Shoppng for new PCs
With the large influx of cabbage I'm expecting at the end of December when caroling ends, I've promised myself not to squander it and put it towards something substantial, like a new PC to take over the reins of my hard-working 5 year old Gateway POS. Since it'll primarily be a gaming rig, I've been browsing the Alienware Site, messing with
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1) Frank has it a bit backward; OLDER video cards won't work with PCIe motherboards (also known as the mainboard; that's what everything plugs into. It's the foundation of the computer.) PCIe is the new spec, and new video cards are designed to work with it. Since you're building a new system, you're safer than people who are looking at doing a piece-by-piece upgrade. The SLI motherboard that you have specc'd provides 16 PCIe lanes to each video card, rather than splitting 16 lanes into 2x8 lanes with two video cards (so you'll be able to add another 7800 GT later to just about double your graphics power, and still run at full bus speed.)
2) Your storage is too small. At least double what you're quoting right now. Also remember that bigger hard drives are faster, due to multiple platters and higher areal density on the platters themselves. I realize that you'd like to go low-end with this, but the drive you already have is WAY out of date with respect to the rest of the new system, and you'll really pay a speed penalty that you'll be kicking yourself about later. Your primary disk should be big and fast, so the swapfile and system partition is nice and speedy. Use the second disk for document storage, music, etc. (Not games; they should go on the fast drive.)
3) Go with the X-FI sound card. This card is getting rave reviews, and will result in overall faster performance, because ALL of the system's sound info is offloaded to this card. Onboard sound is terrible, and puts load on the processor. Very bad with the newer crop of complicated games coming out.
4) XP Home sucks. It has several features disabled, and some of them are performance tweaks. Unless you have a licensed copy of XP Pro that you can load on the machine when it gets home, go with Pro loaded from Alienware. Really. You'll thank me later.
-M
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~j
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