Ars Technica System Guide.

[CougTek]

Hi,

I took a glimpse at Ars Technica System Guide to see what good those guys had to say about the optimal configurations in the three main price segments. I found many recommendations highly questionable. Take a look at it and tell me what you think about it.

Just a few examples :

• God Box : They recommend to buy the Seagate Cheatah 73LP. :eekers: An overpriced drive IMO. For similar SCSI drive, the Maxtor Atlas 10K III would be a better buy. And with the new Special Edition drives of Western Digital, there's little need to go SCSI to get capacity and storage space, especially for a workstation like the God Box is supposed to be. They wrote a link to StorageReview in their Budget Box config, maybe they should have visit SR one more time for the God Box.
  
  God Box 2 : They recommend the Sanyo 24x burner. Come on, there's almost a consensus among drive reviewers to say that this drive is slower than the competition and consequently overpriced. LiteON, Mitsumi, TEAC or Yamaha, but not Sanyo. Or Plextor if you want top quality but you don't care to throw money away...
  
  God Box again : They made a mistake in the naming of the memory modules. It should have been 1024MB PC2100 Registered ECC DDR SDRAM. But that's only a typo...
  
  Budget Box : How could they dare to recommend such a crappy monitor? A curved bulb, ultra cheapo 17" Optiquest Q serie monitor. Nobody should buy a curved screen with a new system our days. Reflects are so much a pain for your eyes on a curved screen compared to a flat screen CRT. You can't possibly recommend anything below a Samsung 755DF or a LG 775FT with a system. It should be criminal.

Their Hot Rod system doesn't have any major flaw IMO and it's easily their most succesful system recommendation. Sure, Everyone has their favorite brands, but the basics are good regarding the Hot Rod config (ie - KT266A chipset, not the mobo brand I would get, but still more or less the same).

I know it's easy to criticize and harder to write an article, but the above flaws shouldn't have made it to the article. I've seen a lot worst, but it's not up to what Ars Technica usually writes.

 

[Mercutio]

Well, I wouldn't moan about that 17" optiquest display. Curved screen or no, that's a fine budget monitor (better a curved Optiquest than a flat KDS or Shamrock)...

Surprises: No IDE in the "god box". That 73LP is way, way out of place given the capacity and performance of the "special edition" Western Digital drives. There's an access time advantage, sure, but I would think that anything access-time critical would live on that X15 they suggest for a primary drive.
I also notice they dropped mention of IDE RAID, something that at least occasionally made an appearance in the past.

Hercules Maxi Gamer XP - I've bought those things in the past. I didn't care for it. It's a card with a breakout box for all the connectors. Ew. Another place for cabling to tangle, and none of the usual advantages of external sound, since the parts of the hardware that are actually doing work are still in your EMF-laden case. The card is useless without the box - there isn't even a headphone jack on it. Hope it doesn't fall on the floor or get stepped on or anything.
What's wrong with a Turtle Beach or an M-Audio card for "godly" sound needs?
... also note that both the other boxes used Live/Audigy cards (particularly surprising on the budget box. The onboard audio on that Epox board isn't that bad). IF Creative's cards are that bad why not at least make a blanket choice not to use them?

Zip drive - Why bother? For the price of the 250MB drives plus a disk, adding an extra 60GB of storage + a big ol' spindle of CD-Rs to feed the CD-RW drive they also recommend purchasing is just as possible and a way, way better value.

Geforce3something or other - even if you're some kind of misguided nvidia liking-person, aren't there geforce4's now? And why didn't the surpremely nice Radeon 7x00-series cards rate a mention in the sub-god categories?

No Windows 2000 in the OS recommendations. WTF? "98 if all you do is gaming, Linux if you're into that sort of thing, and XP for everyone else."
No windows 2000? Or are they just assuming that either everyone will break PA or that no one has a problem with it?

 

[CougTek]

I didn't remark the Zip drive, but as you wrote, it's a waste of $$$ nowadays considering how cheap burners are.

I can understand (but not agree) with their recommendation for WinXP, as most softwares for Windows will be developped for it in the future. Win2K SP2 is better than WinXP, but alas, all the goodies will be made for WinXP and not for Win2K, even if WinXP is a piece of junk.

 

[Adcadet]

Just a few examples :

• God Box : They recommend to buy the Seagate Cheatah 73LP. :eekers: An overpriced drive IMO. For similar SCSI drive, the Maxtor Atlas 10K III would be a better buy. And with the new Special Edition drives of Western Digital, there's little need to go SCSI to get capacity and storage space, especially for a workstation like the God Box is supposed to be. They wrote a link to StorageReview in their Budget Box config, maybe they should have visit SR one more time for the God Box.

• 
  
  Yup, the 10KIII would be my choice as well (after the Cheetah 15KLP, of course). And I would have throw in RAID1 array with 2 WD1200BB/SE for mass storage. Afterall, this is what my God is running.
  
  At least they admit that RAID stuff is kindof unclear at the moment and avoid it.