A SupCom computer. I hope.
I have a low budget. Below $750.
So, I’m here to ask for advice from you awesome folks.
First of all, should I go Intel or AMD? I’m not a fanboy of either(though my last one had an AMD processor.)
What would you guys suggest for everything else?
Most of my computer knowledge is outdated(when it comes to hardware), so I don’t really know what to choose.
Well, I have a good suggestion for you when it comes to the chassis. Get this one. It’s got a thermally advantaged design, which means it has a cooling duct over the processor that significantly reduces the stress on your fans, as well as a vent by the PCI and graphics card expansion slots. The design is COMPLETELY tool-less, all your expansion cards and HDs and everything go in with little clips. (No need to screw little brackets on to the HD and CD drives first either.) Even the mobo goes in without tools. Anyway, I was considering building a PC a while ago and this was my chassis choice. It gots a big 120mm fan in the back, too.
Choose your processor before you choose your mobo, otherwise your choice may limit your processor options because of socket type. As far as AMD vs. Intel, as I understand it both have their advantages and disadvantages over the other, but personally I would go with Intel. You may want to look at craigslist.org to find a really nice processor that will fit your budget.
If you’re looking for a low-budget processor, a few good choices are the Athlon XP, Sempron, Celeron, or even the Pentium 4. I’d personally go for Intel as well, so I’d suggest the Pentium 4 2.8GHz+.
As far as RAM goes, nowadays you need at least 256MB, but I’d go for 512 if you want really good performance at the lowest price.
As for the monitor, LCD for looks, but definitely CRT for price.
I don’t know much about sound cards or video cards, so someone else will have to help you out with that.
Hope this helps.
Thanks.
For the processor, I was looking at this one.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16819103535
Its AMD because they are the only ones I’ve had much experience with. I gotta read up more on the intel processors.
Any thoughts?
You really may want to check out craigslist.org. I know this listing is for my local area, but look what I found when I searched ‘Pentium 4’ and limited the price to $70: link
I’ll check that out.
An intel is the way to go. I have a 3.3ghz celeron, it renders quickly and keeps the games running smoothly. I’ve heard that AMD is better for Blender though…
Whats the difference between a Celeron and a Pentium?
hy,
just copy paste from the biggest Dutch tweaking community, every 3months they assemble a basic, multimedia, high end and a work station.
For 750€ that would be the basic one (€ is more then $ but then again the prices in the US of A are lower then in Europe)
here is the link
For 750€ you get:
Processor: AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ - € 126,44
Motherboard: MSI K9N Neo-F, nForce 550 - € 65,62
Fans/cooler: Boxed
Memory: 512MB x 2 (1GB) PC5400 DDR2, CL4 (Corsair) - € 100,41
Videocard: Asus GeForce 7300 GT Silent - € 77,47
Netwerkcontroller: On Board
Sound Card: On Board
Hard Disk: Hitachi Deskstar T7K250, 160GB - € 53,46
Dvd-burner: Samsung SH-S182M 18x - € 25,-
Case: Antec NSK4400 (ATX, 380W, Zilver/Zwart) - € 67,95
Monitor: Acer AL1916WAs (19", 5ms, D-sub, Zwart/Zilver) - € 179,14
Speakers: Logitech S200 (2.1, Zwart) - € 15,57
Keyboard: Logitech Cordless Desktop LX300 - € 43,50
All thogether that makes € 743,47. But you probably don’t need the last 3 thing so thats 283€ less. So for a grand total of 505€ you get bang for your bucks.
Invest that money in something usefull or a better processor or videocard…
Cheers
Thats the same processor I use. But you can get better for the same money. But I’m more then happy with it. But for 50$ more you have a new dualcore AMD…
Wow, thanks for this!
I searched around on newegg for these parts, and with a few changes(no speakers, monitor, keyboard, or dvd drive) I totaled 473.95. I think I might actually do this, with a few more changes.
@FadieZ
Thanks for the article!
I would get tons of ram(+1gigs) I would go with 2gigs… I had just gotten this dual core AMD laptop. Love the dual core hate it sharing ram for video. So it is less then the 1gig. I would have to buy 2gigs to replace my one. Sculpting is fun and needs lots of ram.
good memory isn’t the cheapest thing on earth and 1 gig is allready good. next step is 2 1gig sticks and thats like 220$
http://www.eofw.org/bench/?PHPSESSID=829131122b318139945116f617a5539a
http://www.pricewatch.com/cpu/athlon_64_x2_3800_am2.htm
fun read:
http://sharikou.blogspot.com/
when buying the amd x2 3800 (or 4200), make sure you get the EE (65 watt) energy efficient version.
You just have to be careful of restrictiing yourself with your own components. For example, 2 gigs of ram is great until you realise your cpu may not be able to keep up to it anyways, and all it ends up doing is letting you run more processes than your pc can handle anyways. So you’ll be able to run 3 quake 4’s, 10 blenders and some firefox’s without using Swap space on your HDD, but if you can’t deal with them properly, it’s a waste.
For the majority of people, 1 gig of ram is more than sufficient, 2 gigs and you’re into the realm of gaming pc’s, where the extra ram counts. 3d is a little in the middle, some parts use high amounts of ram (Fluid baking etc.), but mostly it’s heavy on cpu processes. In any case, you won’t stop the usage of Page Files, without it you use much more memory than you need to, so you’ll suffer more anyways, at least under Windows currently. I have no idea about Linux.
So the key is to look for a nice middleground, where you have components that won’t restrict one another in the end.
Since Intel released the Core 2 Duo, AMD dropped prices on plenty of their single and dual core cpu’s, making them much better value for money. They’re fighting with their own Quad-core, but for your budget, I’d aim at an AMD dual-core processor. I’m still a little on the edge for 64-bit, as I don’t plan on going to Windows Vista, but there will likely be many optimized 64-bit programs shortly, so I wouldn’t shy from it if you find a good 64-bit cpu for a good deal. Dual-core 64-bit cpus may cost more, but it’s wiser to spend that money on a cpu than ram, as 2 gigs of ram is significantly more than 1 gig, and the performance is generally dependent on your cpu and gpu.
Honestly, unless your into high-end gaming, overclocking, or stressing your system, you won’t notice much of a difference between different speeds of ram, as long as they’re relatively good. For example, if you were looking at PC2700 and PC3200, you’d want to get the PC3200 for higher bandwidths, but you’re unlikely to need the more aggresive timings from the higher-end ram modules. Save the money and spend it on the cpu instead.
The graphics card is also an area where it depends on your preferences moreso than hard-and-straight lines for good and bad. If you’re into Gaming and High end 3d, a good card can make all the difference in the world. If you’re into general web-surfing and muddling around with 3d occasionally, it may be decidedly less important.
A couple of factors are key about Graphics cards, vram, type of vram, gpu and the slot.
vRam - Video ram, ranges currently in the midrange from 128 mb to 512 mb, higher and you get significantly more expensive. This is useful, but a 512 card is likely to be worth the amount you spend on it if the rest of the system isn’t up to snuff. great, you can load all of the textures from Quake 4 full settings into ram, but can your cpu handle the load, in addition to particle effects etc.? I’d probably aim for a 256 card here for a midrange pc.
Type of vRam - The same as normal Ram, DDR, DDR2, DDR3. DDR and DDR2 are more common on midrange cards, but DDR3 is becoming more and more used, so if you can get that with a good deal, it would be good. it determined the speeds the ram can handle, maximum bandwidth etc. Once more, one of those changes you may or may not notice, from DDR to DDR2, depending on how in tune you are with your pc.
Gpu - Graphics Processing Unit - It’s the cpu for the graphics processor, which helps offload most of the stress from your main cpu. You’re less likely to look at this category and decide a card based on it alone, but you may want to check for overclockability (Even 10 percent can give a nice boost with little price. You limit the life of your card a little, but with the current surging forward of technology, you’re likely to replace it long before it becomes an issue).
Slot - AGP or PCI-Express are currently the two main supported slots, with PCI-E quickly taking the market. If you buy a current motherboard, it’s likely to have PCI-E, which limits your choice of cards down a lot, which is nice for decisions. You can still find a great card for AGP 8x, so don’t be discouraged if an otherwise great motherboard only supports AGP 8x. It’s not the end of the world.
The motherboard is a very important part, but I know very little about them, so I can’t help much there. Just know that they will limit the choices you can make, simply due to what it supports. If you don’t have PCI-E in your motherboard, you can’t run a PCI-E card in your computer, (I suppose there may be ways, converters etc. but I have no idea about any if they exist).
Those 4 componants (CPU, Video Card and Motherboard and RAM) tend to be the choices most important, Hard drives aren’t much of an issue, getting decent speeds with high amounts of space is cheaper now than ever.
Hopefully this, along with the other posts can help you make a good decision on a good PC.
Contagion
Wow, thanks for that Contagion! Some stuff in there I didn’t know/didn’t realize.
Thanks for those links tedi!
My suggestion try out the sculpting, if you love it get more ram.
sorry if I come across too strong on the memory really depends on what you use it the most for. What do you want to do with it?
I really don’t see the point in buying anything less than a dual core CPU, 2GB RAM and at least a 7 series Nvidia GPU.
Going with anything lower will just result in having to upgrade a year down the line anyway.
I recommend waiting until you have enough cash for someting closer to the current standard, so that when you make the buy, it can last for a good 3-5 years, and be able to run pretty much anything you throw at it.
My $0.02
Honestly, he’s much better off with less ram and a faster cpu.
It’d be silly to bottleneck his pc simply due to his cpu.
They key is ram is module, so you can add/subtract whenever you like, where it tends to be less desirable to do so with a processor, you can’t reuse the old one.
Oh, when you do go for memory, don’t buy a single stick of the total ram you want. For instance, 1024 mb of ram (A gig) is much better in 2x512 sticks, versus one gigabyte stick. You get higher bandwidths, faster data transfer etc. You can google it and find precise calculations if you really want to check it out. The bonus to that is you’re likely never to breach 2 gigs of ram anyways, so if you do decide to upgrade to a gig later, when you have more money (because you spent it on a good processor, right?), you can simply pop 2 more 512 sticks in. If you do that, keep the ram equal with equal slots.
For instance, my motherboard has 4 slots:
Black (1), White (2), Black (3), White (4)
You wouldn’t put 2 512 sticks in the first two (black/white) slots, instead you’d want to put the 2 512 sticks in the black slots. As a general rule, try and keep the values equal on whichever ram you put in. So if you put a 512 stick in a black slot, get a 512 stick in the other black slot.
Also, be careful when mixing different speeds of ram, (pc3200 versus pc2700, for instance), most motherboards simply downclock all of the ram to the slowest ram to avoid potential issues. So it’s no good going broke buying a nice 512 stick of ultra fast ram and matching it with a stick of so-so 512 ram, as you’re expensive ram will act exactly like the other ram.
Oh, yeah, I’d advice not buying ram simply for sculpting in Blender. I have 1.25 gigs of ram and sculpt works perfectly for me, so a gig should handle it pretty well, once more: Spend the money on a good processor. It’s not something you generally swap out later, so get the best while you can.
I’d definately aim at a dual-core AMD, though, 64-bit is up to you, but if you plan on Windows Vista, it’s a must have (Vista is 64-bit compatible).
Edit: In terms of graphics card - Don’t just go for nVidia without checking the various stats, google each card and compare them. Nvidia tends to be much more expensive than Ati, and occasionally isn’t even justified in the price-increase. For instance, my 180 dollar 512mb x1600pro performs pretty close to my friends more expensive nVidia card with 256 mb of vram. Under higher stress, his does win, but it was almost another hundred dollars, so I feel I ended up with the better deal anyways. My card will play almost any game out there quite well, with only the newest games posing much of a problem. For 180 dollars, I couldn’t have asked for a better deal.
So choose whichever you like - Ati or Nvidia, but don’t buy just because of name.