Joneses we will never keep up with

[Mukik]

Since I like money, midget porn an learning to code. I was wondering whats a good middle of the road specs to aim for in
.1 hard drive
.2 cpu
.3 memory

I know its abigious but I wonder if buying the 1/2 tb drives are just a way of making me download more mp3's and midget rodeo porn?

[Klast Brell]

Check the components recommended at the various levels in the arstechnica guide http://arstechnica.com/guides/buyer/guide-200708.ars

[Ddrak]

To buy a computer, figure out how much you want to spend and then buy the best parts you can within that budget. As for 500G drives - I have about 3Tb of storage between my assorted computers and am still always scraping for more space to put my midget donkey shows. This doesn't mean everyone needs that much space though.

"Middle of the road" specs in my mind would be:

1. HDD - 300G. Maybe. Not much price diff to go to 500G.
2. CPU - Intel Core Duo E6750, or Athlon64x2 6000ish.
3. Memory - 2G. No sense going for less than that really, and try to get 2x1G sticks rather than 4x512.

Dd

[Finglefinn]

One thing not mentioned was a video card. The better than average cards (like a nice nvidia 7800) are a minimum investment of $200 plus another $20-30 for a phat ceramic VGA cooler. The 8800's are a minimum of $300.

[Ddrak]

If you're looking at vid cards, get a DX10 card. My feeling is nVidia seems to be the better pick at the moment (GF8xxx over Radeon 2xxxx).

Dd

[Bahd Zoolander]

I'd go with a 500 gig drive. They're really cheap these days. I agree with DD on CPU/RAM.

Plan for the future a bit and get a DX10 video card for sure. I prefer Nvidia video cards, but if you're going to run Vista you might be happier with an ATI card. Their drivers really seem to be much more solid in Vista. I know plenty of people that aren't having issues with Vista and their Nvidia card, but I also see tons of bug reports for them and really none for ATI cards. I don't know if it's overall driver quality or just that Nvidia releases so many beta drivers that you get cruft built up over time that causes problems, but if I was to buy a card to go with vista today it'd be ATI.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Agree with all the advice here except the DX10 card. If you were building a high-end uber geek gaming rig then I'd probably say go for it. But for a mid-range budget box I think it's a waste. There's hardly any games that even utilize it, and the ones that do are half-assed ports. Maybe a year or two from now when the software is around that takes full advantage of DX10 (which also gives Vista some time to mature), the cards will be both mainstream and dirt-cheap.

I would say that a mid-range rig by definition should hit the sweet spot on price for all components.

As far as a system that meets your bizarre goals:

-- Any modern system is fine for p2p / multimedia, unless you want to watch HD movies, in which case you just doubled the cost of your rig (get the DX10 card in that case.)

-- Any dual core system is fine for coding. Don't know what development tools / environment you're using, but I can say the Visual Studio (what I use) loves the extra RAM, and so does every web server / database engine I know of (since you'll probably be testing your software locally.)

-- I'd go with the 500 gig drive. They're going for about 100 bucks. You could always get fancy and RAID 0 a couple 300 gig drives for about 150 bucks and get much better performance. I usually go with the SLED (single, large, expensive drive) methodology since big drives are no longer expensive, and RAID is harder to recover if something goes wrong.

[Ddrak]

DX10 cards start at about $50, so not sure what you're calling "expensive". Wasn't suggesting to go all out and get an 8800Ultra (though they are very nice), but an 8600 or 8800gts is definitely worth the cash.

Bioshock is much nicer in DX10 too.

Dd

[Freecare Spiritwise]

DX10 cards start at about $50, so not sure what you're calling "expensive". Wasn't suggesting to go all out and get an 8800Ultra (though they are very nice), but an 8600 or 8800gts is definitely worth the cash.

Bioshock is much nicer in DX10 too.

A quick look at newegg.com:

CHAINTECH GSE86GT-A1 GeForce 8600GT 256MB 128-bit GDDR3 PCI Express x16 SLI Supported Video Card - Retail (this card rated 5 stars)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814145146

Yeah, they have come down in price quite a bit. I wish I had a link to a Tom's Hardware article I read where they were saying that the budget DX10 cards had lousy performance compared to previous generations. IIRC, the 8600 series didn't come close to the 7900 in performance /shrug. I think they cut down the number of pipelines. Either way, it's hard to go wrong for $124.99. I stand corrected on the price issue, but I still doubt that most people are going to see the full benefit of DX10 for quite some time.

[Ddrak]

I still doubt that most people are going to see the full benefit of DX10 for quite some time.

Yeah - not disagreeing there.

Dd

[Klast Brell]

Here is a good current source for graphics cards http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/09/05/ ... page2.html

[-=Xilanthanax=-]

For me, the issue was moot. I bought a radeon x1950 pro 512mb (for my amd dual core machine) for the same price i could have gotten a 256mb 8600 gs. I don't wanna use vista at least until they get a service pack or two on it, so I'm perfectly fine with a high performance dx9 card.

[Freecare Spiritwise]

Here's the article I was referring to: http://www.tomshardware.com/2007/07/24/ ... orce_8600/

Snippet from the article:

We fear that those buying "DX10" cards in the hope that they will play the highly anticipated game titles due out later this year will be sorely disappointed in the performance levels.

[Ddrak]

That article summary doesn't make a lot of sense. The 8600GTS beats a 7900GTX on pretty much every benchmark they threw at it, is at least $50 cheaper (7900GTX is about $220, 8600GTS is $160ish) and they complain about it?

wtf...

Dd