Duh, like what computer should I buy

Anig Browl · Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 20 Location: San Francisco

I feel bad asking this: I used to build computers for a living and I am better qualified to answer my own question than most people. But here's the problem:

I need to upgrade pronto, I am in the middle of post-production for a film and this computer is too darned slow for the amount of work I am going to have to do next week. It works fine, just too slow. But as I'm in film now, I am broke much of the time Confused

Now I want to build a system with a 3.0GHz P4, 800 MHZ Front side bus, DDR400 RAM and Serial ATA. But I can't afford that right now. And while I could build a good system from lesser parts, that needs extra research time and of course I will spend far too long researching and optimising, ie trying to leave myself upgrade paths etc.

But right now, my local computer chain is selling an e-machine AMD Athlon XP 30000 (2.2 GHz) on an ASUS mb with 512 mb RAM and a 160 hdd and some extra. I don't want the software, I don't like being restricted to a slower bus, being forced to buy all the bundled software, blah blah, but I've used AMD before and this is about 3x faster than this 1GHz Pentium 2 with only 192 MB RAM.

So my question is, would you do what I'm thinking of and just spring for the econmically priced solution and get the dream machine next year, or do you know any horror-story type reasons to avoid this hardware combo like the plague?

play · Posted: Wed Jul 07, 2004 1:11 am Post subject:

i don't know about horror stories but disapointment, yes. big numbers don't really mean much when you have a slow bus. if you're doing video i'd suggest pouring as much money as you can into ram (like, a gig) and vram (get an ATI 9800 or something--cheap but fast). since you know how to put computers together go to http://www.pricewatch.com and order some parts. it's not always the cheapest as compared to dells or other package deals but you can really optimize hardware for your needs.

Anig Browl · Joined: May 05, 2004 Posts: 20 Location: San Francisco

Scrictly audio, apart from a little video for sync checks (you don't want to know how that's been going). I found some OK 'barebones system' deals on eBay that look like they might be better value. Not that i'll have any more time to check today...zzz!

elektro80 · Posted: Sun Jul 11, 2004 5:42 am Post subject:

If you are doing strictly audio then almost any decent barebones system will do. You shold of course pat attention to how the USb and firewire implemantation has been done and the bus speed etc. Cranking up harddisk performance is often the way to go instead of buying the ultimate top of the range motherboard and PCU. A lot of RAM is very smart too. I do not recommend softraiding disks for music and video though. Perhaps you should go for some SATA disks?