Building or Purchasing a New Computer: Help Please

[Geo]

I strongly believe now is not the time to be spending $5k on a three year box.

Maybe November. I'd feel much more comfortable with February.

High-end *and* quiet is also liable to be a bitch this time.

Really, if you need to go *right now* then seriously consider getting something more midrange-ish on the graphics end and then upgrade that separately with the first round of 65nm high-end DX10 refreshes in 2007 some time.

But at least waiting to see G80 to get a sense of what performance and heat are going to be like, when talking about a 3 yr box, is a must in my mind.

 

[epicstruggle]

I strongly believe now is not the time to be spending $5k on a three year box.

Maybe November. I'd feel much more comfortable with February.

High-end *and* quiet is also liable to be a bitch this time.

Really, if you need to go *right now* then seriously consider getting something more midrange-ish on the graphics end and then upgrade that separately with the first round of 65nm high-end DX10 refreshes in 2007 some time.

But at least waiting to see G80 to get a sense of what performance and heat are going to be like, when talking about a 3 yr box, is a must in my mind.

QFT.

 

[Natoma]

Just reading the replies.......

With respect to the storage, we're going to go with a NAS since we'll have a desktop and a laptop in the house. We currently have a 802.11g network setup (WPA-PSK) so that shouldn't be an issue.

We're currently looking at a NAS that we can install 750GB Seagate drives into. I'd like to get about four of them and then have the laptop and desktop have minimal storage. In part to cut down on the requirements for cooling, but also to get a smaller case.

It also would be good from the standpoint of being able to run backup images of our computers over the network just in case of failure. We had a computer failure about a year ago which cost us all our digital photos, applications, and MP3s. Twas quite painful.

Anyway, I just want to touch on a few subjects for my own edification.

G80

This is supposed to come out in November/December? Does anyone know anything about image quality or any other information surrounding this card? IQ is VERY important to us and we still haven't really forgotten about the IQ shenanigans that Nvidia pulled with their prior releases. As a note, the 9800 Pro was the first non-nvidia card we owned after 4 years of purchasing their stuff, really since the TNT2 Ultra. So I haven't had issue with them in the past, but the 3dmark stuff left a sour taste in my mouth.

R600

Anything whatsoever??

Quad Core (AMD or Intel)

I'm a little wary of going with Intel for Quad core because they're still sharing the same FSB. In terms of upgrades that's rather limited imo as opposed to the separate FSB AMD design, which should scale better if we decide to get future CPUs.

With that said, however, is there any release information regarding K8L, and what kind of upgrade it'll be?

Keeping in mind of course that anything we upgrade to will smoke our 3.0Ghz P4. But with that said, we're really at the stage where we want to get the system and not worry about it much, if at all, for the next few years.

Memory

DDR2 is the standard for a while? I wouldn't want to get 2GB of DDR2 only to find out that "DDR3" is coming out in a few months and then have no memory upgrade path.

Vista

geo informed me that the 3D application interface was not removed as I had previously read. That "Aero Glass" is still there. Does someone have a feature list that compares with XP? Just to see what the major differences are?

Thanks for all the input everyone. It's greatly appreciated.

 

[mcsven]

Certainly I'm not sure how you could quietly cool a crossfire or SLI setup, especially if the new chips turn out to be power-hungry beasts.

You could always go this route of course.

nutball, do you use a fan on that ninja heatsink? One of the reviews I read indicated that without a fan the thing just overheats. I also don't like the idea of hanging that off the CPU socket when the mobo is vertical; too much stress.

 

[Geo]

G80

This is supposed to come out in November/December? Does anyone know anything about image quality or any other information surrounding this card? IQ is VERY important to us and we still haven't really forgotten about the IQ shenanigans that Nvidia pulled with their prior releases. As a note, the 9800 Pro was the first non-nvidia card we owned after 4 years of purchasing their stuff, really since the TNT2 Ultra. So I haven't had issue with them in the past, but the 3dmark stuff left a sour taste in my mouth.

R600

Anything whatsoever??

NV has been getting their nose rubbed in IQ for some time now. I could be entirely wrong, but today my gut is telling me they are going to go a long way towards addressing the IQ issues that they've been getting pelted with rotten garbage on with G80, and add some new goodies as well. We do know that HDR+AA is in. We are lead to believe that other AA goodness of an unspecified nature is in. I personally --and based on nothing confidential at all, just my own assessment-- believe that they are going to get their filtering house in order as well.

It's not that R600 is uninteresting in these ways, and I did not mean to imply so by suggesting you at least wait for G80. It's just that it appears G80 will be first by at least a month. So it's the first chance to really get a feel for what next gen might be bringing to the table in a concrete way and if that is enough to interest you.

We think we know that both chips are hot as hell, so it really does appear they are both bringing the high hard one to try to get off on the right foot on Vista transition, pushing 80nm to the ragged edge. The problem is, you might like the performance/features quite well and not be willing to live with the heat situation. You might say, "Yeah, that's awesome, but let's do something mid-rangey cheap for right now that will smoke my 9800Pro but still let me wait for G8x or R6xx refreshes at 65nm that are cooler and quieter to really throw down the bucks for SLI or CrossFire".

Like that. Some of these arguments would be less compelling for a 6 month cycle, but you're talking about a 3 yr box here.

 

[epicstruggle]

With respect to the storage, we're going to go with a NAS since we'll have a desktop and a laptop in the house. We currently have a 802.11g network setup (WPA-PSK) so that shouldn't be an issue.

We're currently looking at a NAS that we can install 750GB Seagate drives into. I'd like to get about four of them and then have the laptop and desktop have minimal storage. In part to cut down on the requirements for cooling, but also to get a smaller case.

It also would be good from the standpoint of being able to run backup images of our computers over the network just in case of failure. We had a computer failure about a year ago which cost us all our digital photos, applications, and MP3s. Twas quite painful.

Im really liking this unit recently reviewed by ET:
http://www.extremetech.com/article2/0,1697,2018300,00.asp

/drool

 

[SugarCoat]

Quad Core (AMD or Intel)

I'm a little wary of going with Intel for Quad core because they're still sharing the same FSB. In terms of upgrades that's rather limited imo as opposed to the separate FSB AMD design, which should scale better if we decide to get future CPUs.

Well its been shown that the FSB isnt going to be bottlenecking quad core yet, and Kentsfield (intel quadcore) will be chipset 975X compatable and should be released for the holidays. If it works for conroe it works for kentsfield. However that doesnt mean Intel is going to not change that for future chips. I'm quite confident we'll be seeing new faster FSB chips (1333) by this time next year to go against K8L and keep the performance lead. Of course that means new chipset time too. No intel chipset really lasts that long, but that doesnt mean the performance is bad.

I am skeptical as well though if K8L is really worth a damn to wait for because of how well conroe really does do. AMD is working off of K8 tech afterall and we know where that stands. Really if the performance lead of K8L over conroe/kentsfield is anything less then 15-20% i'm sure you'll feel shafted after waiting a year and using inferior parts while waiting to boot. I doubt AMD is going to be able to pull off that kind of lead on K8 tech.

With that said, however, is there any release information regarding K8L, and what kind of upgrade it'll be?

Yep:
http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/amd-k8l.html

Memory

DDR2 is the standard for a while? I wouldn't want to get 2GB of DDR2 only to find out that "DDR3" is coming out in a few months and then have no memory upgrade path.

DDR3 SDRAM will be making an appearance around this time next year. Really the main differences are going to be operating voltage and a really nice stock latency, but the speeds are going to start exactly where DDR2 left off if not slightly worse. They should of course be much cheaper then those fastest DDR2 models though. Its going to take an addition 6-12 months after launch for the really great modules to come out like it did with DDR2 and DDR1 so thats quite awhile to wait.




Vista features ---> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Features_new_to_Windows_Vista

 

[Tim Murray]

With respect to the storage, we're going to go with a NAS since we'll have a desktop and a laptop in the house. We currently have a 802.11g network setup (WPA-PSK) so that shouldn't be an issue.

Not sure how great of an idea this is. With decent 802.11g equipment (and none of that speed boosting nonsense), you're going to hit ~30Mbps in an ideal situation. That's still less than 4MB/s. If you're doing audio/video editing or working with large print images, it's going to cause some headaches. You could always wire your house for Ethernet and have wireless as a backup...

 

[Blazkowicz]

what would be nice to do is a crossfire of X1950 pro, cheaper than a single master card. when are they coming? or there's 7950GX2 on the nvidia side (you require HDR, I personnally don't care that much about it given our displays are low DR and a bloom shader can do the job for overbright things. not denying it can be interesting.)

that should be fine, and the money you save could later go towards a future 65nm shrink of G80 (G81?)

for the NAS, I can see a smallish PC with either VIA C3/C7 or an AM2 sempron (running at something like 800MHz/1.0V), with some linux distro, software RAID 5 (and whatever server duty you might find useful to have)

 

[Cartoon Corpse]

this close to vista, i'd probably wait. but i built (mostly) my rig last march (or may?) and im happy with it (though mboard fried 5 months into it).

im going dx10 when it makes sense. wondering whether i'll get away with a GPU replacement only at that point.

im hoping my next rig is at least a year (or 2) down the road.

but what im hearing is that we're close to another 'quantum' leap in performance (more speed, capacity, less heat, less power draw). when software (games) need that, that's when i'll do it again.

i LOVE playing max everything in every game i own (that i previously had to dial back on my old rig).

and i WAITED FOREVER (needing a new rig) on things like BTX (may never fly)...1G GPU cards (just around the corner)...my old rig was over 4 years old by the time i just said 'do it'. im glad i did. the past 7 months have been a great experience that shows no signs of weakening in the nearterm future.

 

[Natoma]

After seeing the Kentsfield previews, we're going to wait a month or so to build a system based on that. Hopefully there will be motherboards that support two sockets by that point so we can drop another CPU in down the line.

If geo is right then G80 should be out by then as well. Sigh. I hate waiting.

 

[Sxotty]

Sigh. I hate waiting.

You are definitely doing the right thing by waiting Natoma. You will appreciate it later.

 

[SugarCoat]

Intel doesnt do dual socket consumer boards. The Core architecture doesnt support it at all. If you want a dual socket board you're going to be looking at Intel Xeon Clovertown (Server Kentsfield counterpart) and a Socket 771 board. Be careful cause not many even support add-in PCI-Express graphics cards let alone two. Pretty sure all of the 5000X chipsets support a full 16X graphics slot.

Heres a list of whats coming for just over the next year to give you an idea. This doesnt include the mobile or cheaper processor solutions.

Consumer:
Q3 2006 // 65nm Conroe 4MB Cache Shared
Q4 2006/Q1 07 // 65nm Kentsfield (2x1 Conroe 4MB Cache per die 8MB Total)
Q2/Q3 2007 // 45nm Ridgefield (True Quad-Core 6MB Cache Shared ; New Chipset Release Codename "Bonetrail" 1333FSB + DDR3 // Q3 2007)
Q3/Q4 2007 // 45nm Yorkfield (2x1 Ridgefield, Octo core, 6MB Cache per die 12MB Cache Total)
Q4 2007 Q1 08 // 45nm Bloomfield May be Cancelled (True Octo Core 8-12MB Cache Shared)
2008 // Nehalem 45nm-32nm New Microarchitecture

Server Xeon:
Q3 2006 // 65nm Woodcrest (desktop counterpart; Conroe)
Q1 2007 // 65nm Clovertown (2x1 Woodcrest)
Q2/Q3 2007 // 45nm Whitefield (desktop counterpart Ridgefield, new chipset threat with FB-DIMM DDR3 support, FSB increase not expected)
Q4 2007 // 45nm Harpertown (2x1 Whitefield)
2008 // Nehalem 45nm-32nm New Microarchitecture


Intel is projecting a 30% performance improvement over 65nm with the introduction of the 45nm process.

 

[digitalwanderer]

Sigh. I hate waiting.

But you won't regret it, I'm glad to hear you chose wisely.

 

[psurge]

Plus, maybe you'll be able to get a Samsung 305t or 245t by then .

 

[Natoma]

Nah, definitely not going 30".

I don't think there's any graphics card out or coming out that can drive high res/high AA/high AF/HDR graphics at those required resolutions.