My friend has a 5-year old eMachine that’s served her faithfully (more or less) and is about ready for retirement. It was a refurbished eMachines C2881 Intel Celeron D 2.66GHz / 512MB DDR / 80GB HDD / DVD-ROM/CD-RW Combo / Windows XP Home / Desktop PC. She’s been off the Net for a while but is now back on and it’s not able to keep up with the traffic, as well as being almost full.
Her main uses for this will be gaming, music & movies, and keeping her business site running, mostly by answering e-mails. She is wanting a quad core, 500gb-1tb HD, 8+gb RAM, two DVD-R drives, and a high end NVIDIA card. She’d prefer to run on XP instead of Vista, but a friend told her that on XP, anything over 4g RAM is wasted. Is this correct? And depending on the answer, what is the best computer for her needs? She’s on a budget of $800 max. Her monitor is fine, but just in case, I’d like suggestions with and without monitors.
Your friend has a 5 year old computer and will be using this new one for gaming? I am a little confused why someone who “wants” a quad core would have a 5 year old emachine of all things. To answer some of your questions. Without a 64-bit CPU the Operating system will only see 3gigs of RAM. Vista and XP a like. What type of games does your friend play? Only a handful of games out there require a high end Nvida card. In my opinion I would go with CPU, Memory, Storage in that order. Hard drives and RAM are cheap. 500GB should be enough unless she plans on getting HD quality stuff than I would say go with 1TB. For 800 I would just get a cute little Dell Studio or a Dell XPS system.
*She’d prefer to run on XP instead of Vista, but a friend told her that on XP, anything over 4g RAM is wasted. Is this correct? *
32bit operating systems can only address 4gigs of ram. So unless she gets Vista 64-bit then she cannot do anything with more than 4 gigs.
You should be able to price this HP to get close to the 800 dollar limit. Im assuming you might have to put in the second dvd-burner manually. She can save money by getting a dual core. Dual cores will be faster per dollar per core and most games cant use all 4 cores so a faster clocked dual core is where its at for gaming. Spend most of the money on the video card, not the cpu.
I just bought an e machine with Vista Home Premium, AMD Athlon dual core 2.10 GHz
3 GB RAM
32-bit OS, Around $400.00 us.
Added $100.00 and put in a NVIDIA 9500
It only has a 320 GB HD, but I am working on buying something better. and one dvd rw +- . No monitor printer or other extras.
If she’s really concerned about Vista, take note that any new systems purchased beginning July 1 with Vista Home Premium, Business, or Ultimate (but not Vista basic) will get a free upgrade to Windows 7 when it comes out. Or she could just wait for Windows 7 to come out, which is slated for October 22.
Her current machine is perfectly fine for business use. I suggest she keeps her current machine and cleans it up for business use, and buy a separate machine for gaming. Note that many monitors have two or more inputs and you can switch between them. And USB KVMs are cheap.
For the gaming machine, there’s no need for two DVD-R drives. One will do. 8 GB RAM is overkill at the moment, but the capacity for 8+ GB should be there. If she can afford 8 GB, then she should go for it. Note that some machines are triple channel, so the memory should be 6 GB (3x 2 GB), not 4 GB. 4 GB DIMMs are still rather pricey. With regard to the CPU, it’s a toss-up between dual and quad core unless she’s doing video encoding, in which case quad core is the way to go. Game engines have only recently started making serious use of multiple cores. Far Cry 2 comes to mind.
The friend is not quite correct: anything over a variable amount over 3 GB is wasted in XP. How much is wasted depends on a number of factors like the video card. A 64 bit OS is necessary to make best use of 4+ GB of memory.
Graphics cards are a moving target that changes monthly, if not weekly, but a Nvidia GTX 260-216 is reasonably high-end without breaking the bank.
HlF- that HP looks interesting. Thanks for drawing my attention to that.
Her most recent gaming obsessions are Morrowind and Fallout 3. She’s devoted to Thief, Planescape:Torment, Alice, and Sims 2. She wants to get Oblivion & probably Sims 3 later on.
Both are pretty terrible for gaming computers. First one has a fairly crappy 9400GT, and the second has integrated graphics. Avoid that like the plague.
Really? Because I found that the CircuitCity site is now basically another branch for TigerDirect and my friend has had good experience with TigerDirect.
Which reminds me- here’s another gamer- how’s this look?
Videocard (9600GT) is much better than the previous 2 pieces of junk you listed, but is still really what I’d consider to be the absolute bare minimum for a Graphics card for a gaming computer these days. It’ll run WoW just fine, but it’ll really start to struggle on anything demanding.
Here’s a benchmark for how the 9600GT compares to other graphics cards in FarCry2 (recent videogame) Note that it has less than half the performance of some of the higher-end single GPU cards like the HD4950 and the GTX275. Those probably aren’t going to fit on a $800 budget, but you should be able to fit a GTS 250 or even a GTX 260 c216 in there, especially if you built it yourself.
It is important to add that this means 4GB of memory is addressable in the whole machine…not just RAM.
So let’s say she installs 4GB of RAM in the machine and runs a 32-bit OS. She also has a video card with 512MB of RAM on it. The memory available to other applications will then be (roughly) 3.5GB.
There are other things that have memory in the PC but the video card is usually the biggest culprit here these days.
Amongst the pre-built computers I’m seing on Newegg, the best videocard you’re probably going to get in a system less than $800 is the HD4850, which is an ATI card approximately equivalent to the Nvidia GTS250 or 9800GTX+. After that, the 9800GT is probably the next best thing, followed by the 8800GT 512MB, then the 9600GT. It’s unfortunate that none of the system builders seem to be offering a HD4770, as thats a good budget card that gives better performance than the 9800GT.
It’s decent, but I like the specs for this computer better for a gaming rig. Unless your friend has a really valid reason (I doubt it) for the Nvidia-only-policy or the 8GB RAM requirement.
I built my current comp in November. Heres the build:
CPU: Pentium Dual Core 2.53ghz
Case: Raidmax Smilodon
Motherboard: ASUS P5Q Pro
Power: Corsair 750tx
Mem: 2x Corsair 2gb DDR2
Graphics: Radeon 4870
HD: Western Digital 160gb
Dvd: Sony Dvd R±
OS: Win XP Pro
I bought everything from Newegg except the graphics card, which I got from Tiger Direct. I was able to get some combo discounts and instant rebates from newegg, so I saved around $150. I would highly recommend newegg.
I can run Crysis, Fallout 3, and Grand Theft Auto IV with no problems (all relatively new and high end games). I have no problem with the 4gb memory limit in XP (it’s actually 3.2gb by the way). If your friend wants to go with XP instead of Vista, it’s a perfectly viable option. I’m skeptical that more than 4gb is really necessary unless you’re doing high end video or audio processing. Anyway my paltry 3.2 gb works just fine.
If I had to rebuild my whole system right now, the only thing I’d change would be to go with a quad core q6600 cpu, and maybe an Antec Nine Hundred case. But I’m very, very happy with my system, it was easy to build, relatively cheap (you could probably throw it together for around 800 now), it’s very stable and runs new games without any problems. Of course you do have to be able to spec out parts and put everything together, and you didn’t say whether your friend (or you) are able to do this or not.
For monitors, I have an Acer 19" widescreen and it works fine. If she’s using a CRT monitor your friend may want to consider getting a wide flat screen monitor. I personally prefer matte over glossy screens, the glossy ones reflect too much glare, but you can go to your local electronic hut or even wallmart and see the ones on display. 15" or 17" flatscreen LCD’s are fairly cheap now.