141.1W (135.6*0.9+190.8*0.1) and 131.8W. The difference is 9.4W. Over a year, that's 82kWh.

Assuming an electricity price of 6cents/kWh, it will cost me an additional $5/year to run my computer overclocked. A steal IMHO.

*probably assuming a perfect sinusoidal wave instead of actually doing the integration

As for my PSU, it's rated for 380W (at 80% efficiency, that means 475W on the input side), so it won't mind.

EDIT:
Upon thinking about it a bit more, of course the load is not linear. It shouldn't even be sinusoidal - there is a rectifier in there!

Therefore, all my calculated power are greater than the actual power consumed (and you have to pay for). By how much I don't know.

This is interesting, How do you overclock? I imagine you disable power saving features in order to overclock using the bios?
I wouldn't mind undervolting or overclocking my own cpu without raising the voltage.
I would have thought it would be a higher wattage.

Also, concerning the PSU: don't pay mind to the "rating." It's marketing crap. What really matters it the amount of amps it can put out on its critical rails. My PSU, for example, cannot handle my gpu at full load which might cause the system to use around, like, 250-300W, and it's rated at 400W.
12-21-2009
crowe

Something you might find helpful:
Best computer you can get for $X.
12-21-2009
abachler

Quote:

Originally Posted by crowe

Something you might find helpful:
Best computer you can get for $X.

Worthless. Not everyone is building a machine for gaming, and those are all pretty lame builds for gaming anyway.
12-21-2009
Elysia

Those things are usually worthless as they list components in US and US resellers. Not everyone lives in the US, as you know, and for them, it's worthless.
12-21-2009
Kennedy

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elysia

As for memory... <snip> Then there is DDR3 which is newer and faster, but pricier. <snip> 8 GB ($100 or so?).

It is amazing what we consider pricier these days. The first computer I built (back in 1994) was on a tight budget of ~$30K. I purchased two SIMs 16MB for the low low coast of $500 each. The mainboard I got was a Tyan for about $850 with an i386 clone for about $1,000.

But, we now say that 8GB of memory that is 100X faster than the old days is pricier.

(BTW, including 45GB of storage in the form of 5 9GB Seagate Barracuda SCSI drives I came in under budget at $25K -- The client was thrilled.)
12-21-2009
Elysia

Oh yes, it's amazing indeed.
I remember the old computer that was 133 MHz with around 2 or 4 MB or ram I think, can't remember clearly.
Then I got a 266 MHz computer, but with memory unknown.
I wasn't into the computer market yet at that time :p
12-21-2009
Kennedy

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elysia

old computer that was 133 MHz

Wow, that's fast. My first (in the mid 80's) was an 8/16/24 MHz -- it had a 3 state pot on the front with Slow/Med/Fast on it -- it predated the "turbo" button by about 3 years. My dad traded advertising on his radio station for it (I don't know how much memory it had but I do know that is was less than 640K).
12-21-2009
cyberfish

Quote:

This is interesting, How do you overclock? I imagine you disable power saving features in order to overclock using the bios?
I wouldn't mind undervolting or overclocking my own cpu without raising the voltage.
I would have thought it would be a higher wattage.

The power saving features are still enabled. They just drop the CPU multiplier and CPU voltage when its unused. The power saving is proportional for the overclocked CPU.

I am running it at stock voltage, but true, I can probably undervolt it at stock frequency. That would incur slightly higher cost to overclock, like $5 extra / year.

Quote:

Also, concerning the PSU: don't pay mind to the "rating." It's marketing crap. What really matters it the amount of amps it can put out on its critical rails. My PSU, for example, cannot handle my gpu at full load which might cause the system to use around, like, 250-300W, and it's rated at 400W.

Most good modern power supplies have the watts distributes among the rails in a sensible way, according to how modern computers eat power (ie, give the video card 90% of the total watts).
12-21-2009
Mario F.

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kennedy

Wow, that's fast. My first (in the mid 80's) was an 8/16/24 MHz -- it had a 3 state pot on the front with Slow/Med/Fast on it -- it predated the "turbo" button by about 3 years. My dad traded advertising on his radio station for it (I don't know how much memory it had but I do know that is was less than 640K).

Probably an Amstrad PC 1512. 8086 cpu. My first too and at the same time.
Mine came with a whooping 20Mb hard drive you could hardly fill those days. And the HD was in fact an extra. Usually they would come with 2 floppy drives as seen on the picture. The HD one only had one slot. The other was for the disk.

My dad bought it for himself. For his work he said.
Right. He never again used since the day I laid my eyes on it. The day he brought it home. :D
12-21-2009
Elysia

Quote:

Originally Posted by cyberfish

The power saving features are still enabled. They just drop the CPU multiplier and CPU voltage when its unused. The power saving is proportional for the overclocked CPU.

I am running it at stock voltage, but true, I can probably undervolt it at stock frequency. That would incur slightly higher cost to overclock, like $5 extra / year.

That's not the way for AMD cpus at least, for what I know.
The "states" it has are hard coded are cannot change. Even if you bump up the multiplier, it still won't accept them, and use their hard coded states.
So to overclock, I have to disable the power saving features.
At least, this is what I have been led to believe.

Quote:

Most good modern power supplies have the watts distributes among the rails in a sensible way, according to how modern computers eat power (ie, give the video card 90% of the total watts).

That is if they are good. Many are not and many fail to balance load properly, too.
So beware.
12-21-2009
CornedBee

Quote:

That's not the way for AMD cpus at least, for what I know.
The "states" it has are hard coded are cannot change. Even if you bump up the multiplier, it still won't accept them, and use their hard coded states.

I think that's one thing that distinguishes the Black Edition from others - the BE has an unlocked multiplier.
12-21-2009
Elysia

Ah, but there is the catch. The Black Edition is the super-mega hungry versions of the processors that eats up to 140W and costs 1.5x the rest of the cpus.
No, thank you. I'll stick with my current 65W cpu and switch over to 45W phenoms when they become available.
12-21-2009
crowe

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elysia

Ah, but there is the catch. The Black Edition is the super-mega hungry versions of the processors that eats up to 140W and costs 1.5x the rest of the cpus.
No, thank you. I'll stick with my current 65W cpu and switch over to 45W phenoms when they become available.

Nope, you're wrong.

The current line up of Black Editions ranges from 80 to 140 with the 14 being phased out in favor of the 125.

And I don't think you'll see a performance processor at 45W for quite some time(if ever).
12-21-2009
Elysia

I see only 125 and 140W locally. Doesn't matter what newegg says. I don't live in US.
And I do believe that AMD is planning on releasing 45W Phenom processors. There already are Athlon X4 or whatever they're called 45W cpus, so it's not far off, I think...
12-21-2009
crowe

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elysia

I see only 125 and 140W locally. Doesn't matter what newegg says. I don't live in US.
And I do believe that AMD is planning on releasing 45W Phenom processors. There already are Athlon X4 or whatever they're called 45W cpus, so it's not far off, I think...

Ah, well where are you that you can't get a wider selection than that?

Also, AMD has been saying they're going to release 45W phenoms since mid 2007. They say a lot but often don't follow through with it, unfortunately.
12-21-2009
Elysia

Ah, but you were listing dual core and triple core processors, as well. Yes, there are 95W for triple and 80W for dual core. Yet, there is only 125 and 140 for quad core, which is what I was looking at.
And why would I pay for an 80W dual core cpu when there are 45W out there?

Also, don't be so hard on AMD. They have fallen in bad times.
Still, I would like to see some 45W cpus out there. We need them in these times of troubled economy.
12-21-2009
crowe

Quote:

Originally Posted by Elysia

Ah, but you were listing dual core and triple core processors, as well. Yes, there are 95W for triple and 80W for dual core. Yet, there is only 125 and 140 for quad core, which is what I was looking at.
And why would I pay for an 80W dual core cpu when there are 45W out there?

Also, don't be so hard on AMD. They have fallen in bad times.
Still, I would like to see some 45W cpus out there. We need them in these times of troubled economy.

Correct. I must have missed the qualifier "quad-core".

Also, don't get me wrong, I love AMD even through their hard-times I remain a fan for "budget performance". Quad-core computing for under $100USD? Yes, please!

I'm in the middle of a slow-going build(currently have: Antec 300, two 22" monitors, and three WD640-Blacks[two in Raid-0, one for backup]). I'll almost definitely be going with the 955BE whenever I catch a really good deal on it.

I'd love to have an i7, but the cost is just enormous right now. $125 difference in processor, plus $160 or so difference in mobo costs, totals at just under $300 for not much gain overall. I'd rather put that money into more ram or a stronger video card, honestly.
12-21-2009
abachler

Quote:

Originally Posted by Kennedy

Wow, that's fast. My first (in the mid 80's) was an 8/16/24 MHz -- it had a 3 state pot on the front with Slow/Med/Fast on it -- it predated the "turbo" button by about 3 years. My dad traded advertising on his radio station for it (I don't know how much memory it had but I do know that is was less than 640K).

My first computer ran at 110 KHz clock speed and had 2.5K of ram. The good ole VIC-20 :D

My first IBM compatible ran at 4.77 MHz and was my 4th computer.
12-21-2009
zacs7

IMO, AMD have lost the "edge" over Intel. The new i5/i7 processors rock. The fact that the tri-core AMD processors are really quad-core processors that failed Q&A is rather concerning.

I would build it myself, that way you can control what goes in it. And if you require more horses, you could just set up a distributed compiler to use with your old computer and laptop. Being able to play the "newest games on decent settings for two years" is a very big ask, especially at the rate things are moving. ATI have cleaned up their act a fair bit when it comes to Linux drivers, but I'd still say go with nVidia. RAM is cheap, so go with DDR3 since if you want to upgrade in the future it'll make it easier finding matching ram with the same CAS latency (which you'll need for dual- or tri- channel). 8GB of RAM is certainly worth it, even if you don't think you'll need it. ramfs anyone? :)
12-21-2009
cyberfish

I tried ramfs on my laptop some time ago. Put my root on ramfs (used a script in initrd to copy files into ramfs on boot up). Then I got an SSD :D. No noticeable difference anymore, so I took it out.
12-22-2009
CornedBee

Quote:

Originally Posted by zacs7

IMO, AMD have lost the "edge" over Intel. The new i5/i7 processors rock.

AMD profited from Intel's boneheadedness about the Netburst architecture. Once Intel woke up, it flexed its financial muscles and developed the Core architecture.

Quote:

The fact that the tri-core AMD processors are really quad-core processors that failed Q&A is rather concerning.

Nah, die harvesting is common practice. AMD/ATi does it, Intel does it, nVidia does it.
12-22-2009
crowe

Quote:

Originally Posted by zacs7

IMO, AMD have lost the "edge" over Intel. The new i5/i7 processors rock.

AMD has a strong user-base in the budget pc market, as well as a decent hold on servers(again, because of the budget issues). Intel is getting hit left and right for various anti-trust/anti-competitiveness lawsuits which is giving AMD and nVidia a good chance to move up(AMD with the Phenom for budget performance, and the Neo X2 for netbooks and nVidia with the ION chipset replacing intel's GMA).

Quote:

The fact that the tri-core AMD processors are really quad-core processors that failed Q&A is rather concerning.

As CornedBee pointed out, this is common across all manufacturers. What do you think the difference between a 3.33GHz Core 2 Duo and a 3.06 GHz Core 2 Duo is? More often than not, some sort of instability that causes that 3.33 to need to be downclocked, or possibly a portion of the chache is corrupt so they downgrade a large portion of the processor and sell it for less instead of just chucking it out.

Same goes for graphics cards. If you have a card with 1600 stream processing units, and a quarter of them are bad(for whatever reason), just disable the bad ones and sell it for less as a lower model. Don't see what's so bad about that.
12-22-2009
abachler

Quote:

Originally Posted by zacs7

The fact that the tri-core AMD processors are really quad-core processors that failed Q&A is rather concerning.

Only on of them failed, which is why its disabled. Theres nothing wrong with the other 3. Intel routinely sells dual core units with one failed unit as single core units. They increase yield on their quad cores by gluing two duals together (figuratively speaking). In point of fact most video cards have many failed stream processors on them.
12-22-2009
MK27

Quote:

Originally Posted by Mario F.

My dad bought it for himself. For his work he said.
Right. He never again used since the day I laid my eyes on it. The day he brought it home. :D

My dad was an engineer; when I was 11, all I got for Christmas was a C64.

I cried. :p
12-22-2009
abachler

Quote:

Originally Posted by MK27

My dad was an engineer; when I was 11, all I got for Christmas was a C64.

I cried. :p

Tears of joy I would hope, the C64 was an awesome machine in its day. In fact they sold software for it up until about 10 years ago. Its a great machine to learn on, since its simple to start programming, you cant mess anything up that turning it off then back on wont fix, and it teaches you to make the most of the resources you are given. If I was king fro a day, I'd make everyone start on a C64 or VIC-20 as their first computer and learn to program it before you could get the newer ones.
12-22-2009
MK27

Quote:

Originally Posted by abachler

Tears of joy I would hope, the C64 was an awesome machine

No, mostly because previous Christmases I always got some Lego monstrosity, and had it finished before my parents got out of bed. I was up a creek wrt to assembling the C64 tho. All I could do was sit there and look at it while my stupid little sisters were laughing and playing. Also, my grandfather had died the night before...

We had a VIC20 before that. I used to program in BASIC on both of them.

I don't remember when or why I stopped -- I suspect it was a mixture of puberty and that when we got a PC clone a few years later it didn't have a BASIC oriented shell. Also cartridge games like "jumpman" on the C64 were probably a distraction.

If I was starting kids out programming on computers now, I think I'd show them ruby.

Ruby Programming Language ;)

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