…and I was wondering if I did good. I paid $414 USD including shipping for this thing, and I was wondering what the computer gurus thought about it and what I need to do to it to make it better (other than get a bigger hard drive).
Deets:
It’s brand new…
Processor AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core 5200+ Socket AM2
CPU Fan AMD Original AM2 CPU Fan
Motherboard ECS nVidia GeForce 7050M-M Motherboard
Memory 4GB DDR II 800 Memory 240 Pin (Kingston)
Hard Drive Western Digital 160GB 7200RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA II
Optical Drive LG 22X DVD RW + Dual Layer
Video nVidia GeForce 9600GT 512MB DDR3 PCI-E Dual DVI HDTV
Audio Realtek ALC662 6-channel HD Audio
Network Card Onboard 10/100 Network Card
Ports 6 USB 2.0 Ports, 1 Parallel, 1 1394a
Case 1285 Deluxe Black Tower Case
Power Supply 600 Watt Heavy Duty Power Supply
Warranty 1 Year Parts 3 Years Labor Warranty & Life Time Toll Free Support
Assembly Fully Assembled and Tested
Is this an OK machine for the money?
Please advise, thanks!
Edit: What OS should I get for this thing? I’ve never used Vista and am pretty fond of XP. Anyone foresee any potential issues?
I built my own machine, much beefier, for about twice as much including Vista x64. I would say you got a fair deal for a built machine including shipping with just the bare metal, but not a killer deal. You will probably need a bigger hard drive. The power supply sounds a little heavy for your configuration, but certainly not a problem. I am not familiar with AMD and the CPU could make a significant difference in price at this level. You could try finding a similar build from Dell’s web site and see what they would charge for a machine with the OS (but also lots of bloatware).
If you like XP, go with XP and wait for Windows 7 to be released to upgrade. However, you won’t be able to use quite all of that 4G of RAM unless you go to Vista x64.
Is that motherboard and RAM pretty current? What about the video card, is it a good one? All I know is that since I don’t know how to build a computer myself, that paying $400 for something like this is a far cry better than buying it new from a store like Best Buy, where it not only would likely cost over a grand, but come with loads of pre-installed BS software that I don’t want. I want a clean machine with a clean OS install to play games, watch movies and surf the net with. I also wonder how much more RAM I can add to this motherboard for in the future.
This is my last computer purchase for awhile, I hope that it’s pretty upgradeable for the future. I assume with that power supply that I can get a future video card that will be adequately supported.
Any advice or suggestions from the resident computer geeks are certainly welcome and encouraged!
I had XP on my last machine, I liked it, was familiar with it, and knew how to tweak it. So when I put together my new machine late last year, I went with XP Pro (with SP3). No regrets here. I briefly considered getting Vista, but after doing some research, I broke it down thusly:
Advantages with Vista Better security features: I dunno, I haven’t had any problems with XP pro, so this isn’t really that big of a deal for me. Shiny new graphic features: I tend to run my OS as minimal as possible, so I’d probably turn most or all of these off anyway.
**Supports 4gb RAM. ** Well 3.2gb in XP is good enough for me. I honestly don’t think the extra .7 or .8 gb is really going to make that much of a difference.
**Supports Direct X 10. ** I don’t think there’s really a lot of games that support DX10 right now, and by time there are, Windows 7 will be out.
Disadvantages are: bugs and incompatibility issues, they’ve moved all the things you’re familiar with around in non-intuitive ways so you can’t find anything, annoying security features, bloated crapware.
Yeah, I’d stick with XP, especially if you’re already familiar with it and like it.
didn’t see your other questions and missed the edit window…
The motherboard is a budget board, nothing fancy, but nothing shitty either. It should be fairly stable and do what you need it to do. It’s only got 2 memory slots, which means if you did get more memory, you’d have to throw the old ones out. I seriously doubt if you’d need more than the 4gb it comes with anyway, and by time you did want more than 4gb, it’s most likely time for a new machine.
Not sure on the power supply, there’s no real information in your link. As someone explained when I built mine, you can’t just go by the wattage. I’m sure you could throw in a better video card, but I don’t know if it would power, say, a GTX 260 because there’s no info on the PSU. You could always get another PSU when you upgrade the video card though.
Overall, I’d say you got a decent budget machine, and can probably upgrade it a bit in the future.
I don’t know what the board will take but as I noted, more than 4G of RAM is a waste unless you are using a 64-bit OS. XP won’t be able to use it. I use Vista x64 but the drawback is that there are still some issues about software, device, and driver compatibility which can be occasionally irritating.
I have built my own computers and it seems like a good deal to me although not the deal of the century. You might end up with a beige case that looks like it got shipped from 1996 but probably not. I would feel good about it unless you are proven wrong once you actually get it. It should be able to handle any modern apps including cutting edge games just fine.
The hard drive space is unusually low compared to the other specs. It won’t be an instant problem but you can add a secondary hard-drive many times the size for $50 - $120 if you do it yourself and that isn’t very hard even for people that have little experience. If it were me, I would add a second hard drive right away and only keep system files on the main drive and most other things on a secondary hard drive. That is good in lots of ways but you can get by either way.
For an OS you could download and install the Windows 7 beta and put off buying anything for at least six months. I’ve been using it since it was released and have had no problems at all (note that I am usually a MicroSoft basher.) Get the 64-bit version and you will be using all of your RAM.