johnrrogers
Old Racer
A little background about me first: I have worked as a software engineer since 1985 when I retired from the US Navy as a Nuc engineer and have taught computer science for Chapman U. and UOP in San Diego since 1989 but I hate messing with hardware!
Since I just had to replace my main home PC due to old age a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would cover what I did and what my logic was to end up with a blindingly fast PC with 2 TB (Tera Bytes) of storage for about $1200 or so.
I considerd a Mac but they are too restrictive and expensive for parts so that choice was eliminated.
I considered an off the shelf PC but while guarantee is nice, their speed and storage were not what I wanted so they were eliminated.
I built my own (again) with most all new parts except for the DVD reader and DVD writers and two IDE hardrives with the apps that I wanted to save and not have to reinstall. I bought a new case, 550W power supply, 4Ghz AMD 64bit CPU and 2 GB of very high speed RAM. The motherboard is an ASUS M2N4-SLI and I added a new nVidia PCI plus video card made for the AMD system. This ended up being essentially a game playing computer that can display graphics instantly when clicking on a JPG image. For storage, I bought 4x 500GB SATA drives and the motherboard has an onboard high speed controller and you can even setup a RAID-5 array if you wish (I did not). The drives were $120 each which is a pretty good amount of storage for the bucks.
Total cost for everything was about $1200 and I also splurged on a wireless keyboard and mouse which is pretty cool.
I stayed with XP instead of Vista since the shop told me they have had a lot of trouble with it and it is plenty fast as is.
A side note about the nVidia video card nis that you can install two of them, connect then with a sync cable and actually run up to four monitors when playing games and such but the wife said no!
Periodically I have family and friends visit from the east coast and one of the first things they do is buy computer hardware since we have a thousand small computer hardware shops in this area. If anyone is interested in help if they come to the SD area feel free to let me know.
Since I just had to replace my main home PC due to old age a couple of weeks ago, I thought I would cover what I did and what my logic was to end up with a blindingly fast PC with 2 TB (Tera Bytes) of storage for about $1200 or so.
I considerd a Mac but they are too restrictive and expensive for parts so that choice was eliminated.
I considered an off the shelf PC but while guarantee is nice, their speed and storage were not what I wanted so they were eliminated.
I built my own (again) with most all new parts except for the DVD reader and DVD writers and two IDE hardrives with the apps that I wanted to save and not have to reinstall. I bought a new case, 550W power supply, 4Ghz AMD 64bit CPU and 2 GB of very high speed RAM. The motherboard is an ASUS M2N4-SLI and I added a new nVidia PCI plus video card made for the AMD system. This ended up being essentially a game playing computer that can display graphics instantly when clicking on a JPG image. For storage, I bought 4x 500GB SATA drives and the motherboard has an onboard high speed controller and you can even setup a RAID-5 array if you wish (I did not). The drives were $120 each which is a pretty good amount of storage for the bucks.
Total cost for everything was about $1200 and I also splurged on a wireless keyboard and mouse which is pretty cool.
I stayed with XP instead of Vista since the shop told me they have had a lot of trouble with it and it is plenty fast as is.
A side note about the nVidia video card nis that you can install two of them, connect then with a sync cable and actually run up to four monitors when playing games and such but the wife said no!
Periodically I have family and friends visit from the east coast and one of the first things they do is buy computer hardware since we have a thousand small computer hardware shops in this area. If anyone is interested in help if they come to the SD area feel free to let me know.
I just upgraded my PC to 2 Gig RAM,need a replacement CD ROM drive as my original went belly up about a month ago.I'll probably have to hit up newegg for a deal