Apr
A Surprise In The Mail
by admin
This is just an update on what’s going on here. As I mentioned in The March $100 winner, a problem and a rant, my PC crapped out on me last week. I have a Mac 800Mhz G4 that I use for testing web stuff on and I have been forced to use this for now.
Now I love Macs because they run a BSD based OS and I grew up on Unix but I tell you this machine is a dog to use for everyday stuff especially card dropping. I’ve also had some character modeling to do and the 3d stuff is as slow as molasses. Well, all of this will soon be a thing of the past 
This morning I got an unexpected surprise in the mail - a £420 tax rebate!!
This means that Saturday morning I shall be going up Tottenham Court Rd in London to the Computer Fairs there to buy:
- A Motherboard
- CPU
- Memory
- Graphics card
Now it’s been about three years since I last built a PC and things have changed, back then the Athlon 64 was king of the hill and I built of 3Ghz PC with 2 250Gb HD’s and 4Gb of memory. But now it looks like Intel have reclaimed their throne with the dual and quad processors. I have been reading up on stuff most of the day today and it looks like the E8200 is the best buy at the moment, and that’s as far as I’ve got on my shopping list.
The Motherboard: I really don’t know yet… the MSI P35 Platinum looks to be a good deal. I need plenty of USB ports for cameras, 2 printers and stuff. I have two brand new ide HD’s, 250Gb and 500Gb, and I plan on using the ide DVD drive or should I get a SATA drive or DVD?
The Memory: I want at least 2-3Gb, 3d apps are memory hungry when it comes to textures and rendering! I think I need PC800, yes?
The Graphics Card: It has to be Nvidia because I need decent Open GL support, at least 1.5. The 9600 GT looks like a good deal but I haven’t any experience with PCI graphics, I do know I will not be running dual gfx cards. do motherboards come with AGP anymore?
I just bought a 650W modular PSU so that should be able to handle any power requirements.
I don’t play games very often but I do a lot of 3d stuff, stills and animation in Cinema 4D, Cararra and Poser. I also do some film work with Adobe Premiere. Those are the most tasking things I do, I also have Adobe CS2 and some music programs as I have a keyboard, a synth module and a drum box.
So this is where I would like to ask you guys for some advice…
Bearing in mind my budget of £420, have you got any recommendations for the 4 items I need? Any advice would really be appreciated. If you can convince me or twist my arm in a particular direction and it works out then if you are a fellow Ecarder I’ll send you 2000ec’s, this is how important it is to me to get this done as I want to get of off the Mac and back to the comfortable world of PC’s 
Tags: Mac, PC, system build
Category General |
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Colin, I sure wish you would fix your computer. I miss you.
One other thing, when the entrecard ad is clicked this site comes back up.
I know, I am not trying to be top commenter. After I posted my last comment the ad changed and now it is working. So strange
@Etta: I’ve built it now, the hardware is working and I’ve installed XP Pro. As my backups are on the drives I used on the old machine, I had to go out today and get one of those external drive shell thingys so that I can copy stuff across. I’m busy installing programs now, though I might put up a quick post tonite, but I really want to finish the updated theme for this site and go to wp 2.5.1 today.
So what was the outcome of your purchases?
Thanks!
Well, I’ve blogged and linked my direct contest post for the Summer Money contest. I’ve also subscribed to all the blogs. Hope I’m lucky this time!
Sorry to be commenting so late — I see you’ve made your purchases so won’t offer up anything for suggestions (although the SATA drive would have been it — so much faster than IDE).
Good luck and can’t wait to see the new layout. Wish I knew PHP (or could understand the book I bought) so I could do my own…
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@Bunny: See my previous comment to Etta, though I may do a more comprehensive post about it tomorrow.
@Margaret: Yeah, that bums me too, I had already bought the ide’s to replace what I thought were maybe the dead ones. The new MB has 6 sata’s plus esata’s and fortunately 1 ide port, so I was able to use the ide hd’s. I had to get a sata DVD.
I’ve finished the updated layout, but I am already bored with it… I might just make another that’s a lot more different.
You don’t need to KNOW php fully, try working thru one of my tutorials, if you need help you can alwys give me a shout
How about working on Mac I heard about it a lot but never got a chance to run one.
@Shankar: If you put a two-button mouse on a Mac and press the Apple key instead of the Control key then there is not much difference between Mac and PC. They’re both computers just wrapped in different boxes. But if you are of the geeky persuasion then you might like Mac more as it’s os is built upon Unix. I have both and for everyday use there is little if any difference.