• I want to thank all the members that have upgraded your accounts. I truly appreciate your support of the site monetarily. Supporting the site keeps this site up and running as a lot of work daily goes on behind the scenes. Click to Support Signs101 ...

Price/Performance value

B Snyder

B Snyder

New Member
Spec wise, how does this sound for $800?

Processor Brand: Intel
Processor Class: Core 2 Quad
Processor Number: Q6600 with Viiv Technology
Processor Speed: 2.4 GHz
Front Side Bus: 1066 MHz
L2 Cache Size: 2 x 4 MB
System Chipset: Intel G33 Express
Memory Type: DDR2-SDRAM
Installed Memory: 3 GB
Maximum Memory: 4 GB
Memory Slots Total: 4
Memory Slots Available: 1
Total Hard Drive Capacity: 500 GB
Drive Controllers: SATA-150
Rotational Speed: 7200 RPM
Optical Drives: Double Layer DVD+/-RW Drive:

Card Slots: 1 x CompactFlash
1 x MicroDrive
1 x Memory Stick
1 x Memory Stick PRO
1 x Secure Digital (SD)
1 x SmartMedia Card
1 x xD-Picture Card
Audio Channels: 7.1 Channel Surround
High Definition Audio
Video Chipset Brand: ATI
Video Chipset: Radeon HD 2400
Video Bus: PCI Express x16
Video Integration: Card
Installed Video Memory: 128 MB
Total Available Graphics Memory (Vista): 384 MB
Port Connectors: Front:

4 x USB 2.0
1 x high-definition headphone out
1 x high-definition microphone in
Rear:

6 x USB 2.0
6 x Audio
1 x DVI
1 x S-Video
1 x FireWire® (IEEE 1394) (6-pin)
1 x RJ-45 Ethernet LAN
1 x RJ-11 Modem
1 x VGA 15-pin D-Sub
1 x Parallel
1 x S/PDIF

PCI Slots: 2
PCI Express x1 Slots: 1
PCI Express x16 Slots: 1
Slots Notes: 1 x PCI
1 x PCI Express x1

External 3.5 Bays: 2
External 5.25 Bays: 2
External Bays Notes: 1 x 3.5-inch open
1 x 5.25-inch open

Internal 3.5 Bays: 4
Internal Bays (Notes): 3 x 3.5-inch open

Network Support: Gigabit Ethernet (1000 Mbps)
Modem Speed: 56 Kbps
Input Devices: Keyboard
Wheel Mouse
Installed Operating System: Windows Vista Home Premium
Special Feature: MS Windows Vista Home Premium
Chassis Color: Black
Chassis Style: Tower (Mini)
Regulatory Compliances: FCC Class B, ETL

Height: 14.5 in
Width: 7.0 in
Depth: 18.0 in
Weight: 25.0 lbs
Limited Warranty: 1 Year (12 Months)
 
WYLDGFI

WYLDGFI

Merchant Member
If youre on a tight budget...it sounds alright. Otherwise build a custom system. you'll get more bang for your buck
 
B Snyder

B Snyder

New Member
I'm not really up-to-date on what the latest and greatest CPU's, chipsets, bus speeds, blah blah yada yada are.
Are these components quick enough to run Photoshop and CorelDraw reasonable well from? Could I build a custom system with better components for less?
 
John M

John M

New Member
Truthfully, you'll have a hard time beating a machine with those specs by more than a few dollars. Those parts do add up, especially if you use quality brands.

I can offer an identical system with XP Home / Pro for $829 / $879, plus shipping of course. This is a 500w power supply, Asus P5B motherboard, an MSI HD2400 Pro 256 MB video card, SATA2 hard drive (Acer uses SATA1). I can switch to a different ATi video card with two DVI outputs for the same price if you'd prefer.

However, I'd suggest a small change that'll make a noticable difference in what you're doing with the computer. For $75 I'd add a RAID card and change to two 250 gig HDs in striped RAID. This will take you from one drive's 65 MB/s sustained hard drive transfer to 115 MB/s. Let me say up front that this is still technically a "software" RAID card but tests show it to use less than 2% of CPU resources, something you'll have plenty of with a quad core.

Got any questions or feature changes, just let me know. That's the beauty of custom machines!
 
Bulldog1929

Bulldog1929

New Member
I'm glad that John M's on this board. I learn a lot of good putor stuff from his posts. I'd give him a :thumb:. Sounds like he really knows his stuff.

Happy New Year 2008
Mike:Coffee:
 
Bogie

Bogie

New Member
IMHO, you need to go with John M... Why?

That raid setup will really increase thruput on anything with a lot of disk activity, like big graphics seem to require. 250 gigs may not sound like much, but if you have more than 100 or so gigs of data on your primary machine, you've got too much - back the stuff off onto redundant removable media, and store it.

What the world needs now is a hot-swap drive dealie that I can plug 250 gig drives into... but USB also works...
 
Jackpine

Jackpine

New Member
I'm glad too. With John M there is a person BEHIND the machine for support.
Bulldog1929 said:
I'm glad that John M's on this board. I learn a lot of good putor stuff from his posts. I'd give him a :thumb:. Sounds like he really knows his stuff.

Happy New Year 2008
Mike:Coffee:
Click to expand...
 
John M

John M

New Member
Hey Bogie - I've got a device that replaces two 5.25 bays with three hot-swap SATA bays :biggrin: It's around $75.

The enclosure takes 2 normal 4-pin power plugs and one SATA connection for each drive. It includes a fan to keep the drives cool.

To swap drives you simply press the button (which doubles as a HD activity light) next to the drive to turn it off. Then you pull the eject handle and remove the drive. No cartridges, no adapters, nothing to lose. I use them on server builds (and optionally on the Sign Monster) so hard drive failures can be repaired quickly.

Oh, and the machine I posted above would have a pair of 250s, yielding 500 gigs of usable space.
 
eforer

eforer

New Member
John M said:
Truthfully, you'll have a hard time beating a machine with those specs by more than a few dollars. Those parts do add up, especially if you use quality brands.

I can offer an identical system with XP Home / Pro for $829 / $879, plus shipping of course. This is a 500w power supply, Asus P5B motherboard, an MSI HD2400 Pro 256 MB video card, SATA2 hard drive (Acer uses SATA1). I can switch to a different ATi video card with two DVI outputs for the same price if you'd prefer.

However, I'd suggest a small change that'll make a noticable difference in what you're doing with the computer. For $75 I'd add a RAID card and change to two 250 gig HDs in striped RAID. This will take you from one drive's 65 MB/s sustained hard drive transfer to 115 MB/s. Let me say up front that this is still technically a "software" RAID card but tests show it to use less than 2% of CPU resources, something you'll have plenty of with a quad core.

Got any questions or feature changes, just let me know. That's the beauty of custom machines!
Click to expand...

Striping is a not a good idea. If you have ever paid for data recovery you'll know why. You double your probability of a total loss. A RAID 5 2+1 setup gives you some performance increases along with fault protection. Furthermore, unless the RAID card utilizes the PCI-E or a PCI-X bus, you're going to hit a nasty bottle neck.

Also, a quad core for a design station is silly. More clock on a dual core is better suited to that application. Also, no flavor of Windows is particaularly good with SMP, and Adobe stuff is notoriously bad. Unless you're Johnny multi-task, its not the best fit. Also, be leary of anything that has "1" slot available. This means the memory isn't double pumping. While bench marks have shown that dual channel doesn't really give the as advertised performance increase, not running matched pairs of ram is a handicap nonetheless.

As far as a Mac goes.... Yuck. OSX, all versions is based on the Moch Kernel which is awful. I love the idea of a pretty looking and user friendly unix, but the Apple execution leaves a lot to be desired. If you put that pretty gui on solaris or bsd, then you'd have something. Alas, if you're a sign maker, you are stuck with lousy OS options. One day there will be a good unix/linux rip and adobe will release for non mac-tel or win-tel. Hopefully soon!
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Top