Well, since I will be gainfully employed, and our old desktop is getting a little ragged around the edges, Mrs. Magill and I are looking at buying a new Desk top system.
Our objectives:
[ul][li]Get a good gaming system that will have no problem with City of Heroes and City of Villains (when it’s released).[/li][li]Get a system that can edit videos from our Digital 8 Camcorder and burn DVDs. <1>[/li][li]Get a system that will last for about four years.[/li][li]Get a 19" flat panel monitor to replace the 19" CRT. <2> [/ul][/li]
We are looking at a Dell 8400 (with free monitor upgrade)
[ul]Processor: P4 630
[li]OS: Windows XP Media[/li][li]Video: 128MB PCI Radeon x300[/li][li]RAM: 1GB DDR @ 400Hz[/li][li]HD: 250 GB (7200 RPM)[/li][li]Monitor: 19" Flat Panel (free upgrade)[/li][li]CD/DVD: 16x DVD-ROM Drive + 16x DVD+/-RW w/dbl layer write capability[/li][li]IEEE 1394 Adapter (I think this is a “firewire connection”)[/ul][/li]
What I’m trying to figure out is whether I should drop another $180 for a 256MB PCI Express™ x16 nVidia GeForce 6800. Is the improvement really worth it?
<1> We want to watch our Honeymoon videos <3>, but don’t want to make people sit through 2 hours of us walking around with the camera.
There’s a website called Tom’s Hardware - they often do comparisons of different video cards; they show the framerates for various games, using different cards, in a consistent base system. It might be helpful to you.
Ok, if your not looking out to pinch pennies the Dell looks like a decent deal. Only reason I would stay clear of Dell is if you want to do some serious upgrading down the line. They have a funny way of limiting what you can do (IIRC if you need a new PSU, you have to get it from them, etc) to your box. I would skip the PCI express, but that’s just me.
If you want a good gaming system, you’ll have to upgrade that graphics card at some point. It’ll probably do for now, but it’ll quickly fall behind. Tom’s hardware has a handy list showing relative performance of all current graphics cards. The Radeon X300 has a gaming benchmark of 1300 compared with roughly 2600 for a 256-meg Geforce 6800. (The Geforce 6800 GT gets a score of 5000, but since you didn’t mention the GT I’ll assume it’s a regular 6800.)
Of course, changing the graphics card couldn’t be more trivial, so you could always buy the X300 and upgrade it once games are running too slowly, at which point you can pick up a cutting edge card by today’s standards for a fraction of the current price.
Otherwise, the system looks good. It’s worth noting that Dell jacks you when you go above the minimum memory or hard disk sizes, so it may be worth adding your own instead of paying a premium for theirs.
While Dell systems are decent, but note what World Eater said.
We just replaced the motherboard on a friend’s Dell computer. Dell does silly stuff like changing the pin configuration on the front USP ports, so that you can’t just plug a new one from someone else in. (In this case, Dell took the 4 pin connector, and added another, blank, slot in the middle, so instead of 1234, you get 123b4, where “b” is a blank pin slot.)
In addition to that, if you need their support you might get extremely pissed off. The head tech in my University said that, if he only could, he would throw every single Dell machine from the top of our Tower, just because of the frustration of dealing their technical support. The University of Newcastle is possibly the largest customer in the North-East, and they treat us like shit anyway: if it gets broken it’s our fault, if we reinstall Windows or if we even dare to think of Linux, anything happening afterwards is our fault. Kept us waiting for months for a BIOS update for a problem that was widely known - but they wouldn’t recognize it, because “the machines worked when we sent them”.
Wow. When I called them six months after noticing some minor spots on my monitor screen where the film had worn off, they immediately said, “We’ll send you another one by Fed Ex, it will be there tomorrow, put the old one in the Fed Ex box we send with a preprinted label and send it back to us, Fed Ex will pick it up from your house, we’ll pay for all shipping.” And that’s what happened.
It’s been my experience that Dell’s customer support for individuals is much, much better than their institutional tech support.
Case in point, I ordered a Dell through work a couple of years ago. We ordered and paid for a dual-processor workstation. We received a dual-processor workstation with only a single cpu in it. Despite having an invoice which showed us being charged for both cpus, they initially refused to send us another one. They didn’t try to argue that it wasn’t their fault, they simply wouldn’t send us another cpu. I did finally get one, after calling their customer service line a few times myself and bitching at them, but it was pretty tough. Very weird – friends who have deal with Dell’s customer service for their home machines have had nothing but praise.
I’ll have to second that Dell’s individual support is quite good. I can’t speak for institutions.
I had a new Dell machine a couple of years back with one of those nifty fold-open cases, ala Mac G4. The only problem was, if you had two PCI slots filled, and the lid was closed, the machine wouldn’t turn on. Lid open, everything was fine. Lid closed, zip. It didn’t matter what was in the slots. The cards could be low-powered-serial boards, nothing that exceeded the power supply’s limits. Really.
A pretty sharp tech and I went through various options trying to figure this out over the phone for about an hour. The tech was knowledgable and interested in the problem, and escalated it pretty quickly. They sent a local tech out the next day, who looked at the machine and threw his hands up, and called Dell back. I ended speaking to someone in machine engineering while the tech looked on, who asked me to send the machine directly to him, so he could diagnose it in person.
I was shipped a new machine the same day, and shipped the new one back no charge.
When i bought my new computer just about a year ago (a Dell 8300 that i’ve been very happy with so far), i got a 17" LCD monitor. My wife now has that, and i’m using a 19" Samsung 997DF CRT monitor, mainly because she has a very small desk and a big CRT won’t fit, whereas i have a large desk.
Anyway, before buying the computer and the separate Samsung monitor, i did some reading about monitors and their pros and cons. At the time, many people were recommending against getting an LCD monitor for serious gaming, because they have slower refresh rates than CRTs and high-speed motion has a tendency to look blurry. At the time, the consensus was that serious gamers would probably stick with a CRT.
Also, CRTs were said to be better for people who need to do stuff with digital photos, because color rendition is generally more accurate than it is on LCDs, and the contrast ratio on CRTs is generally higher. I compared my two monitors, the LCD and CRT, and when the gamma was properly set on each one it did seem to me that the rendition and the contrast was better for digital images on the CRT.
Anyway, some of these issues may have been addressed in the year since i bought my system. I’m sure that LCD screens are getting better all the time. But if you want to do high-end gaming, it might be worth checking into the issue of refresh rates and stuff. It seems a shame to spend a whole bunch of money upgrading your video card if your monitor might not be able to keep up.
Chiming in… I’d recommend the bigger video card. As mentioned above, swapping video cards is trivial, but I have had somewhat unpleasant experiences with going from ATI to Nvidia cards – no reflection on either manufacturer, as both of them make quality product, but having two sets of drivers loaded was problematic.
Aside from that, it looks like a good system. **Dangerosa **and I are looking forward getting started on missions without waiting for you to load the map.
We ordered yesterday. Actually, with the bigger video card, it became cheaper to get the next package up, which has an upgraded sound card and 5.1 surround.
I must be an old fart, because I’m still impressed when the sound doesn’t come from the tinny PC speakers.
IIRC they call that “ghosting”. I purchased a Samsung 195P a few months back and I love the thing. (after exchanging one with 5 dead pix) The refresh is 20ms compared to most at 25ms, so maybe that makes a difference, or maybe I just don’t notice any ghosting.
World Eater, most every LCD review I read has the Dell high-end LCDs as the cream of the gaming crop, especially the price/performance ratio. I’m hoping to swap my 19" CRT for a 19" LCD next month.
Tehy are up to 8ms on the high-end LCD’s now. That equates to about a 125Hz refresh rate, so yeah, they’ve gotten better. Even you’re 20ms LCD is now considered too slow, at that is 50Hz. I run my monitor at 75 Hz, and I can’t stand anything below that (i can see the flicker below 75 Hz.) That is about a 13ms response time for an LCD, so myself I would need at least that low to make sure I did not notice any ghosting.
