PC specs for 2004

[time]

I've been thinking about what spec to recommend for PC purchases as we move deeper into 2004. I feel that a number of "emerging technologies" are on the agenda and need to be taken into consideration. My main interest is small to medium businesses (corporates will do their own thing anyway).

The significant event for me has been Intel's acceptance of AMD's 64-bit extensions to x86. This changes everything. It raises questions about software compatibility in two to five years time, as well as managing to legitimise AMD's products after a period of uncertainty.

So I'm forming the view that all new PCs should now be x86-64 compatible, at least if projected service life is three years or greater (one of our clients still uses PCs that are about to celebrate their sixth birthday). I suspect the preferred desktop OS in two years time will be 64-bit. It will only take one app to require or prefer this software/hardware platform to cause major heartburn in an enterprise.

I realize that Intel doesn't currently have a product in this space. That's their fault, not anyone else's. It doesn't alter the fact that a 3.4GHz P4 may become unacceptable in 2006.

 

[time]

On with the spec:

o SATA. Already, nearly half the drives available are SATA. It's clear that in six months time, ATA drives will be in the minority, and in twelve months, expensive and hard to get. I feel that in most cases now, it would probably be unethical to sell a motherboard without it.

o At least six USB ports (four is not enough for SOHO). They should all be USB2.0 - who want's to keep track of which is which?

o Preferably 1394 (Firewire). Most decent motherboards now have this feature, and imagine the hassle if you have ten PCs, yet none of them can accept a 1394 device. A lot of my reasoning here is based on the fact that it's increasingly uneconomical to mess with PCs down the track.

o Front USB and audio ports (and preferably Firewire). Front USB should be mandatory, and if you want to use headphones with a PC, what else are you supposed to do?

o Preferably Gigabit LAN. I realize that network adaptor chipsets will change in the next few years, so an onboard solution may not be ideal, but at least you would have one! Gigabit LAN is going to be huge this year; switches have come down in price way faster than when the world moved to 100Mbit.

o DVD-ROM. This will also be huge, now that DVD burners have entered the budget consumer domain. CD-only drives are now at the end of their life. Although burners are considered standard for home SOHO PCs, larger enterprises regard them with justified suspicion - they have the potential to be a major security problem.

o DVI display output. LCDs haven't taken over the world yet, but there's an inevitability about the whole thing. A display monitor is a separate appliance. If a user gets a new 17" LCD monitor, you really don't want to have to change the video card just to achieve a good picture.

 

[time]

Here's some sample configurations, all with Gigabyte motherboards, because everything else sucks. The drives are Hitachi (purely because they were the first prices to hand), and the optional display adaptor a Leadtek A340TD 128MB FX5200 twinview with DVI.

Celeron
GA-8I845GV mATX with integrated graphics, LAN
Celeron 2400 CPU
512MB PC2700 (or PC2100) RAM
80GB/2MB 7200rpm HDD

Athlon XP
GA-7VT600-1394 KT600 with SATA, LAN, Firewire
Athlon XP2600+
512MB PC2700 RAM
80GB/8MB SATA 7200rpm HDD

Pentium 4
GA-8IPE1000-Pro2 i865PE with SATA, GigaLAN, Firewire
Pentium 4 3000 / 800MHz FSB CPU
512MB PC3200 RAM
80GB/8MB SATA 7200rpm HDD

Athlon 64
GA-k8NPRO nForce 3 with SATA, GigaLAN, Firewire
512MB PC3200 RAM
80GB/8MB SATA 7200rpm HDD

And some very rough pricing as of now:

               Celeron    Athlon XP  Pentium 4   Athlon 64
Mboard           $54         $72        $106        $137
CPU              $73         $90        $237        $225
RAM              $70         $70         $81         $81
HDD              $60         $81         $81         $81
Display                      $75         $75         $75

TOTAL           $257        $388        $580        $599

 

[blakerwry]

you didnt include the opticals or the cases... if you want front USB, audio, firewire you'll need a case that offers it.


Remember that many DVD-ROM drives cannot read +R media... some probably have a problem with -R media... I have no idea about RW media.



About displays.. I see no reason to require DVI.. analog should offer excellent picture quality in any LCD as long as it is run at the native resolution. Additionally, a business is probably going to prefer the $100 price per monitor it saves by getting an analog input LCD vs a digital input.





What are your corporate customers concerns over the security of front USB since it offers an easy way to get files on and off the computer?

 

[ddrueding]

Looking for a board with onboard video in the Athlon XP area....can't seem to find any with SATA and onboard video from a reputable mfgr.

 

[blakerwry]

shuttle?

 

[CityK]

shuttle?

No SATA with the Shuttle XP models.

time, is 1394 necessary for your bus. clients?

 

[blakerwry]

huh, I thought for sure they'd have a VIA kt600 model out there...

guess you have to get one of their athlon64 or intel boards for S-ATA.

 

[time]

I see no reason to require DVI.. analog should offer excellent picture quality in any LCD as long as it is run at the native resolution. Additionally, a business is probably going to prefer the $100 price per monitor it saves by getting an analog input LCD vs a digital input.

I'm assuming that DVI connections will become standard on LCD monitors rather than an expensive option. The fact that all except the cheapest new graphics cards are now DVI equipped will change the whole landscape in the next couple of years.

I have some trepidation about buying current budget DVI cards after reading this ExtremeTech article. They do make these points, however:

... higher resolution displays are steadily becoming more popular and, by [late 2004], we'll see the prices on 1600x1200 displays become much more affordable. As TFT-LCD response times improve, they'll even become good displays for gaming. So if you are considering a DVI flat panel display and are tempted by the higher resolution models, DVI compliance may be an important concern. ... DVI compliance will become more important as UXGA panels become more common.

I think you may be right, though. At 1280x1024 there's not likely to be much difference between DVI and analog, and especially with P4 platforms, a separate graphics card seems a waste for general business use.

What are your corporate customers concerns over the security of front USB since it offers an easy way to get files on and off the computer?

One would like their developers to have access solely through Terminal Services. I argue that you have to trust them with your I.P. sooner or later - that's what binding contracts are for. We could of course disable the front USB ports, but I doubt that anyone would notice a programmer messing around at the back of their PC, so the only practical solution would be to disable all USB ports. But then there's email, and disabling attachments won't stop design notes and source code leaving the building. In fact, if I can't think of ways to circumvent a 'security' measure, I'll bet someone else can.

Meanwhile, you have to consider worker productivity in your business, and making technology more user-friendly is likely to improve that. Anyway, that's my view. :roll:

 

[ddrueding]

So if you aren't using onboard video, what are you using? This is what I've been using for servers, but no DVI.


ASUS nVIDIA GeForce2 MX400 Video Card, 64MB SDR, 128-bit, 4X AGP, Model "V7100 PRO PURE" -RETAIL

 

[Bozo]

I've been installing the ATI Radeon 9000 64Meg card for motherboards without on board video.
All of our computers/servers have the USB ports disabled. Some don't even have a CD-ROM. This keeps the "curious" from fooling around. We spend enough time keeping virises and worms out without having a 'backdoor' open. You'd be surpised at how many people bring software in from home and try to install, copy, or view it on the companys computers. Thankfully, none of our (process control) computers are not connected to the internet.

Bozo :mrgrn:

 

[time]

So far, only one person - Blakerwry - has actually offered an opinion on this topic.

It appears that hardly anyone is interested. :-?

 

[Fushigi]

It appears that hardly anyone is interested. :-?

It's not that I'm not interested. I've just been extremely busy at work the past 3 weeks and the workload won't be slowing down anytime soon. I had to attend a funeral out of town on Friday so this past weekend was not particularly productive & I had little time to give topics much thought.

Anyway, since I'm not one of the people who build systems for a living and I only maintain about 4 on any regular basis, new builds aren't really what I do. I typically will upgrade my personal machine and then hand down whatever spare parts were generated to one of the other 3 boxes as needs dictate.

The boxes I support are:
Me: AXP @ 2800, 1GB RAM, X-15 + 0.5TB IDE disk, AIW9600, Diamond Pro 930SB
Wife: Athlon Classic 800MHz, 512MB PC133, 36GB Atlas 10K-II, GF2GTS, Samsung 15" LCD
In-laws: Duron 850, 512MB RAM, 20GB IDE WD POS (to be replaced), ATI Rage II, Dell 15" CRT
Sister: Athlon T-bird 1.4GHz, 256MB, ?? HD, ?? vid card (another Rage card?), Compaq 17" CRT

The wife's is 98SE; the rest are 2KSP3. The wife's and mine Fold 24x7; the others do not Fold at all as they are not on all the time.

Honestly, all of the above machines are fine for their intended uses. My sister is the closest one to needing an upgrade as she will use PhotoShop, DreamWeaver, and other 'hungry' apps on occasion, The wife does email & Office. The in-laws do mostly just email over a 9600bd connection. I'm the only one who taxes their system on any regular basis but even then my current box is more than up to the task.

The following is geared towards home users.

If someone wants a new machine spec from me, I'll generally start with a 2.5GHz CPU (recommend Athlon XP, but P4 OK. No Celerys), 256MB RAM (best-fit for the mobo), 80GB drive, CD-RW (currently the Lite-On 52x32x52 @ $33 shipped from Newegg), an entry level Radeon card, WXP, and whatever case & PSU are convenient. Bump stats & features as needed depending on the planned usage.
- 32 vs. 64 bit aren't really considered at this point. No one I know, including myself, would really benefit from 64 bit on the desktop.
- PATA vs. SATA will simply depend on the mobo & drives available at the time since both options are viable for at least the next 3 years.
- Add 1394 if it may prove useful; preferably integrated on the mobo.
- DVI once prices for DVI-based displays are the same or cheaper than their analog counterparts.
- DVD-RW (no read-only optical get my recommendation anymore) if the person will actually back up their machine or wants to play with video.
- 100Mb/s LAN is still fine for the desktop as I know very few people who are even remotely considering Gb Ethernet at home. Most are happy with 802.11b so what would Gb grant them? Even I'm satisifed with it for my simple home network. I don't move GBs of data around and my internet tops out at 3Mb/s.
- Front USB is good. And it should all be 2.0. I don't know anyone who uses headphones so front audio is not important.
- PSUs. For me I over-buy, but a base 300 watter is typically good enough for the machines I support/recommend. Most folks simply live with the noise so going after silencer models is generally not worth the extra expense.
- Scanners: Canon. LiDE 50 for convenience or 5000F for better quality.
- Printers: HP. I know many don't like them but we've all had good luck with them. Better by far than with Epson, Canon, and Lexmark. I was recommending the 9xx series deskjets so it's been a while. I'd have to get familiar with the current lineup before recommending anything today. Note that I generally never recommend entry level models as they tend to be the most trouble-prone.
- Digital cameras: Canon, Nikon, Olympus in that order. Maybe Minolta or Fuji. Nothing from Sony, Kodak, HP, Gateway, etc. would make my list. 3MP minimum for point-and-click folks; 4+ for the more serious. That said, my 3.3MP Powershot G1 still works and I've no intention of upgrading it until a genuine need arises.
- I'll recommend a UPS to anyone, and now that one can be had for <$50 I think more will take that plunge as well.

OK, so I will over-buy for myself as I don't really limit my personal budget. I also like to buy things that I believe will last a long time, especially since they will generally be used as hand-me-downs after they leave my system. But most people who ask me what they should buy are on limited budgets so it makes sense to spec a box that is effective but not over-speced and also one that likely won't need hardware upgrades for 3 years. They typically aren't gamers, developers, or power users of any sort.

 

[Mercutio]

Here's my take:

1. 1394 isn't common enough to worry about, and isn't worth the effort to seek out. I base this on the fact that firewire has been around for five years and probably 85% of PCs sold don't have it. USB2, on the other hand, went from nowwhere and nothing 18 months ago, to absolutely unavoidable. In a business, the only use I can see for firewire is a high-speed scanner or external zip drive, and USB2 has those things covered.

2. SATA v. PATA - both are and will be needed for at least a couple years. There still isn't any evidence of SATA optical drives yet, but even if there were, probably every one of us who does regular tech-work has a seemingly inexhaustible supply of PATA optical drives laying around. I don't want to stock spare converters. I just want to be able to plug in a drive.

In two years I wouldn't want to curse myself for buying a board I couldn't put a SATA drive in, but I don't want to pay the cost for SATA right now, either.

3. Nothing about PCI Express? It'll be here soon.

4. Media reader as floppy replacement - I've had more than a few requests for media readers. They cost about as much as floppy drives ($10) and are as- or more likely to be used as time goes by. I buy an Inwin model that includes a front USB2 port.

I ask almost everyone I deal with if they use their floppy drive. Almost no one does. It's time.

5. Motherboard that can be made to boot from media in reader or from USB. So far, the all-time champion board for booting off weird devices is the ECS K7S5A. Seriously. I realize that, like front USB, booting off strange media is a two-edged sword, but I believe it's a worthwhile thing to have a writable, bootable media for our needs as techs.

6. DVD-ROM: I've met resistance in businesses on this one, on the basis that Manager X thinks his people will sit and watch DVDs all day (note that I'm not suggesting that anyone install decoding software. DVD = movies to way too many people). In a perfect world, I'd like to have CD writing and DVD reading. Given the choice, I'd rather be able to write CDs than read DVDs, so that's the direction I'd rather push for a business machine.

7. USB ports, number of. I vastly prefer having a hub on a desktop (or better, built into a monitor) to 6 ports on the back of a PC. Hubs are tiny and highly convienent. They don't even cost much. $10 for four or five ports.

I've also found, with the hub-on-desktop situation, that users are more able to troubleshoot their stupid cabling problems, I guess because they can SEE that they've unplugged their own keyboard without looking underneath their desk at the back of their PC.

8. Front-anything. I've found that an astonishing percentage of people don't even realize they have front ports, even when they do. They need to be surrounded by blue cold cathodes for a few years, so people learn to recognize that they have them.

Just this friday I moved someone's headphone connection from the jack on her CD-ROM drive to a front audio port.

9. Gigabit & DVI: Hard to argue with those.

 

[ddrueding]

The things that I value for the econo-desktop box in order of importance:

1. Onboard NIC, Gig-E is nice, but I won't be sweatking it for a while.
2. Onboard Sound, Sure it's crappy...but it's better than the $5 speakers every business person stole from the guy down the hall when he was fired.
3. Onboard video, I love a system with no expansion cards. Runs cooler, looks cleaner, generally cheaper.
4. USB 2.0, I don't spec components that require it...and I hate it when users try to install their own printer or burner, but I does have it's place.
5. More than 2 DIMM slots, I just got stuck with a bunch of 256MB sticks after a company needed to upgrade from 512 to 1GB. Having an extra slot for some 512MB sticks would have saved me some serious money.
6. SATA, it is a very nice feature. And I have build quite a few office PCs with Raptors in them, but the additional price on the mobo is still steep.
7. DVD-ROM, I make sure that at least one workstation has one. This way they can verify the DVD-RW backups from the servers.


Things I don't care about:

1. Firewire is on it's way out IMHO...USB 2.0 is doing very well, and external SATA will finnish it of.
2. Front ports, part of my "your computer isn't yours, keep your paws off" policy. I always train one guy how to plug in the basics...call him.
3. DVI, as most of my users don't go above 1024x768, I don't value it too much. And analog LCDs will be cheaper for some time I think.

 

[Mercutio]

One of the things that drove adoption of Windows 95 - besides long filename support - was the fact that Microsoft released Office 95 for 32-bit Windows only.

Now, the situation in August of 1995 was somewhat different that it will be in ~18 months when the next version of Office is released, but I'm wondering when Microsoft will get around to doing it for 64-bit stuff.

 

[time]

Exactly so, that's the sort of thing I'm wondering about.

Although mainstream PCs were capable of 32-bit operation for some years before Win95 went 32-bit.

But then again, OS2 went 32-bit in 1992 and most PCs didn't have the RAM to properly support it (or even more so NT a year later).

 

[CityK]

Firewire is on it's way out IMHO...USB 2.0 is doing very well, and external SATA will finnish it of.

Firewire won't die. Its too entrenched in A/V. It most likely will be pushed aside in terms of tradional peripheral devices (drives, scanners etc) though. But it may make big gains if it ends up becoming the interconnect of choice between HD displays and devices (STB, computers, HD-DVD players...).

 

[Pradeep]

FW800 currently gives twice the bandwidth of USB2, and this certainly comes in handy with external hard drives.

As CityK mentioned, FW is also the connector of choice to hook up set top boxes to recording devices such as D-VHS for archiving/time shifting of HD video. But it only has the bandwidth to carry the compressed MPEG2 stream, can't carry uncompressed video.

For the connector for HD-DVD, my money is on HDMI (DVI with audio carrying capability, new smaller connector and backwards compatibility) to be used for that. The studios would prefer a DVI based output, because even if it were possible to decrypt it before reaching the display device, the data rate is so large as to be unfeasible to capture.