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Topic: What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home? (Read 12170 times) previous topic - next topic
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What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #25 –
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i dont think windows xp is recommended as a server operating system.  you will be better off with windows 2k, windows xp 64 (you will need a very powerful pc for xp64, its minimum system requirements for ram are 1Gb!).

hehe..
it's preferred you use 64-bit CPUs also

Hahaha...

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #26 –
Pentium 4 w/ Intel chipset. VIA chipsets are notorious because their problems with PCI bus control, USB and so forth. If the computer is targeted for music usage, I don't recommend any non-Intel-based system, unless you find vinyl-style crackling charming.

I honestly don't think there is need to wait about 8 months when 3.06 GHz HT-enabled Pentiums begin to be affordable. Virtually every Northwood P4 is a terrific overclocker, for instance almost every 1.8A chip overclocks to 2.7 GHz. Pretty powerful breed, the Northwoods, regarding both performance and overclockability.

Not to mention P4's come with a badass heatsink and a tiny <25 dBA fan. They won't get very hot. Should you choose to retain the original clock speed, your system will be very silent. You could actually concentrate on the music and not on the VIA crackling + Delta fan noise in an AMD system.

If you're going to build a server, consider a dual Intel Xeon system.

There's some more decisions to make with P4. Are you going for Rambus or DDR? RDRAM PC1066 is much, much faster than DDR400 but also much more expensive. Should you decide to use DDR, get a chipset with DDR333 support. Such include Intel's 845G and 845PE. Whatever memory should you choose, get 512 MB's of it.

Traditionally Asus has been the most respected motherboard manufacturer, but nowadays it has to compete with terrific brands like EPoX and Gigabyte. This applies for Intel and AMD systems.

A RAID setup might be worth considering for the HDD side. For instance, one 2x40GB striped RAID array for your multimedia and one regular IDE for your OS and crucial data. Striped RAID arrays are quite fast, althought a bit insecure.

And also, my 80GB 5.4 krpm Maxtor is extremely quiet. Western Digital 7.2 krpm 80GB HDD's (with 8MB cache) are the fastest in existence.

Display adapter. Duh. Radeon 9000 Pro or course. Good for anything, the image quality is good enough for CAD, it's powerful enough for games and it has plenty of outputs for your multimonitor or TV needs. Or a Radeon 9700 if you feel extremely rich.

Sound card. M-Audio Audiophile 2496, Echo Mia or Terratec EWX 24/96. This board is full of threads WHY these sound cards are better than 8-bit SoundBlaster 2.0.

Any DVD reader except Pioneer slot model. I own one (106S) and it's the noisiest, hottest and slowest DVD drive in history. Get any brand besides Pioneer. For CD-RW side, Plextor makes the best drives.

Okay, enough of the hardware blurb

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #27 –
Well, you gotta pay ridiculous prices if you want the best

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #28 –
I'm thinking of the Echo Mona... it's very sexy
I'd like to use those sweet balanced output -> bXLR -> Active studio monitors.
just need to build out my livingroom wall first
I'm 50cm short for optimal placement

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #29 –
Uuh, this question seems very familiar to me (today I'll get my nu pc , last week I spend a lot of time in the Internet to get some infos) - how ever.
This is its configuration:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7V8X (KT400) Mainboard
512 MB DDR PC 333 CL2.5 Samsung
Asus V8420 TD 64MB Graphics Card
WD 800 JB (80 GB, 8MB HD-Cache)
Pioneer DVD-A06SW
[LG GCE320B (bought it 5 months ago)]

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #30 –
"Plextor makes the best drives"

I disagree .. My Yamaha 3200E reads anything and writes anything ANY Plextor can. And well, Yamaha drives are known to be of better quality than many others.. Including Plextor. But you can ask why i say that and bla and bla , many technical reasons that i myself don't even remember. (for info CD Freaks is good). Now i'm thinking i shouldn't have written this at all, everybody will think i'm a closed minded Yamaha lover freak who doesn't write why he claims it's better than Plextor and instead points to a site .

For Graphics adapter i'd recommend NVIDIA GeForce 4200 ti.. Great price and best performence for that price. And for graphics performence, i believe Asus motherboards are still the best.

I wouldn't recommend any hard drive other than Maxtor. Total quality, reliability.

About AMD.. Just one thing to say. The amount of heat AMD processors produce is frightning.. Says something don't you think??

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #31 –
that configuration is almost identical to my PC except the motherboard which is KT333

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #32 –
That is true about the amount of heat the amd produces.  i have XP2000 and its @ 52 @ 100% processing usage!

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #33 –
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About AMD.. Just one thing to say. The amount of heat AMD processors produce is frightning.. Says something don't you think??

AMD got over heat issues a long time ago.

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #34 –
I think we all can agree that we'll never agree on any hardware setup.

When asking people for their recommendations, ask what experience they are based on.

I find the I own 5 XXX computers and they work fine recommendations pretty worthless.

The I have been working 10 years+ assembling hardware and life is too short for XXX are somewhat better -- but only for a hardware perspective. Does the hardware work well with your software?

The I've been a system administrator for 10+ years and I only buy XXX is slightly useful too -- but mostly from a stability perspective. Sysadms often support a very limited amount software.

The tech supporter working in a computer store fixing customer's computers might have a lot more insight. So will the nerd who has been playing with 100 computers since 1990.


And just to prove that most manufacturers has released bad products:

Harddisks
Seagate: Terrible harddisks 1991-1995 - slow, noisy, unstable
Maxtor: Major failure rate on harddisks 1995-1996
IBM: Major failure rate on 75 GXP series 2001

CPUs
Intel: Floating point error in P60 and P66 - 1995 (there were also minor problems with 386/486 and PPro)
Cyrix: MAJOR heating problems
AMD: Heating problems until recently, floating point performance problems until 2000?, compatibility problems - K5

Mainboard Chipsets
SIS: USB problems - 2002
VIA: Problems with games, etc (don't know much about it)

Net adapters
Intel: Major failure rate on 21143 chipset for net adapters when not using a hub/switch - 1995-1996
RealTek: Major failure rate - 1995-1997

Graphics Adapters
Matrox: First release of G200 had terrible picture quality (they were sold for 6 months)
Diamond Multimedia: Driver problems, support problems

Sound Adapters
Creative: Driver problems, PCI problems, SMB problems
C-Media: Driver problems, performance problems

The list really goes on and on and on...

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #35 –
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it's preferred you use 64-bit CPUs also

Preferred is the key word

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #36 –
Hey that's a very nice list Annuka.

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #37 –
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I disagree .. My Yamaha 3200E reads anything and writes anything ANY Plextor can. And well, Yamaha drives are known to be of better quality than many others.. Including Plextor.

For Graphics adapter i'd recommend NVIDIA GeForce 4200 ti.. Great price and best performence for that price. And for graphics performence, i believe Asus motherboards are still the best.

Well why not, Yamaha drives could be much better than Plextor ones. The thing is that Plextor is a very widely known brand and most of their recent drives have been excellent, not only with burning but ripping too. I have personally never even seen a Yamaha CD-RW drive anywhere.

And about Ti4200 - the cheapest brand costs about 60 € more than 128 MB Radeon 9000 Pro and according to benchmarks Radeon pretty much OWNZ Ti4200. But nVidia vs. ATI is an eternal struggle (except for the time being, 9700 OWNZ all), pesterized with Fanboys on both sides.

@p0wder

Are you referring to the new Throughbred core? Old Athlons/XP's can be classified as thermonuclear weapons. Throughbreds still dissipate much more heat than their P4 equivalents.

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #38 –
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Pentium 4 w/ Intel chipset. VIA chipsets are notorious because their problems with PCI bus control, USB and so forth. If the computer is targeted for music usage, I don't recommend any non-Intel-based system, unless you find vinyl-style crackling charming.

Typically misguided Intel propaganda... I guess you've never built a VIA system of your own, or you suck at it... IE, choosing really piss poor components...

Noise problems are always related with hardware that steals the PCI bus (like Creative cards) and also grounding of the computer... Seriously, how many of you actually ground your computer... Just around 2% is my bet...

But sure, there's nothing wrong with Intel chipsets...

As I've said earlier in this thread, these two motherboards are very nice and have lots of nice features:

Intel P4 Nortwood MB: Gigabyte GA-8IEXP (Intel 845E)
AMD Athlon MB: ASUS A7V333 (VIA KT333)

Just flip a coin, any system with these motherboards should (will) work perfectly as long as you don't play "cheap ass" with the rest of the computer components...

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #39 –
Ars Technica's God Box / Hot Rod / Budget Box series is a good place to go to find out what is the current best buy depending on your budget. It's updated monthly too. Currently for Hot Rod they have just swithced from AMD to Intel P4-2Ghz

http://www.arstechnica.com/guide/system/hotrod.html

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #40 –
P4 Northwood (speed depends on your money, p4 with hyper threading would be nice)
DDR or RDRAM
seagate or maxtor hd
plextor cdwriter, prioneer dvd
geforce 4 or one of the new radeons... chose some budget model if u don't want to play games.

hm what else do u need ?

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #41 –
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Typically misguided Intel propaganda... I guess you've never built a VIA system of your own, or you suck at it... IE, choosing really piss poor components...

I've built two AMD/VIA systems, other with ASUS A7V and other with ABit KT7-Raid and one Intel/VIA system with Abit VH6. The crackling was always there, both with SB Live! and Terratec EWX24/96. The crackling was especially bad when using Terratec with ASIO drivers and 24-bit sampling rate. I eventually had to delay my music projects until I got a better system.

The net is full of articles which prove that VIA chipsets have problems in PCI bus control. Latency patch may or may not solve these problems.

And yes, I ground my computer. I had to get a 15m extension cord for that.

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #42 –
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Seriously, how many of you actually ground your computer... Just around 2% is my bet...


Hmmm, I've neer heard of grounding your computer  Can you point me to some sites that that me why and how? Thanks
Sorry, I have nothing witty to say here.

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #43 –
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@p0wder

Are you referring to the new Throughbred core? Old Athlons/XP's can be classified as thermonuclear weapons. Throughbreds still dissipate much more heat than their P4 equivalents.

Oh I guess I was wrong.  I thought AMD and Intel both had heat problems while trying to improve scalability of their chips...

Oh well chips are getting so fast is it worth it to overclock them?

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #44 –
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Seriously, how many of you actually ground your computer... Just around 2% is my bet...


Hmmm, I've neer heard of grounding your computer  Can you point me to some sites that that me why and how? Thanks

Doesn't that extra third prong in the power supply cable ground your computer?

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #45 –
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Doesn't that extra third prong in the power supply cable ground your computer?

Those unfortunate enough to be outside of the UK probably don't have the third pin... 

And I have never heard any crackling or indeed any other artifacts from my AMD XP2100+ / VIA KT333 system...
[span style=\'font-size:9\']\"Do not go gentle into that good night,
Rage, rage against the dying of the light\"[/span]

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #46 –
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Quote

Doesn't that extra third prong in the power supply cable ground your computer?

Those unfortunate enough to be outside of the UK probably don't have the third pin... 

And I have never heard any crackling or indeed any other artifacts from my AMD XP2100+ / VIA KT333 system...

No...in the US all PSU and cables have three prongs so I guess 100% of people have their computers grounded rather than 2%.
Sorry, I have nothing witty to say here.

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #47 –
My main machine at home is an overclocked 80286 (not sure what MHz, haven't found a oscilloscope that's fast enough to measure it). I've got good memory expansion capabilities in that it has (4) 30 pin wide slots, and I have used only (2) of them (using 1MB x 30 FPM RAM). I like fast video, so I jammed a late model GeForce 4 AGP card in the ISA slot. Using a 500MB SCSI 1 drive. Too much overhead in SCSI 2 and especially UltraSCSI. The monitor is a 14" Acer. I don't want to chance any burn-in so I dropped the refresh rate down to 30 Hz interlaced. Resolution is 1280x1024x8bit. Have the disks partitioned as C: & D: (file compression enabled on D). I have Win2000 installed. Did some registry hacks and so it's much faster than stock .

I continually update & tweak the system so I'll keep you guys posted on any future enhancements I make (off the top of my head though....dual booting into Linux).

Xenno

PS: Forgot to mention that since I leave it running all the time (and hooked to the Net), and since I love astronomy, I let SETI do some of their processing on it (I installed a math coprocessor on it recently).
No one can be told what Ogg Vorbis is...you have to hear it for yourself
- Morpheus

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #48 –
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I like fast video, so I jammed a late model GeForce 4 AGP card in the ISA slot.

Hahaha! 

What Kind Of Computer To Run At Home?

Reply #49 –
edited: Oh man!!.. i can't believe how stupid of me!  Only now i noticed the sarcastic humor.. Should have read well

Anyway... on another note ()
I don't know what all this, ahm, nonsense about Geforce 4 not being fast is all about.
Sure, ATI Redeon 9700 Pro is "K|nG" and all..
But, i have a geforce 4 4200ti and am very satisfied with it.
It's not very expensive, about 160$. And has great performence for that price.
For example, did you ever use GLExcess as a benchmark?
Try it sometime, tweek your system, tweak all, then start the benchmark (mark all tests), and see how many XSMarks you get. I remember i got more than 6600 points (without "overoverclocking" it untill it freezes my computer like many do..). At 1024X768, 32bit. Now that's a very fine result for this very fine, not so expensive card. And it performs completely stunning in everything else i have, not just GLExcess, no complaints here.