New PC - what to get?
Posted by: Roger
New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 11:42
So, I'm looking at getting a new Windows PC. It'll be used for dev work and games (and Jen'll be using it for email/surfing).
I'm quite impressed with my work PC -- Dell Precision 470, dual Xeon CPU, big wedge of RAM.
However, I don't particularly want to pay Dell prices.
What's good right now?
Oh, it must be able to play Half-Life 2 or equivalent, so a decent graphics card is a must.
I'll also be looking at a new (LCD) monitor. Any suggestions on that front?
Posted by: BartDG
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 12:02
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I'll also be looking at a new (LCD) monitor. Any suggestions on that front?
Dell 2405FPW 
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 12:14
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Dell 2405FPW
Seriously, though. I've been looking at the Dell LCDs. They're quite nice. I'm wondering whether I really need a widescreen one (I'm looking at the 2001FP instead).
For reference, I've got a Samsung 213T at work -- which is very, very nice, but also very expensive. Oh, and a 17" VideoSeven LCD, which isn't so good.
Posted by: Dignan
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 12:21
My dad has that monitor. It - is - beautiful. I really wish I could just bite the bullet and get one for myself. Anyway, the 20" has the same features, so I'm sure you'l like it. Del has really nice monitors at low prices (though I'm not sure what kind of prices you get over there).
Posted by: BartDG
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 12:24
I AM serious! I've ordered one of these babies! I can hardly wait until it will get here. This is one seriously kickass screen!
Very high resolution, fast enough to game on if desired (16ms), DVI, 9 in one cardreader, USB hub, etc, etc... <drooooool!>
Posted by: andym
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 12:51
After having a laptop with a WUXGA screen my next monitor will have to be at least that resolution, the 2405FPW looks perfect, Aria had them on special yesterday for £681!
Posted by: andy
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 13:57
I love my Dell 2001FP, so much so that when I start my new job next week I am thinking of buying a second one to use in the office.
The width screen 20 inch one hadn't come out when I bought my 2001FP, but I would still have gone for the non-widthscreen version. I find that when using things like VS.NET I need height as much as I need width. I can see how someone editing documents and the like however would apreciate a wide screen, as it is suited to displaying two pages of a document at once.
Posted by: jbauer
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 15:04
I also have the 2405FPW and it's unreal - especially for HL2, which was the main reason I bought it. I got it WAY CHEAP bundled with a Dell PC.
CALL DELL AND NEGOCIATE A LOW PRICE. I have read reports that all Dell branded products can be had for way lower than the prices listed on their web page. All ya gotta do is find an operator that will agree to a deep discount. If you get an operator that doesn't want to play, call back!
- Jon
Posted by: Dignan
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 17:12
My company has a Dell purchase program. At the time the 2405 was $1200, but I was able to get it for $700. Even the original list price is excellent compared to their competitors. At the bargain prices it's not even a competition anymore.
Posted by: peter
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 17:12
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I also have the 2405FPW
Does it rotate to portrait? The Dell website is a bit coy on the matter, and 1200x1920 would be very nice for coding.
Peter
Posted by: jbauer
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 17:30
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I also have the 2405FPW
Does it rotate to portrait? The Dell website is a bit coy on the matter, and 1200x1920 would be very nice for coding.
Peter
I haven't tried it, but I did find this review (http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1774272,00.asp) which mentions "The 2405FPW rotates to portrait mode, but no utilities are supplied to support this." I thought that the nvidia drivers had that feature built in. I can try it when I get home tonight if you like.
- Jon
Posted by: TigerJimmy
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 17:57
I have this monitor, too. Its awesome. It supports portrait, but I've never done it personally.
Many games don't support widescreen resolutions, but this is not a problem because you can still run the game in 1600x1200 and have black bars on the left and right sides of the image. New games will almost certainly support widescreen.
LCDs only have one native resolution, as I'm sure you know, so you'll need a video card that can do at least 1600x1200 with the new games. I had to upgrade my video card when I got this monitor because playing games at a lower than native resolution defeats the whole purpose.
I was able to negotiate the price of the 2405FPW to $820 by calling and BSing with my sales rep. Today would be the day to order it, by the way, since tomorrow is the last day of their fiscal quarter.
The 2001FP is pretty much the same monitor in a non-widescreen.
Go for the widescreen! Skip the dual CPUs since most home applications don't make good use of them anyhow, from what I understand. Spend the extra money on a great video card and the 2405.
Jim
Posted by: wfaulk
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 18:14
Any application that supports multiple threads (which is most Windows programs) will use both CPUs. In addition, the OS will run different apps on different CPUs. The only time you run into problems is when you have a single-threaded CPU hog, like LAME. In these instances, you can often just run two copies of the program, encoding two MP3s at the same time, for example.
Games might be another matter. I don't know if they're commonly multi-threaded or not. It seems like they would be.
Posted by: Phoenix42
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 18:20
Jimmy, I believe Dell's next end of quater is the end of October, although it might differ depending on the Dell division or product line. I know for storage it runs a month behind, or two months depending on your point of view.
On topic: I have the Dell 1905FP at work and it is quiet nice to have all the space, I don't know what I'd do with a bigger one. Okay I lie, I know I'd find more thing to fill up the sapce
Posted by: tfabris
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 18:47
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Many games don't support widescreen resolutions
And of those, many do if you know what stuff to tweak in their configuration files.
Posted by: jbauer
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 20:22
Posted by: andy
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 20:23
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Does it rotate to portrait? The Dell website is a bit coy on the matter, and 1200x1920 would be very nice for coding.
The problem is, on Windows at least, portrait isn't as nice to use as landscape. This is because the ClearType font smoothing relies on knowing which order your red, blue and green sub-pixels come in. Once you rotate to portrait your smoothed fonts go slightly fuzzy and you have to turn font smoothing off.
Of course, some people don't like font smoothing. So it wouldn't be a problem for them.
Posted by: tfabris
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 22:02
You'd think they could fix up that ClearType software to support rotated displays. Seems like it would be a very simple tweak to the algorithm.
Posted by: TigerJimmy
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 22:11
Oh, you're quite right about that. Their quarter is one month late. Dell is notorious for offering great deals at the end of a fiscal period.
Jim
Posted by: TigerJimmy
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 22:14
Somebody on this board needs to buy this immediately. If he was willing to ship, I would buy it for my GF. In fact, anybody who lives close to this guy willing to buy it and ship it to me?????
Jim
Posted by: Robotic
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 22:20
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Somebody on this board needs to buy this immediately. If he was willing to ship, I would buy it for my GF. In fact, anybody who lives close to this guy willing to buy it and ship it to me?????
Jim
I'll help, but the ad is more than a day old already. Let me know if he's still got it.
Posted by: TigerJimmy
Re: New PC - what to get? - 29/09/2005 22:21
Thanks a TON! I just sent him an email. I'll let you know what I hear.
Jim
Posted by: drakino
Re: New PC - what to get? - 30/09/2005 06:25
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Games might be another matter. I don't know if they're commonly multi-threaded or not. It seems like they would be.
Quake 3 was about the only commercial game to really attempt full SMP support, and end the end they turned it back off. Multithreading is slowly being used in more games, but slowly. Most developers are being forced into it now, with the next gen consoles all being highly parallel, and even desktops seemingly moving towards dual core and such as becoming common.
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And of those, many do if you know what stuff to tweak in their configuration files.
The widescreen tweaking has become more common then I have thought. I've had quite a decent response to GRS, even though it was initially intended for the few people who change resolutions often. I'm hoping to make 0.5 a better general widescreen program, with code already in place to adjust FOV properly and such.
widescreengamingforum.com is also another good resource.
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 30/09/2005 07:02
TigerJimmy said:
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Skip the dual CPUs since most home applications don't make good use of them anyhow, from what I understand.
Oh, trust me. I'm not running "home applications" on this PC. I'll be doing some dev work on it -- which requires running multiple applications. I'll also probably be running Virtual Server which really benefits from multiple CPUs.
wfaulk said:
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The only time you run into problems is when you have a single-threaded CPU hog, like LAME.
All of my music is currently FLAC encoded. So when I change something, it gets re-encoded as MP3. This means that I have two CPU-bound processes running in a pipeline anyway (flac | lame). Oddly, I get better performance (on a single CPU) when I turn the priority of both processes down...
Posted by: altman
Re: New PC - what to get? - 30/09/2005 10:46
JohnR went out and got an Athlon 64 X2 4400, which by all accounts is very nice - I broke down and got the same system myself about a month later
Veeeeery fast (the 4400 is the slower clocked one with 1MB of L2 per core, as opposed to the 4600 which is clocked quicker but only 512k per core. The 4800 is too expensive to even think about!). MB is an Asus A8V deluxe (the KT800pro chipset does interleaved DDR), with Crucial Ballistix CAS2 DDR400 memory (2x512).
Only problems have been the memory (2-2-2-8 doesn't seem to work; 2.5-2-2-8 works fine though and is near as dammit the same performance), and my aged graphics card which didn't like a dual-CPU system - strange, as it's a 3Dlabs Oxygen VX1 which is designed for CAD stuff... but the last driver update was 3 years ago
Hugo
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 30/09/2005 13:54
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JohnR went out and got an Athlon 64 X2 4400
Looks good. I'm going to go to PCI-X, which implies the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the Deluxe and Premium models is that the Premium can turn off SLI in the BIOS, without opening the case.
Looking on Crucial, I find that it offers both 2.5v and 2.6v memory for this board. Presumably I want the lower voltage RAM if possible?
Any recommendations on graphics cards?
Posted by: tman
Re: New PC - what to get? - 30/09/2005 20:50
PCI-X isn't the abbreviation of PCI-Express. It's a tweaked and faster version of PCI. 133MHz instead of 33MHz.
The 2.5V RAM is listed as DDR333 whilst the 2.6V RAM is listed as DDR400 oddly. If your board & CPU can do DDR400 then you should get the 2.6V ones?
Posted by: tman
Re: New PC - what to get? - 30/09/2005 20:52
Apparently horizontal resolution is more important than vertical resolution which is why they've not bothered to handle this
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 01/10/2005 04:43
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PCI-X isn't the abbreviation of PCI-Express.
My bad. I did mean PCI-Express.
Looking at it further, Crucial also offer ECC memory for this board, which only comes in 2.6v (DDR400), so that's what I'll get, probably.
So far, my shopping list looks like this:
- Athlon X2 4400+
- Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe
- Zalman CNPS9500-LED Aero Flower CPU cooler
- 2x 1GB, ECC, DDR400 RAM
- nVidia GeForce 6800 Ultra (PCI Express)
- 2x Seagate Barracuda SATA 80Gb (Virtual Server really benefits from a separate spindle)
- Arctic Cooling T1 case (includes 400W PSU)
- Dell 2001FP LCD
I'll probably use my existing keyboard and mouse, and I'm gonna re-use my Sony DVD writer as well.
I've opted for the nVidia card, so that I have the option of adding another one for SLI later. However, it's only a little faster than my existing Radeon 9800 Pro in Half-Life 2.
I'm also thinking about getting a copy of Windows XP x64 Edition.
My existing Windows PC is probably gonna get moved to the lounge and plugged into the TV, so we can surf/email from the sofa.
Posted by: BartDG
Re: New PC - what to get? - 01/10/2005 14:17
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JohnR went out and got an Athlon 64 X2 4400
Looks good. I'm going to go to PCI-X, which implies the Asus A8N-SLI Deluxe. As far as I can tell, the only difference between the Deluxe and Premium models is that the Premium can turn off SLI in the BIOS, without opening the case.
No, there's one other, really important difference. The A8N-SLI Premium doesn't have a fan on it's chipset, but rather a heatpipe and thus is fanless (=noiseless). This IS a big issue. Because the fan used on the Deluxe model is one of those pesky little things that rotates at 8000 RPM+ and makes a helluva racket. Trust me, I currently have a Deluxe model, and that chipset fan is driving me absolutely bonkers. I'm currently waiting for a new Premium mobo to arrive so I can swap mobo's.
Apart from that, the specs of these two boards are indeed identical, and they are very, very good boards.
Posted by: BartDG
Re: New PC - what to get? - 01/10/2005 14:23
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Arctic Cooling T1 case (includes 400W PSU)
You might also want to check out the new Antec P180 case. (Link 1, Link 2, Link 3) It doesn't come with a PSU however, but it's one of the best looking cases I've ever seen, and the attention for detail that went into this case is simply astounding...
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 01/10/2005 15:49
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You might also want to check out the new Antec P180 case.
Nice. Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to fit under the desk -- I just picked up a new (Ikea) desk and a PC hanger thingummy (which, bizarrely, doesn't appear to be listed on Ikea's website). The P180 is, apparently, 54cm tall, which is an extremely close fit.
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 01/10/2005 15:55
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Unfortunately, I don't think it's going to fit under the desk
Thinking about it -- it appears that a lot of cases on the market either have an excessively large number of drive bays, or next to none. I need 1x5.25" external bay and 2x3.5" internal bays. I do not need an external 3.5" bay. Floppy Disk Drives are so 20th century...
Any suggestions on that front?
Posted by: drakino
Re: New PC - what to get? - 01/10/2005 17:00
With the need for only one 5.25 inch bay, I'd say a Shuttle then. The
SN26P looks to meet your needs except for one part. It's not qualified for a 6800 Ultra, however it is qualified for a 7800 GT. The 7800 GT seems to be cheeper, and faster then the 6800 Ultra boards out there. Down the road, if you need better performance, the Shuttle will handle a second 7800 GT in SLI mode.
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 02/10/2005 06:27
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With the need for only one 5.25 inch bay, I'd say a Shuttle then.
Yeah, I'm thinking about that too. My existing box is a Shuttle SN45G, which is nice. The problem I have with it is heat/noise. Are the newer ones cooler and quieter at all?
Posted by: drakino
Re: New PC - what to get? - 02/10/2005 08:02
From what I have seen of the P series chassis, they are cooler running, as it is a bit bigger, and also has thing ventilated separately. The CPU intake comes in the front right and goes out the front left, while the hard drives are cooled through the top front to back and the rest of the system gets cooled front to back from lower in the case. Where as in the G series, it is all front to back, including all the heat off the CPU heatsink.
Noise I can't really judge as my only experience with the P series was at Quakecon filled with tons of other noise. My personal preference in systems has moved on from Shuttles to notebooks or tiny Macs.
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 03/10/2005 20:22
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I'm looking at the 2001FP instead
I've opted for a pair of 2005FPW monitors. They should turn up in 1-2 weeks, apparently.
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 03/10/2005 20:27
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You'd think they could fix up that ClearType software to support rotated displays. Seems like it would be a very simple tweak to the algorithm.
Not really. They rely on the fact that the red, green and blue pixels run from left to right to give you increased horizontal resolution (where it counts for text). If you rotate the monitor, you end up with the RGB cell running vertically, which wouldn't have as great an effect.
ClearType could always be turned off automatically, though, which would be useful. There's (currently) no way for Windows to know which way round your R, G and B are, which is what that ClearType tuning thingummy is for on the Microsoft website.
Posted by: DWallach
Re: New PC - what to get? - 03/10/2005 21:57
So, if you get one of those tablet PC things that allows you to rotate the screen 90 degrees, does this mean that ClearType doesn't play nice?
Posted by: altman
Re: New PC - what to get? - 03/10/2005 22:15
fyi, both myself & JR got our CPUs from Novatech.co.uk, they had good prices and were one of the few who had the CPU in stock when the X2's were new...
Hugo
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 04/10/2005 04:35
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So, if you get one of those tablet PC things that allows you to rotate the screen 90 degrees, does this mean that ClearType doesn't play nice?
Good question. One of the guys at work has a tablet PC. I'll ask next time I see him.
Posted by: tman
Re: New PC - what to get? - 04/10/2005 07:36
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So, if you get one of those tablet PC things that allows you to rotate the screen 90 degrees, does this mean that ClearType doesn't play nice?
Yup. You have to live with the artifacts when you've rotated it, remember to turn it off each time or not have it either way.
Posted by: Roger
Re: New PC - what to get? - 06/10/2005 19:00
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I'm looking at the 2001FP instead
I've opted for a pair of 2005FPW monitors. They should turn up in 1-2 weeks, apparently.
Apparently, they meant 1-2 days. Cool:
Posted by: Dignan
Re: New PC - what to get? - 06/10/2005 19:08
That is a beautiful si
ght.
Yeah, I was suprised by the speed of shipping as well. It seems their policy is to disappoint you up front so that you're pleasantly surprised when it gets there early
*edited for dumb spelling*
Posted by: JBjorgen
Re: New PC - what to get? - 06/10/2005 19:12
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That is a beautiful site.
I always thought the color scheme was a bit garish, but that's just me. The monitors, however, are a beautiful sight.
Posted by: Dignan
Re: New PC - what to get? - 06/10/2005 19:28
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That is a beautiful site.
I always thought the color scheme was a bit garish, but that's just me. The monitors, however, are a beautiful sight.
Damn. That'll teach me to try to be active on this board while manning a help desk 
Posted by: tman
Re: New PC - what to get? - 06/10/2005 19:32
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That is a beautiful site.
I always thought the color scheme was a bit garish, but that's just me. The monitors, however, are a beautiful sight.
Damn. That'll teach me to try to be active on this board while manning a help desk
Nah. That one is okay. It's people that insist on "web sight" that annoy me
Posted by: Dignan
Re: New PC - what to get? - 07/10/2005 02:33
Hehe, thanks. Technically, I could be refering to the physical location, which is very nice its self. But I couldn't claim that