On 13-Aug-09 22:33:05, Colin Wilson said
>> That's an idea..... an extension from that is, how difficult would it be
>> for me to build a pc myself?

>Nowadays it's like lego - almost hard to get it wrong...


That's the kind of challenge I like. :)

>It's not like it used to be, where the motherboard manual started with
>"take two chickens and a goat..." and you spent ages fecking around
>trying to figure out why you were getting timing errors and DMA
>clashes, only to discover there were known issues with board A with
>card B that the manufacturers couldnt or wouldnt fix...


Funny you should say that...

I got my sone a pc in about 2003, and when we got adsl I "knew" all the
sweat was going to be on the Amiga side. It turned out the this pc
motherboard which used something called WinFast just wouldn't recognise
any pci boards you added - until you found the patch program with a lot of
desperate googling.  :)

>Check out for good Dell deals on http://www.dmxdimension.com - you
>occasionally get a full base unit for <£150 but don't expect something
>at that price point to be usable for games (or have a PCI-E slot to
>allow you to upgrade the gfx card)

Right had a look, bit confused it may be down to the way IBrowse displays
it (I just found out I can no longer view the BUY NOW button on Amazon!
:(

Is it BS when people talk about this pc being for games and this one for
office?

I mean why wouldn't a pc capabale of running high end games also be fine
for an office?





                  All the best,
                        Angus Manwaring.       (for e-mail remove ANTISPEM)

I need your memories for the Amiga Games Database: A collection of Amiga
Game reviews by Amiga players http://www.angusm.demon.co.uk/AGDB/AGDB.html

> Right had a look, bit confused it may be down to the way IBrowse displays
> it (I just found out I can no longer view the BUY NOW button on Amazon!
> :(

Bugger... can't see anything spectacular on sale at the moment anyway 
:-}

> Is it BS when people talk about this pc being for games and this one for
> office?
> I mean why wouldn't a pc capabale of running high end games also be fine
> for an office?

Most of the time it comes down to two things - graphics card and 
available memory.

1Gb is almost certainly (at least with XP) fine for office work, with 
any graphics card (onboard or otherwise) - it doesn't have to work 
that hard to scroll data around.

A gaming machine on the other hand will typically have a faster 
processor, a MUCH faster gfx card (think stock A600 speed versus an 
A1200 '060), and more memory to facilitate shuffling the massive 
amounts of data a modern game requires.

For graphics, anything onboard is relatively crap - even the cheapest 
seperate card will be roughly twice as fast.

Games these days are stunningly complicated in the way they display 
their graphics - gone are the miggyesque arguments about chunky vs 
planar, these days the graphics card is raytracing reflections from 
all the different surfaces elsewhere on the screen* and modifying the 
output on the fly, as well as other tweaks like multi-pass anti-
aliasing to "smooth" any "jagged" lines when its done everything else 
- they're possibly more powerful in many ways than the main processor 
now.

(*game dependant of course)

Recently people have started to use this "untapped power" (think of 
them a bit like an FPU when processors were slow and clunky) to force 
their way throgh difficult encryption because they can be many times 
faster for certain types of program than a normal CPU.

A machine with vista will likely crawl out of bed and that's about it 
with just 1Gb of RAM to play with, but it'll (forgive the analogy) be 
more of a playful pup in a bigger "pen" (memory) to work with.

Check out...

http://www.rojakpot.com/showarticle.aspx?artno=88&pgno=0

...for info on relative gfx card speeds - the column that refers to 
Texture Fill Rate (Mpixels) is the best line to look at. One small 
note - the main links down the page are playing up at the moment, but 
the drop-down menu below the title works fine. You may also want to 
note what version of DirectX it supports.

Mine came with a Dell 3 years ago, it's an ATI X600 - it does around 
1600Mpixels (theoretically, but mine shares system RAM which will drag 
it down) - almost any card costing £30 will blow it out of the water 
now and be about 3x faster (i'm actually debating updating mine)

One minor note is tha Nvidia have had massive (mainly kept quiet) 
issues with their chips failing due to issues with their manufacturing 
processes - you might be lucky and have a card last 18 months without 
failing, but by the same token it might keel over in weeks. This has 
been a MAJOR issue for people like Apple, HP, Dell and so on who used 
onboard chipsets from them in laptops etc. because the only way to 
"repair" them is to throw out the entire motherboard because of one 
failed component.

The failures are caused by heat stresses, and graphics cards get VERY 
hot very quickly (100degC in milliseconds is probably fairly close to 
accurate without heatsinks and fans).

You can get more on the Nvidia issues at http://www.theinquirer.net 
(just search for something like "nvidia failure")

> I mean why wouldn't a pc capabale of running high end games also be fine
> for an office?

Forgot to answer this one... NOISE !

The gaming machine will be noisier even on mundane taksk due to the 
bigger fans for cooling everything.