I'm about to shop for a new computer for the first time 8 years and I haven't kept up to day (as much as I should have) with CPU and video card development. So, I'm calling in some experts. First, I want a performance machine, on a budget. I would like to spend no more than $600 to $1000, but I'd be willing to spend slightly more if it were worth it. I'm looking for something without a monitor and I'm just curious where the sweet spot is. Is it better to get a cheap high end system, or the top of the line budget system? And primarily I'm having trouble with all the new variables. Before it was mostly a matter of clock speed, and then system bus and chipset and cache factors. But now, I have to think about how many cores, and clock speed seems so much less a factor that it's harder to judge what's smartest. Do I go for a slow quad core or a really fast dual core? An entry level i7 or the highest end i5? I guess I'm just thrown off balance since I'm less familiar with the new landscape of CPU features and designs. I'm similarly out of touch with video cards. I still like Nvidea, but I'm not sure what the major considerations are now. Last time I bought a video card it was AGP 8x and 64 MB of video RAM. So, you can imagine how surprised I am to find such massive, seemingly overpowered cards now. I don't really do much gaming anymore (at the moment), but I might like to get back into gaming once I have my new system. I also expect this system to last at least a good 3-5 years and allow me to have plenty of power to spare for the foreseeable future. Any advice? Specific suggestions and recommendations welcome, but also general guidelines and information to help catch me up. I'm at least a good 5 years behind the times here, since just the sheer number of video ports now available hurts my head (I'm assuming HDMI is the way of the future?? If so, just how superior is it compared to DVI?) Thanks in advance
Are you building or buying? If building: You should consider a lower cost high end system. You would want to go with i7, so you have the chipset for a future upgrade. Go for a USB 3.0 motherboard, they are out, and the switch is on its way. Things are starting to release at that speed. (you don't want to be left with 2.0.. it is slowwww) As far as video cards, I would go for an ATI card. 58xx are great cards. even the 48xx are great cards. You are going to have to get DDR3 ram, 1066 is a fine speed to go with. 6gb is about the right amount these days for a high end system. If buying: look for about the same things, but you will not get all the things you want. At this high end, it also might be more expensive. If you want less than 1000, (the one I said to get above is probably about 1000 or a little more with tax and shipping and such) you can look at an AMD system. PM me if you want more info. Oh, and HMDI is not the future of computers, display port is. Although the high end cards will normally have DVI, display port and HDMI. But once again, just PM me if you want more info.
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I recommend that you do not use the 775 series socket because socket 775 soon no longer be used in the market anymore, because terlah replaced by socket 1366. but it depends on you, whether you'll be doing an upgrade or not. for the selection processor, you should consider the terms of your use of the everyday. if you want to use your PC for my gaming needs more recommends that you use a intel core i7. but if you are more likely to perform multimedia activities, such as editing, graphic design, and rendering .. would be better if you use a phenom II. however, if you are an overclocker, certainly not a problem for you to use a phenom. because the phenom is now easier to overclock and can achieve clock for 7Ghz
Great info. Thanks. I'm not sure about building or buying. I am traditionally a Dell fan, but I'm open to other options. My main concern is not having a Windows 7 disc for reinstall, I hate restore disc only systems. I am also not a big fan of all the junk some companies load on to their systems. You have a brand new system and it's already cluttered with programs you need to uninstall (or just leave on there thinking you might SOME DAY use them but never do) and unwanted processes. So, in that regard, who are the ones to avoid and who are the good ones? I'm seriously considering a solid state system drive and a separate, much larger data drive. I like Western Digital for rotational drives, not sure whether Caviar Black or Velociraptor, though. I want speed, but I also want reliability and reasonably quiet operation. ONE BIG QUESTION I have that so far no one has been able to answer for me honestly.... I'm not sure how true this still is, but it certainly has been the case for as long as I can remember that hard drive performance drops SIGNIFICANTLY as they get full. Once a drive gets over 50% full, performance falls off dramatically, and once it's up to 3/4 or more, that fast drive slows to a crawl. This is obviously the case with the system partition, since it hosts the pagefile, but as far as I knew it also applied to data-only drives as well (albeit with less of a system-wide performance hit). Thus, the effective size of a drive has always been a bit of an illusion, because if you actually filled that drive up you'd start to slow down and be better off replacing it with a bigger drive. That 300 GB hard drive is really only good for 150 gb before you start to get much longer read/write times. Is this still the case? I'm also coming from ATA100, so I'm a bit unsure of myself. Now, I'm thinking of getting an SSD for my system drive, as I said. I know these differ in some ways, such as data fragmentation is no longer an issue (no defragmenting? YAY!). BUT, here's my big question... do solid state drives have this same issue of slowing down once they get very full??? I'm trying to think of whether I could afford an SSD large enough for my main system partition, and I could probably afford about an 80-100 GB SSD, which would be PLENTY of space IF I knew I could use it ALL (minus, say a couple of gigs for the pagefile) without suffering a performance hit. I plan on getting a 1-2 TB rotational drive for all my data (music, movies, documents, email, etc), so a full 80 gigs for just OS and programs seems like more than enough (it's what I have now and it's significantly less than half full). So, please educate me on this issue, which is really a practical issue that people in the know or with everyday SSD experience would be able to answer. I hope someone can shed some light on this.
There are people that use 30gb ssd drives for their boot partition and some major programs and fill it almost to the brim and still can recognize it is faster than a normal drive. I would say you should leave 5gb on a 30gb drive free. Maybe a little more, but not half. if you are looking for a speed boost in the program loading area and windows launching, that is a good way to get it. Then get a 1tb drive for data, don't get a 2tb. The 2tb drives are very unstable and have bad fail rates. (this information is coming from someone i know who spends his life fixing computers, and replaces a lot of drives, does a lot of server work.) They keep making the data less stable to provide for more room, 1tb drives don't fail often, but 1.5 and 2tb do.
Thank you for the information. So, I can fill it almost full with NO loss of performance?? That's great to know. Heck, 80 GB is MORE than enough if that is the case. Also, I was unaware of the higher fail rates. I've heard that the higher-performance (10,000 RPM) drives had higher fail rates as a trade-off for performance, but I had not heard this about larger drives. Is this just hearsay, or are there statistics you might be able to share? This is useful information, but I want to make sure it's reliable since I had my eyes on a 2 TB drive so I wouldn't need to replace it for a long while.
I don't have any stats to give you, but I am sure you could find some. The way they are making drives bigger now, is causing more data fail rates. I generally trust people who replace drives all day long. He told me last time I was in his shop, that since 2tb drives have come out, he has seen about 90% of his replacements, were 2tb drives. or 1.5tb. They don't have a long lifespan. The 10,000 rpm drives definitely fail more, has a lot to do with the stress from spinning so much faster.
Yes, it makes sense that the faster drives would cause more wear and tear on the bearings and other moving parts, plus due to the added heat generated and added power consumption. But, I would have never thought that just having a larger capacity could be an issue with reliability. This is a valuable piece of information, even if I have to find stats on my own. Thank you for sharing, Sam.
Not a problem. And it has to do with the way they stack the data now. SO they have more room. Makes it less stable