ZDNet Holiday Gift Guide: Top desktops for any budget

TalkBack 1 of 5:

Next »

• Thread View
• Flat View

Consider building

My opinion: Consider building. There are many shops that will build custom systems for you. That's the way to go if you want the best components in the cheapest systems. In addition, it allows you to build it to your needs rather than some stock system that may or may not be the best system for the tasks you want to perform. This is especially true for desktops, which are far more flexible than laptops.

You do pay for the name on a system. Building your own system or having somebody build it is still the best option for a high end system at a low price.

I say go full out with a quad core system. The Core 2 Quad is only a little bit more expensive than a Core 2 Duo in a desktop, and you get twice as many cores.

The new i7 systems look good, but I'd wait for prices to go down a bit. They still seem to be in the "more money than sense" pricing range.

2.67 GHz? You're probably better off overclocking a Core 2 Quad or Extreme.

Graphics are no more complicated, really: You pay through the nose for the highest end graphics cards, but with only marginal gains over the much cheaper and still very good cards one level down. Buying the latest and greatest always has been, and likely always will be, more to stoke your ego rather than to make your games look much better.

The important thing is to keep up with DirectX versions. Any DirectX 10 card will play any game on the market today.

That said, go with a 512 MB card at least - games are pushing for higher resolution textures, so you really do not want a 256 MB or lower card.

And on the OS side - get 64 bit if possible. Otherwise 3.5 GB of memory is all you'll ever be able to use.

"But keep in mind that you may be able to get similar?or even better?performnace and capabilities by sticking with an older processor and putting the money towards dual graphics cards, dual hard drives in a RAID configuration or a Blu-ray player or burner."

My advice is to avoid RAID. RAID means your hard drives are created using a proprietary format that is specific to the motherboard or card. If the RAID controller fails or you want to switch to a new motherboard, that means you've pretty much lost your data. I've already had to deal once with a failed controller, and I'm not doing it again.

My advice is to max out the memory instead: Even a set of RAIDed drives is going to be orders of magnitude slower than memory, so the idea is to keep as much as possible in memory. Grab a 64 bit OS (either Vista or wait for 7 - you want SuperFetch on a large memory system), and go for 6 to 8 or more GB of memory. That will give you a larger performance boost than RAID can ever give you.

Posted by: CobraA1   Posted on: 11/24/08  (Edited: 11/24/2008 @ 05:26) You are currently: a Guest | Members login | Terms of Use

Alert moderator to an offensive message

Subscribe to this discussion via Email or RSS

SponsoredWhite Papers, Webcasts, and Downloads

• Five Steps to Determine When to Virtualize YourServers VMware Server virtualization isn't just for big companies. Entry-level ... Download Now
• Building the Virtualized Enterprise with VMware Infrastructure VMware VMware virtualization software has been adopted by over 120,000 enterprise ... Download Now
• Why Isn't Server Virtualization Saving Us More? A Few Small Changes May Dramatically Increase Your Efficiency VMware Companies have rapidly adopted server virtualization over the past few ... Download Now