Where shuld I buy my new PC from?

[punyXpress]

So where DID you buy it ?

Originally Posted by Sir Trev

Theres no point in buying an Apple when the only thing they use in schools (around here anyway) is PCs.

I should have mentioned that my tower unit (AMD Athlon II X4 620, 1TB, 4GB) is £427 with free delivery. For that price most other places would only give you half the disk space and less RAM.

Sounds pretty good. Only thing I find with pre builds is they skimp too readily on the Graphics card. Shouldnt matter toooo much if you arnt planning on playing games though to be fair

and the ram is usually slow speed and a rubbish make so might fail.

Originally Posted by zsv650

and the ram is usually slow speed and a rubbish make so might fail.

Ah, to be honest the RAM speed seems to make pretty small difference. I went from 667mhx to 1066mhz and the improvement was pretty small... The only real gains are with the i7 (and maybe i5/i3, im not sure about those, not read up on them...) when they get integrated memory controllers and man they FLY! Like triple the bandwidth of old ones! Infact then memory throughput from the RAM is nearly as quick as Cache, though no doubt still loses out on latency, which is to be expected with the much greater separation...

But I digress.

I guess make sure you keep the receipt!

ram speed make's a big difference trust me.

Hmmm. I didnt get much from the benchmarks... Oh well.

Out of interest what BW does your ram get? Ill check mine in Sandra...

Mine is: 5.63GB/s BW and 77.6ns latency. Not as good as the newer ones I got a Q6600, X38 mobo, 3GB PC8500 Crucial Dominator RAM. Oh well, still fast enough for me atm.

I think the best upgrade for me now will be a SSD. They seem to boost speeds like crazy. I get a read transfer of 87MB/s out of my primary HDD, if I can get close or over 200MB/s out of a SSD and virtually no latency then oh yea

SSDs are truly awesome. I had 2 set in RAID0 and they flew, but were just too expensive to warrant me keeping them.

I miss the speed now though

they are amazing but very expensive.

Originally Posted by 7755matt

SSDs are truly awesome. I had 2 set in RAID0 and they flew, but were just too expensive to warrant me keeping them.

I miss the speed now though

Aye... ~£250 for 128GB is a little steep. But then tbh if you run OS and Games off of that and use HDD as storage then I guess you'd be ok. I guess I might even be able to get away with 64GB. Ill see.

Originally Posted by Sir Trev

Theres no point in buying an Apple when the only thing they use in schools (around here anyway) is PCs.

I don't buy that argument at all. It could actually be advantageous to your kid to be able to use both a PC and a Mac, rather than just know how to use once kind of computer. Bright kids will probably want to install Linux on it anyway

If you can get a Mac on educational discount, then go for it. I've got a friend who bought a Mac with the educational discount and sold it three years later at a profit. I've just sold a Mac that only depreciated £60 in three years. I bought an iMac earlier this year and they're selling now on Ebay for £100 more than I paid Apple for it. In contrast, my home built PC's were only worth scrap value after three years. Macs hold their value really well, unlike PCs which depreciate like a 1980's Lada.

Macs are much nicer to use too. I've spent the day working from home with my brand new company dual-core PC laptop. It's such a relief to pick up my brand new dual-core Macbook after a day of swearing at Windows.