Go the the site Ray suggested, www.pricewatch.com you can price a machine in like 5 mins.
The system Niann suggested (which is pretty much as good as you get), with an even more powerful video card and 1024Megs of DRram is like $1800.00 (US) (also that is with a SWEET case, liquid cooling system [the iceberg system], SB pro Platinum sound card & sweet speakers, but no monitor, or CD/Floppy drives - as I am using my old ones), if you didnt want a 3.0GHz CPU you could power down and save some money with an AMD… anyway, check it out - like I said that site www.pricewatch.com is awesome and it takes seconds to find cheap stuff and swap compnents.
Hope this helps… I’ve been looking at a lot of stuff this evening.
Peace
PS Ray… thanks for giving out the info on that site it is sooooo cool!!!
Dan: also I’ve been doing research of a while now for my system (which will be used for the same stuff you want - and the best of everything) so if you have any questions I could probably throw some info your way.
the problem with asking teh hardware verndor is that he/she may be tempted to get rid of some ‘hard-to-shift’ or agein stock
that spec he gave you was a little suspect
for design work i would consider at least double the RAM in the original spec - especially if youlike to work with lots of images at once (with the money you save on the processor (if you buy AMD) you could invest in lots of RAM)
DDR is a little more expensive than DIMM but it operates on both the up and down cycles so you get better performance (and thee’s a strong possiility that it will become the standard anyway, so you’ll still be able to use it on a newer board in future
if you’re using win98 there’s a limit on how much pysical RAM you can use (it doesn’t work well at all with anything above half a gig)
win2k and above don’t have that problem
amd processor
and recommended mboard
2 gb of ram
the above recommended graphics cards
good hdd (7200 rpm) & 8 g of cache (most top brands are pretty much as good as each other)
that would be pretty impressive - the rest of the stuff (like cdrw’s etc) are more or less on the periphery - some hardaware does not operate at the speed ‘it says’ if the software doesn’t support those data bus transfers to begin with (it’s a bit like having a dual processor machine running win98 - the OS doesn’t run better, because it’s not designed to run on 2 processors - so it can’t load balance)
are you on a dial-up connection? if so, i’d stick to an external modem - it’s a little dearer (but not much) and has 3 benefits:
1 - an internal modem uses motherboard resources
2 - if an internal modem ‘hangs’ you’ll need to reboot your machine if you want to go back on line - an external one you just switch off and on
3 - this is a very remote possility, but i’ve seen it happen once! - during a thunderstorm, a bolt could strike a tel post and send a surge down the line… all the way to your connected modem… and fry it.
I have two ATI cards, 8500 All in wonder, and Radeon 64DDR VIVO. I use them for Digital video editing, and digital sound editing (SB audigy plat) I would say go with the 9700, I have had good results using an ATI card. I also have a PC with a GeForce 4 64mb DDR card, and my 8500 allows premire to render faster, and it keep up with photoshop better.
Man you guys TOTALLY jacked all I was gunna say! lol
haha, You should see what my system is… Sad, Pitiful, you know, the works… I just cant afford to upgrade
I’v been building computers for people for a number of years now… Here is what I would go with.
1024 meg of Ram. You wont run out any time soon. You can even go with SD.
NVidia graphics card. 128 onboard. Don’t go for an ATI product, in my experience the graphics arent nearly as good, and their software sucks.
Get an AMD processor, they always outperform Intel. Something over 1 gig should do you, unless your going for really huge stuff, then pop for maybe 2 gig. Processors are WAY over-rated.
Harddrive… I would get maybe a 30 gig, but I dont know the type of files you are playing with. I would also jump for a 20 gig mobile drive… You can store encryption and keep it with you, plus I move around a lot, so I can take my programs and crap with me so if I have some free time…
As to a monitor… I have a 17in viewable, and I crave a bigger one. I would just get a regualr oldschool monitor, none of this flat pannel crap. Color depth and crispness is better on this thing, and it is WAY cheaper.
I would get a DVD burner, but I have no experience with these. My current ROM burner is 40x burn… I can burn an Audio CD (a full one) in about 3 minutes…
