by rootbeer » Sat Sep 10, 2005 12:54 pm
The first thing you have to do is to decide exactly what you want from your computer. What do you want it to do? Knowing that essentially all programs are getting bigger and bigger and that they will soon to be coming to us only on DVD, I wanted one that would play DVDs without the slightest jerk, jitter, hiccup or stutter. That meant I had to have a good graphics card. I use only ATI cards because it reads right on the box that it will play DVDs-- to my knowledge, no other maker puts that on their boxes. $500 for a high-end video card is a but much, so I went with the mid-priced ATI X700 Pro PCIe card because it's compatible with my computer. I paid 215 USD for it, tax included.
Next, I wanted my machine to do its thing quickly, i.e., I didn't want the CPU to have to wait for the RAM to do its job, so I put in an extra 1 Gb of the same type of RAM that came in the machine when I bought it. Having 1536Mb of fast RAM really helps in the response time between hitting the key and seeing the result.
I was going to upgrade a three-year-old homebuilt, but after some educated thought, just went ahead and bought a new machine and put the above detailed upgrades into the new one because to upgrade my homebuilt would have cost more and I'd still have an old machine running an old, slow AMD 1400 MHz chip, using 1 Gb of PC133 SDRAM and a 4X AGP (ATI, of course) video card with 64Mb of VRAM.
Bite the bullet-- buy a new machine and be happy. I am!
Last edited by
rootbeer on Sat Sep 10, 2005 1:07 pm, edited 1 time in total.
emachines T6212; AMD Athlon64 3800+ (2.40 GHz; Venice core); Allied AL-B500E 500W power supply; 2048Mb PC3200 DDR400; Westinghouse LCM-22w2 wide-screen LCD monitor; eVGA e-GeForce 7900 GS KO X16 PCIe video card; Logitech Extreme 3D Pro flight controller;<
