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BGonline.org Forums
Summary and some issues+questions
Posted By: Chuck Bower In Response To: computer system #1 (Chuck Bower)
Date: Tuesday, 30 September 2008, at 5:57 p.m.
Certainly a homebuilt system (such as dc-ohio has generously offered to put together) has advantages, particularly because you can choose EXACTLY the parts you want rather than to live within the constraints of the build-your-own or off-the-shelf models of the major manufacturers.
Of the commercial models listed, I think the HP's are a bit better than Gateway's and Dell's in performance/cost ratio. Clearly you pay a premium for a business system compared to a 'home' system, but so far the 3.0 GHz processors appear to only be available in the business systems from HP and Dell. It is worth noting that there are some vendors like 'Cyberpower' who will build you a system with the faster processors, and for cheap. But I'm not sure about their overall reliability in terms of backing their products. I would be a bit leary buying from Cyberpower although I have no direct experience, just some things I've read.
Keep in mind that I put together these build-your-own just guessing at the configuration Perry might want. There is some performance/cost optimization that can be done. I'd need more guidance to do that.
Regarding waiting for Nehalem, I'll start with the facts. Currently they are saying those CPU's will start arriving "end of 4th quarter". I'm not sure how long it will take for commercial systems to show up but consider that we weren't able to find the Q9650 (or even QX9650) at any of Dell, HP, and Gateway except for HP's small business branch. So CPU's being available doesn't mean affordable systems will be easily available. I've looked at a couple benchmarks at Toms Hardware Guide and although their verbage (historically reliable) sounds impressive as far as performance gains, the numbers only show about 10% improvement and that is compared to the older QX6800 (same generation as Q6600 and Q7700, not the Q9000 series we've been aiming at here over the last couple of days). A general rule of thumb is that if you're willing to wait about 6 months you are ALWAYS going to get a faster computer for the current cost. And that will be true when the Nehalem is released, just as it seems to be the case today. IMO this won't be a quantum leap in computing power, just another 10-20% incremental improvement (and that may depend upon what application one wants to run).
One thing I'm unsure of (although maybe dc-ohio has allayed some fears) is depending upon Vista. Unlike 2000 and XP, Vista has not been well received, and it's been over a year now (I think) since it was first released. Even PCWorld magazine (which is certainly going to be inclined to accept new hardware and software) has not given Vista solid approval, from what I surmise from reading their mag every month. The Vista concern was one of the reasons I went down the 'small business' computer path in the first place since that's the only way to get XP on a new computer. (You also get Vista, although I don't think it's installed if you ask for the XP option, so I guess you have the option of getting it installed later -- not up on all this).
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