I hate computers

[Dr Unne]

Can anyone tell me if this is a good deal?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...=A455-2116%20A

How can anyone keep up with all this crap? It used to be low numbers bad, high numbers good. Sell your 386 and get a 486. Now there's single cores and dual cores and hyperthreading and 32 vs. 64 bit, and no way to tell which of Athlon or Sempron or Duron or Opteron or Celeron or FX or X2 is best.

All I want is an average computer that's better than what I have, and that is going to be upgradeable for the next 4 years or so. I have an old Pentium 4 2.4GHz right now, and I can't even tell if the one I linked about is better or worse than what I have. Seeing as how my old one has a P4 2.4GHz and the motherboard can't take a PCI Express card, I'll assume what I linked above is better.

[Yamaneko]

That's a good price. The 3200 is sort of weak, but since I assume you won't be doing much encoding it should be fine. The 939 socket will allow you to upgrade to a dual core AMD solution when you feel the need for real multi-tasking. You'll want to get at least another 512MB of RAM. You'll also need to provide your own GPU. I recommend no less than a Geforce 6600GT (which you can now find for around $120) and no more than a 7800GT ($300 price range), although that might be pushing the limits of what the CPU can push to a card as fast as a 7800GT.

[Dr Unne]

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...&sku=P450-8576

That card is $99, that was my plan. Again I have no idea whether a XFX GeForce 6800 Xtreme is better or worse than a Geforce 6600GT.

I plan to use this computer for programming and light gaming and watching movies etc. By "encoding" do you mean video / audio encoding? No, I won't be touching that.

[Yamaneko]

That should be fine.

[Dr Unne]

Now you have me wondering if I should get something better than the 3200+.

*sepuku*

[Yamaneko]

A more powerful proc will only benefit you if you plan on running the very latest games at 1280x1024 with everything on high. You would then have to invest in a better GPU as well. The 3200 has a P(entium) rating of around 3.2GHz, hence 3200. Of course it's only clocked at 2.2GHZ (or something like that), but AMD gives you better performance per CPU cycle than Intel does.

[Dr Unne]

OK, that's reassuring. I was thankfully grilled for a semester at college on the fact that faster clock speed does not mean a faster computer. I have no wish to play the latest games at 1280x1024.

I will hesitantly plan to get the crap I've linked here. Thanks for your help.

[-N-]

Reformat and reinstall Windows.

[Cid]

I think that's pretty cheap for what you're getting. So good job.

I have a AMD X2 4400 and it multi-tasks like a beast.

[Yamaneko]

The X2 line is sweet, although I also wouldn't mind an FX-60.

[Dr Unne]

In what way does it multitask better? Is it better responsiveness when doing heavy disk I/O? Or better responsiveness during 100% CPU utilization? I would assume that latter, if the speedup is due to the CPU being able to execute two processes or threads in parallel. Which kinds of programs does it make the biggest difference for?

Linux uses a preemptible kernel that makes it feel a lot more responsive than Windows, especially if you enable DMA for your hard drives. Though I know dual processors would make a difference doing parallel compilation in GCC (when it's possible). It's good to know I can get a dual core processor if I ever want one. I figure I'm likely to get at least as much benefit from switching from an IDE to SATA HD than from upgrading the processor, however I'm basing this on vague theoretical knowledge and not on empirical data. I am looking forward to seeing what kind of difference a 64bit processor makes; my guess is not much, but Gentoo is compiled architecture-specific so you never know.

Reformat and reinstall Windows.

Sage advice indeed.

[Yamaneko]

There is less of a difference between IDE and SATA than between single core and dual core. A throughput of 150MB/s is only theoretical and assumes no latency between HDD, RAM, and CPU. Dual core's benefits are seen now. Ripping a movie? Watch another movie using the other core and experience no bottleneck except for memory and HDD requirements. Programs are now coming out that use both cores. This is especially important in Pro apps where managing seperate processes is key.

The 64-bit jump is not a big one. It's mainly a jump in memory allocation, where before a 32-bit proc could only allocate 4GB of RAM to a system, a 64-bit proc could theoretically allocate 17,179,869,184 GB of RAM (thanks Wikipedia), although a 16GB limit has been placed in most modern OS kernels.

[Dr Unne]

After further searching, it seems that Tigerdirect are possibly a bunch of shysters. BBB report for example...

http://www.bbbsoutheastflorida.org/n...33000027000500

Isn't that depressing? "Too good to be true" comes to mind. Back to the drawing board.

[Cid]

I like Newegg myself. Oh and zipzoomfly.com is good too.

I don't know all the technological mumbo-jumbo, but I did do a lot of comparing before settling on a processor. Basically, I just learned that AMD is better than Intel. Also, I learned that a single core (FX-60) could be the fastest processor on the planet at doing one thing (gaming), but that most of us do different things (check email, listen to music, rip a dvd, whatever). Thus, most of us would benefit from dual core. I don't know why it works better, but the fact is that it does.

I rip two dvds from two drives at the same time. I play Doom 3 while ripping mp3s off of a cd and downloading on bittorrent. No slowdown. The processor cost me about 500 bucks though. There are cheaper, better value AMD dual cores though. I just don't like overclocking, so I got one that I wouldn't have to.

[Dr Unne]

I play Doom 3 while ripping mp3s off of a cd and downloading on bittorrent.

Well that sounds tasty.