New PC for my brother-best MB/processor combo?

[Fushigi]

If he still has floppies, get a 1GB Flash drive for next-to-nuthin and copy all of his floppies to that on the old PC. I haven't used floppies in literally over a year, probably far longer.

 

[jtr1962]

Thinking of these:

Case (Lian-Li PC-60-I've already bought two of them and I just love them)

Power Supply (seems as good as Seasonic for half the price, doesn't have a PCI-E connector. Would that ever be important?)

HDD (500 GB Samsung. Newegg's shipping methods on HDDs concern me however. Also, anyone know if it might be available for less elsewhere?)

The case Merc uses seems great except I want something with more than one internal drive slot. Also, I'm really sold on aluminum cases for heat dissipation reasons. The PS/case combo I'm thinking of would run roughly $67 more here but it's closer to what I think my brother would like (he loved the Lian-Li case I used for my last build).

The grand total I'm getting for everything shipped is $545.56-a bit more than I wanted to spend but not horribly over budget. The main frills driving up the price are the case/PS, card reader, 4GB RAM instead of 2, 500GB HDD instead of 250. Without the frills I would be at slightly under $400.

 

[Fushigi]

You're over budget so make some things more realistic to cut costs.

Drop to 2GB RAM unless he has an immediate need for more. Get 1 2GB stick to leave expansion capacity. RAM is an easy upgrade and tends to get cheaper over time.

Likewise, stop and consider how much storage he really needs. Coming from that old of a system a 250GB drive will be plenty. Massive overkill, really. Even if hew has a few hundred CDs to rip storage won't be an issue. A smaller drive will also likely have fewer platters which equates to less heat generated/wasted and in theory better longevity. This would save you $40.

I would also advise external storage for media storage should a smaller drive actually fill up. An external drive is plenty fast for pretty much all purposes and can be unplugged/powered down when not used to extend useful life even further. They're also portable.

Really, even today my employer buys PCs with 512MB to 1GB RAM and 60GB hard drives. They're meant to last 3 years.

And as a data point, Vista Ultimate 64-bit with all the bells & whistles loaded takes roughly 15GB disk space. That still leaves 235GB for apps & data if you get the smaller drive.

 

[timwhit]

I would agree that 4GB RAM is overkill.

The computer I just built for myself only has 2GB and it is perfectly fine. I also use Photoshop and several other apps that are very memory hungry.

My work computer has 3GB of RAM, but I also run BEA Weblogic Portal, which uses over 1GB for the server and around 1GB for the IDE. Then I usually have Photoshop, Firefox, Outlook, Dreamweaver, and sometimes Flash and Illustrator open on top of that. Do you really think your brother will ever in the life of his machine have a need for that?

 

[jtr1962]

Yes, 4 GB is overkill here, but I can foresee a time that 2GB might not be enough. My brother may decide to do a lot more with this machine than his present machine just by virtue of its capabilities. I can easily see him getting into video editing perhaps. Let's not forget that since we have integrated video it'll be using some of the RAM (64MB?). My main reason for loading up on the RAM now is that it's cheap. I remember last year there was a period where RAM suddenly more than doubled in price. Just my luck, when the time comes another 2GB stick is needed it might cost as much as 4GB costs now. And in the end we're only talking another $50 or so here-an amount that hardly registers on most people's budgets. I honestly don't see RAM getting much cheaper anytime soon. In fact, current prices represent a loss in the industry. Probably $75-$100 for a stick of the highest density is what prices will eventually stabilize at. Until 4GB DIMMs become common that will mean higher prices per GB than now.

On the HDD, I may go with 250 just for reasons of greater reliability/less noise. Truth is my brother hasn't even filled up his original 8GB drive yet. Then again, getting into something like video editing could suddenly cause 500GB to make sense. Anyway, something to think about either way.

Probably the biggest splurge here would be the case and power supply. I could go with something cheaper. However, I consider a decent case to be a one-time investment. The ones I bought for me and my mom will be reused whenever we decide to upgrade. The power supply will be reused as long as it works (a decent one can last several systems anyway).

Anyway, yes, I'm over budget but $500-$600 for a middle of the road system probably would have been more realistic anyway. I just made a little extra money I wasn't expecting to so I can afford it. It'll be a combined Christmas/brithday present anyway split 50/50 between my mom and I. So that's roughly $275 each, $75 each over what we were planning to spend. For me this is actually good. About 14 years ago I budgeted $500 to build a thermoelectric temperature chamber. I ended up spending over three times that. I think the term for the reason why is feature creep.

I just remembered that when I was scanning slides on my old PII the 1GB RAM was seriously constraining me. The scanned image files were something like 40MB each. I was pretty much limited to scanning under 20 slides at a time. I became so disgusted I stopped. The process should be more palatable on my current machine. Should my brother decide to scan his pictures he'll hit that 2GB plateau pretty quickly. No way of really knowing exactly what he will do with the new machine, so better a little overkill than underkill.

At least I know based on the info in this thread that a low-end/barebones system can be built for well under $300. My brother just isn't the type who would have been happy long-term with such a system. On the other hand, most of my relatives or friends probably would be.

 

[Bozo]

If you ever install Vista, 4GB will make sense. The OS is a hog.

Bozo :joker:

 

[jtr1962]

If you ever install Vista, 4GB will make sense. The OS is a hog.

That may well be a possibility down the road should he ever need to install software which requires Vista. I may have to take the plunge myself in a year since it's rumored the new MS Train Simulator coming out then will require Vista.

 

[jtr1962]

UPDATE:

All the parts came this week and I put them together. Unfortunately, the power supply was DOA so I had to use the one from my mom's system to set up the machine. XP installed fine, everything works. The only issue is that XP only sees anywhere from 2.75 to 2.93 of the 4GB of RAM. I knew I couldn't use all 4GB but I was hoping for more than this. The exact amount depends upon how much I set the frame buffer for the onboard video to (settings range from 32MB to 256 MB). As for where the RAM is going, in addition to the frame buffer, the onboard video uses 256 MB, and apparently the other devices use 768 MB. I had been hoping to be able to have more of the RAM useable but no such luck. No setting in the BIOS allow me to turn off the address spaces for the unused expansion slots. XP has PAE enabled, but from what I understand on SP2 and later addresses above 4GB are ignored, or I would probably have access to perhaps 3.6 or 3.7GB. Removing one of the 2GB sticks always drops the available RAM by 1GB. At least I'm using half the stick, so it's not a complete waste of money. ;-) In any case, close to 3GB is more than my brother will likely need for a while. If/when he needs more, we'll upgrade to a 64-bit OS and add one or two 4GB sticks in the open slots.

BTW, I'm amazed that the onboard GeForce 7025 has enough power to run MS Train Simulator reasonably well. In fact, it's about as good as the dedicated GeForce 6200 video card in my machine. I guess onboard video isn't really as crappy as it used to be.

 

[ddrueding]

Those memory numbers are about what I would expect. Comparing a new on-board solution with an older video card that was designed as the low-end to begin with, is a good indicator of how poor on-board really is.

 

[udaman]

That may well be a possibility down the road should he ever need to install software which requires Vista. I may have to take the plunge myself in a year since it's rumored the new MS Train Simulator coming out then will require Vista.

UPDATE:

All the parts came this week and I put them together. Unfortunately, the power supply was DOA so I had to use the one from my mom's system to set up the machine. XP installed fine, everything works. The only issue is that XP only sees anywhere from 2.75 to 2.93 of the 4GB of RAM. I knew I couldn't use all 4GB but I was hoping for more than this. The exact amount depends upon how much I set the frame buffer for the onboard video to (settings range from 32MB to 256 MB). As for where the RAM is going, in addition to the frame buffer, the onboard video uses 256 MB, and apparently the other devices use 768 MB. I had been hoping to be able to have more of the RAM useable but no such luck. No setting in the BIOS allow me to turn off the address spaces for the unused expansion slots. XP has PAE enabled, but from what I understand on SP2 and later addresses above 4GB are ignored, or I would probably have access to perhaps 3.6 or 3.7GB. Removing one of the 2GB sticks always drops the available RAM by 1GB. At least I'm using half the stick, so it's not a complete waste of money. ;-) In any case, close to 3GB is more than my brother will likely need for a while. If/when he needs more, we'll upgrade to a 64-bit OS and add one or two 4GB sticks in the open slots.

BTW, I'm amazed that the onboard GeForce 7025 has enough power to run MS Train Simulator reasonably well. In fact, it's about as good as the dedicated GeForce 6200 video card in my machine. I guess onboard video isn't really as crappy as it used to be.

It has been said/rumored that Intel is getting more and more into the graphics arena, and more potent integrated CPU/GPU's on same die (IIRC).

TS is a very old program that had very limited hardware minimum requirements, should not your brother's old system been able to run MSTS?

http://www.microsoft.com/games/pc/trainsim.aspx#sysreqs




Vista came with support (well sort of) for DirectX10.0, so you'll need a GPU with drivers (Centrino/Santa Rosa chipset supposedly had support for DX10.0, except Intel hadn't provided the drivers/had been dragging their feat on that since last summer, for the GMX 3100).

MSTS2 not only uses DX10.0, it also supports 5.1 sound, so if you get a THX certified 5.1 sound system to give your sims more 'realism' (well at least fantasy big budget movie type of ridiculously exaggerated 'realism' kind of sounds), your neighbors my call the police when they think there has been a train wreck next door, or the sound of a TGV flying by@ 350mph, lol.

Still 256 or 384 of slower system RAM, is not much compared to the Nvidia FX5600's 1.5GB of DDR3...for only $3k .

http://www.nvidia.com/page/qfx_uhe.html

You'd have to use the very lastest integrated GPU's from Intel if you wanted to go with Intel MB, and have support for latest graphics enhancements that MSTS2 will use, Vista only, apparently.

http://www.tsinsider.com/en-US/product/Pages/default.aspx

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_GMA#GMA_X3000


BTW, I find that the latest versions of net browsers can consume 1/2GB alone in RAM, just using tabs and having 10 or more windows open at the same time, and with Camino at least, the RAM is not all freed up when you quit the program. Can never really have too much RAM, it seems...unless you never upgrade or use newer software.

 

[jtr1962]

TS is a very old program that had very limited hardware minimum requirements, should not your brother's old system been able to run MSTS?

Not a chance-the integrated graphics on his old machine wouldn't have been up to it. Also, take those minimum system requirements with a grain of salt. MSTS will run, but barely, and with detail levels turned way down. The program has evolved greatly since it's inception. Add-on routes and trains has become way more complex. The main binary itself has even been altered (i.e. improved greatly) thanks to the MSTSBin project. My previous system (1.4 GHz PIII, Voodoo 3 graphics) had trouble with some high-density routes. The LGVA route was down to 3 or 4 fps in the yards, for example. Even on my present system (Athlon XP 3200, Geforce 6200, 3GB DDR400) I'm lucky to get into the mid-teens there but my brother's machine isn't any better. Frame rates in the mid-teens aren't great, but at least it's playable. Suffice it to say you need a pretty decent system to run MSTS in its present state. I don't know of anyone who has stuck with the MSTS for six years and still only uses the original routes and trains. After a few weeks, that gets old really fast.