Hello from Mexico...

I wonder what kind of computer do you run people, 'cause I want to buy a new computer and I want to install a unix system and windows 2k or xp. Unix will be to play & learn

I will like to build a personal site to run, and I like to burn music cds for personal use.

what do you recommend? which features do you like to run a personal computer like a server?

pentium 4?
hard disk
ram
cdrom, dvdrom?
burners
etc.

thanks in advance!!
rodolfo from mexico

oh man forget it, i better not suggest things
just, be sure to have an SDSL line .. ADSL is what i have and it sucks of course, because the uploading speeds are about 18 times lower than downloading speeds. with SDSL the upload speed is nearly like download speed.

I'd definately get the new p4 3.0ghz that includes hyper-threading (sort of a poor-mans multiprocessing built-in), and the new intel chipset mobo that supports it. It might be expensive now, but wait a little while if you aren't in a big rush.

As for the rest: western digital makes very good 7200 rpm HDs, but stay away from IBM. They have horrible support history. Burners: get a cheap liteon cdrw, or spend some more and buy a pioneer a04 dvd burner. ram: now isn't the best time to buy alot of ram - high prices - buy I would recommend at least 384 if you are running win2k/xp. And buy the fastest ram your motherboard supports - i think the new intel ones support ddr3200 but maybe only 2700... video card: i would buy a cheap geforce4mx 440 and use it until nvidia releases there next-gen card.

May I suggest that whatever you buy, do yourself a favor and buy the individual components instead of being a tool for dell or gateway or some other setup. Besides the better options, it's a whole lot cheaper...

-Jeff

A word about DSL:

Virtually everyone running DSL is really running ADSL. If the up/down speeds match it is still ADSL. DSL lite (as called by Qwest) however is not much faster than a dial up modem.

Xenno

The Pentium4 Northwood2 2.4GHz is cheap and fast and nice.

Now get a mainboard with an Intel chipset for the CPU. Do not buy a board with SIS, ALI or whatever chipset. Intel chipsets will cause you less pain. I currently have (mistake) a SIS chipset and it is not fun at all.

Hard disk - Seagate Barraduca is silent. That is rather nice. If you want high performance, go for a SCSI disk. But expensive and noisy.

RAM: Never buy noname

cdrom, dvdrom, burners
Plextor - they make proper drives.

Now get a graphics with passive cooling, a special LOW noise CPU cooler + PSU cooler. Then you have a silent computer.

If you want to run a linux/*bsd server, then get compatible hardware!

Nope.
There are about 5 types of DSL.
You can learn more at DSL Reports.com.
SDSL is not like ADSL. And lite ADSL stinks .

Your DSL Internet connection will never be better than:

- The quality of your cobber line
- The DSL hardware at your end
- The DSL hardware at the other end
- The Internet Service Provider
- Your Internet Service Provider's access points to the rest of the Internet

My DSL connection is very stable. My ISP has plenty of bandwidth, so I always get 1 Mbit downstream or 512k upstream. The hardware actually supports full-duplex and I get full-duplex a few times at night, when my ISP is in a good mood.

Talk with friends that have DSL before getting one yourself.

All true, that's why i mentioned DSL Reports.
Not only the type of DSL you have matters (obviously..).
But, SDSL is better than ADSL period . ADSL stinks, i have 1.5mbit downstream and 96mbit upstream. Ridiculous... If SDSL would be availible here, i'd definately get it.

Yes SDSL is better and probably a lot more expensive.

Since my ADSL connection is very stable and only cost one third of a 1MBit SHDSL line, I don't think it suck at all.

PS:
1 Mbit = 1 Mega bit = 1 million bit
1 mbit = 1 milli bit = 1/1000 bit (does not make sense at all, unless it is milli bit per second)

There may be 5 types - but only two are common (ASDL/SDSL)

It may stink in your area (for reasons unknown) but not here. From what I read at that site you linked to, ASDL allows for co-usage as a normal telephone line. SDSL doesn't. ASDL can have much faster download speeds and close to SDSL max upload speeds. The ADSL I'm on now is 640K/640K and is available up 1M/7M (up/down). Like I said, most people do have ADSL and make the assumption that because Up/Down speeds are the same, that it's SDSL (that is, if they care like we do). Stinks?...I don't think so.

Xenno

This is what I run myself both as my server and personal computer... It's perfectly stable so there's no reason to use separate computers to different tasks... B)

AMD Athlon XP 1800+ (1.53GHz)
ECS K7S5A SiS735
ATi Radeon 8500LE
Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo III 7.1
Seagate Barracuda IV 80GB
256MB Samsung PC133 SDRAM (need more, and DDR)
Alpha PAL8045T with Enermax UC-8FAB on lowest speed
etc

I suggest you buy something similar for getting a good price/performance ratio... Perhaps the following setup?

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
ASUS A7V333 KT333
ATi Radeon 9700 Pro
Hercules Gamesurround Fortissimo III 7.1
Seagate Barracuda V 120GB S-ATA (almost as fast as a 10k RPM SCSI disc because of TCQ, although it won't be released until next year, somewhere around newyear )
512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM (or more)
Alpha PAL8045T or Thermalright AX-7 with Enermax UC-8FAB (or watercooling if you feel like throwing away your money )

For a P4 system, just change XP 2000+ for Intel P4 1800GHz Nortwood, the motherboard to Gigabyte GA-8IEXP i845E, the memory to PC2100 DDR SDRAM and also a different cooler... Both should have about the same price tag... (I know this isn't a monster system, but that isn't really necessary in most situations... It should be quite silent though... Enermax UC-8FAB is only 14dB on the lowest speed, which is nice...)

P.S. Plextor really isn't worth the money if you intend to use your burner for burning... Lite-On is cheaper and better for that... 52x from Lite-On is still +50% cheaper than 40x from Plextor...

D.S. I tend to agree on the memory part though... Never buy noname unless you feel like gamble... That applies for both the AMD system and the Intel system...

My first post, and thought I'd wade right in here with my (probably worthless) opinions. I *just* did this upgrade to my main PC, and I couldn't be happier with the performance for the price. I'll list the approximate US Dollars I paid from here in the states (For the most part, from www.googlegear.com)

Antec Case - 100.00
MSI K-3 Ultra2 MB - 100.00
AMD Athlon 2200XP - 150.00
Corsair 512 MB RAM - 150.00
Plextor 40/12/40a - 120.00
IBM Deskstar 80 GXP- 100.00
IBM Deskstar 80 GXP - 100.00 (The MSI MB has built in raid 1 / 0.... )
MSI GeForce 4200 - 200.00
Floppy, Cables,
Heatsinks, etc - 100.00
Pioneer Slot DVD - 50.00

For basically 1100 dollars I was able to build a pretty smoking system and didn't have to bow down to the Wintel CPU Gods. Also, that configuration runs Mandrake 8.1 and 9.0 Distro just fine. All those parts I consider to be premium, and I must stress - I am *very* happy with the performance of this machine. If anything, I'll be adding another 512 of Corsair memory. I'll probably be following a few other folks and going to fanless heatsinks, etc, to quiet it down even further.

Your mileage may vary, of course. To me, the price I could have paid for a top of the line Intel P4 alone was enough to buy the top of the line AMD, Motherboard and memory.

These are just one nerd's opinions.

Might as well stop waiting for that new technology because it always gets beat. Wait for the p4 3ghz and you might end up waiting a little longer for AMD's Hammer.

Yep, the time to buy new computer stuff is always "now." Waiting makes little sense, because whatever you get then will also be outdated shortly...

B-sides, PC's are fast & powerful enough now that unless you're a dedicated gamer running the most demanding new games, whatever you get will probably be 'powerful' enough for the next couple/three years, at least...

What kind of computer should you run at home?

This depends on many things, including your budget, your needs, and your willingness to get involved with the inner workings of your computer.

You must understand that these people are recommending products that work for THEM, and that you should actively search for products that work for YOU.

Also, keep in mind that when people make blanket statements about a particular product, whether good or bad, there are probably people out there who are making the opposite blanket statements, too! If I say that XYZ brand components are bad, someone else in the world is saying that XYZ brand is the best brand ever!

I recommend that you take the time to research each component or set of components and make sure that they fit in with what you need.

In order to get the BEST recommendations for YOUR purposes, would you please list your budget, the complete needs of the primary and secondary users of this computer system, and the computer-tech ability of the person(s) who will be maintaining this computer?

I don't believe that any of the previous suggestions have taken any of these factors into account, because you simply haven't provided the information. Please provide the information so that we can make educated suggestions instead of just throwing out random suggestions that may or may not be good for you.

-Steve

I'm saving up for a Falcon Northwest. Very clean systems built for you. Only drawback is you have a limited choice of components, but they are usually top of the line anyway. But that also takes care of the fact that you don't have to worry much about hardware incompatibilities.

If you go to http://www.falcon-nw.com/ you can build yourself a blazin' Mach V from an AMD template for around 2 Gs.

ADSL max download speed is 9mbps, max upload speed is 1.5mbps.
SDSL max download/upload speed is 2mbps (both directions).

http://condor.depaul.edu/~jkristof/xdsl-faq.txt


Because of the called "ACK compression" effect, if you have an asyncronous link (56K modems, aDSL, Cable Modem, etc) you must never saturate the lower speed side, because the speed of the faster side will degrade as much as the max speed of the lower side.

For this reason, it is imperative that you restrict somehow the up stream bandwidth usage, so as to never exceed, say, 85%. I know how to do this with FreeBSD, and Linux can do it too (with more effort ), most server apps have some method of restraining the bandwidth usage.

Mostly said before, but I think these points are crucial:

-If you buy P4, get an Intel chipset motherboard. The classic stability setup is Intel processor, ASUS mobo with i845xx chipset I once had a VIA chipset with Pentium processor and had a lot of stability problems. It is said that the SiS chipset with P4 is less stable than is preferable as well.

-If you wait a few weeks you will be able to get the new dual channel DDR RAM chipset (GB) which uses standard DDR but in a dual channel arrangement.

-Get lots of USB 2 on board, and firewire on board, and RAID with Serial ATA on board, and LAN on board. If you bought all these as PCI cards, they would cost a fortune.

-Wait until you can get the hyper threading P4. When doing intensive FPOs (ie mp3, mpc, ogg encoding) it will be fantastic to have HT ability. I think the new (November 14?) P4 3.06GHz will have this. The current price sweet spot thogh is the 2.4 GHz P4.

-Seagate Barracuda IV is awefully silent.

-Plextor CDRW is quality machinery and close to best at ripping protected CDs.

-Get a quiet power supply from Antec or Enermax (?) or Quiet PC. Some ASUS mobs (ASUS P4PE) have Q-fan which adjusts CPU fan speed depending on workload to cut fan noise. Use quiet case fans.

About 3 years ago, when I was at Uni. We were looking into the future of the internet. and what might become of DSL. VDSL, was supposed to be the next best future technology. I dont know if its available yet, but check out the stats:

52 Mbps downstream
16 Mbps upsteam

You should have a look HERE if you're interested.

For anyone who wants to see a comparison chart, comparing some DSLs, have a look HERE


I think I should add that, if you want to increase the overall performance of your computer, you should look into SCSI harddrives (U320)

just thought i'd mention that

1) i have an SiS motherboard, and it works fine for me (overclocked and all). by no means does this imply that they are stable in general, or that it will work at all for you, but .. yeah. maybe i just like it 'cause the dell computer i had before was really annoying...

2) ibm makes great hdds for the price (last i checked --> ~2 months ago). they made a really bad mistake with their 75gxp and 60gxp lines, and so they're paying for it with low prices on their newer lines and skeptical consumers. most resellers seem to think that ibm's are the most reliable brand in general, though (based on the return rate). wd makes the best drives, though they might cost a smidgen more. seagate makes far and away the quietest drives on the market, though they're relatively slow. i'd stay away from maxtor if i were you...

since i'm mostly full of shite, though, i would suggest going to either the anandtech or hardocp forums for advice, since they sort of specialize in that sort of thing...

i was wondering why everyone uses their burner for ripping since burners cost ~3x as much as dvd drives and ~5x as much as cd drives? personally i try to wear out my cheaper belongings first (all else being equal), but maybe i'm just retarded or something.

Im not saying go and get this PC, just look at it! The black case CLICK HERE!

Abit BP-6 (She's lovely)
2x 466c@466(-700MHz)
384MB SDRAM (1x 128MiB 100MHz CAS3, 1x 256MiB 133MHz CAS2.5)
(128stick = eeevil, gotta replace it)
Quantum Fireball CX20.4A 20GiB HDD (borrow)
Matsushita CDRW CW-7586
SBLive! (1st version)
Coresma Cablemodem giving me free internet & keeping me unknown
~1.5/.4Mbit

Running XP SMP. *duh*

i dont think windows xp is recommended as a server operating system. you will be better off with windows 2k, windows xp 64 (you will need a very powerful pc for xp64, its minimum system requirements for ram are 1Gb!).

hehe..
it's preferred you use 64-bit CPUs also

Hahaha...

Pentium 4 w/ Intel chipset. VIA chipsets are notorious because their problems with PCI bus control, USB and so forth. If the computer is targeted for music usage, I don't recommend any non-Intel-based system, unless you find vinyl-style crackling charming.

I honestly don't think there is need to wait about 8 months when 3.06 GHz HT-enabled Pentiums begin to be affordable. Virtually every Northwood P4 is a terrific overclocker, for instance almost every 1.8A chip overclocks to 2.7 GHz. Pretty powerful breed, the Northwoods, regarding both performance and overclockability.

Not to mention P4's come with a badass heatsink and a tiny <25 dBA fan. They won't get very hot. Should you choose to retain the original clock speed, your system will be very silent. You could actually concentrate on the music and not on the VIA crackling + Delta fan noise in an AMD system.

If you're going to build a server, consider a dual Intel Xeon system.

There's some more decisions to make with P4. Are you going for Rambus or DDR? RDRAM PC1066 is much, much faster than DDR400 but also much more expensive. Should you decide to use DDR, get a chipset with DDR333 support. Such include Intel's 845G and 845PE. Whatever memory should you choose, get 512 MB's of it.

Traditionally Asus has been the most respected motherboard manufacturer, but nowadays it has to compete with terrific brands like EPoX and Gigabyte. This applies for Intel and AMD systems.

A RAID setup might be worth considering for the HDD side. For instance, one 2x40GB striped RAID array for your multimedia and one regular IDE for your OS and crucial data. Striped RAID arrays are quite fast, althought a bit insecure.

And also, my 80GB 5.4 krpm Maxtor is extremely quiet. Western Digital 7.2 krpm 80GB HDD's (with 8MB cache) are the fastest in existence.

Display adapter. Duh. Radeon 9000 Pro or course. Good for anything, the image quality is good enough for CAD, it's powerful enough for games and it has plenty of outputs for your multimonitor or TV needs. Or a Radeon 9700 if you feel extremely rich.

Sound card. M-Audio Audiophile 2496, Echo Mia or Terratec EWX 24/96. This board is full of threads WHY these sound cards are better than 8-bit SoundBlaster 2.0.

Any DVD reader except Pioneer slot model. I own one (106S) and it's the noisiest, hottest and slowest DVD drive in history. Get any brand besides Pioneer. For CD-RW side, Plextor makes the best drives.

Okay, enough of the hardware blurb

Well, you gotta pay ridiculous prices if you want the best

I'm thinking of the Echo Mona... it's very sexy
I'd like to use those sweet balanced output -> bXLR -> Active studio monitors.
just need to build out my livingroom wall first
I'm 50cm short for optimal placement

Uuh, this question seems very familiar to me (today I'll get my nu pc , last week I spend a lot of time in the Internet to get some infos) - how ever.
This is its configuration:

AMD Athlon XP 2000+
Asus A7V8X (KT400) Mainboard
512 MB DDR PC 333 CL2.5 Samsung
Asus V8420 TD 64MB Graphics Card
WD 800 JB (80 GB, 8MB HD-Cache)
Pioneer DVD-A06SW
[LG GCE320B (bought it 5 months ago)]

"Plextor makes the best drives"

I disagree .. My Yamaha 3200E reads anything and writes anything ANY Plextor can. And well, Yamaha drives are known to be of better quality than many others.. Including Plextor. But you can ask why i say that and bla and bla , many technical reasons that i myself don't even remember. (for info CD Freaks is good). Now i'm thinking i shouldn't have written this at all, everybody will think i'm a closed minded Yamaha lover freak who doesn't write why he claims it's better than Plextor and instead points to a site .

For Graphics adapter i'd recommend NVIDIA GeForce 4200 ti.. Great price and best performence for that price. And for graphics performence, i believe Asus motherboards are still the best.

I wouldn't recommend any hard drive other than Maxtor. Total quality, reliability.

About AMD.. Just one thing to say. The amount of heat AMD processors produce is frightning.. Says something don't you think??

that configuration is almost identical to my PC except the motherboard which is KT333

That is true about the amount of heat the amd produces. i have XP2000 and its @ 52 @ 100% processing usage!

AMD got over heat issues a long time ago.

I think we all can agree that we'll never agree on any hardware setup.

When asking people for their recommendations, ask what experience they are based on.

I find the I own 5 XXX computers and they work fine recommendations pretty worthless.

The I have been working 10 years+ assembling hardware and life is too short for XXX are somewhat better -- but only for a hardware perspective. Does the hardware work well with your software?

The I've been a system administrator for 10+ years and I only buy XXX is slightly useful too -- but mostly from a stability perspective. Sysadms often support a very limited amount software.

The tech supporter working in a computer store fixing customer's computers might have a lot more insight. So will the nerd who has been playing with 100 computers since 1990.


And just to prove that most manufacturers has released bad products:

Harddisks
Seagate: Terrible harddisks 1991-1995 - slow, noisy, unstable
Maxtor: Major failure rate on harddisks 1995-1996
IBM: Major failure rate on 75 GXP series 2001

CPUs
Intel: Floating point error in P60 and P66 - 1995 (there were also minor problems with 386/486 and PPro)
Cyrix: MAJOR heating problems
AMD: Heating problems until recently, floating point performance problems until 2000?, compatibility problems - K5

Mainboard Chipsets
SIS: USB problems - 2002
VIA: Problems with games, etc (don't know much about it)

Net adapters
Intel: Major failure rate on 21143 chipset for net adapters when not using a hub/switch - 1995-1996
RealTek: Major failure rate - 1995-1997

Graphics Adapters
Matrox: First release of G200 had terrible picture quality (they were sold for 6 months)
Diamond Multimedia: Driver problems, support problems

Sound Adapters
Creative: Driver problems, PCI problems, SMB problems
C-Media: Driver problems, performance problems

The list really goes on and on and on...

Preferred is the key word

Hey that's a very nice list Annuka.

Well why not, Yamaha drives could be much better than Plextor ones. The thing is that Plextor is a very widely known brand and most of their recent drives have been excellent, not only with burning but ripping too. I have personally never even seen a Yamaha CD-RW drive anywhere.

And about Ti4200 - the cheapest brand costs about 60 € more than 128 MB Radeon 9000 Pro and according to benchmarks Radeon pretty much OWNZ Ti4200. But nVidia vs. ATI is an eternal struggle (except for the time being, 9700 OWNZ all), pesterized with Fanboys on both sides.

@p0wder

Are you referring to the new Throughbred core? Old Athlons/XP's can be classified as thermonuclear weapons. Throughbreds still dissipate much more heat than their P4 equivalents.

Typically misguided Intel propaganda... I guess you've never built a VIA system of your own, or you suck at it... IE, choosing really piss poor components...

Noise problems are always related with hardware that steals the PCI bus (like Creative cards) and also grounding of the computer... Seriously, how many of you actually ground your computer... Just around 2% is my bet...

But sure, there's nothing wrong with Intel chipsets...

As I've said earlier in this thread, these two motherboards are very nice and have lots of nice features:

Intel P4 Nortwood MB: Gigabyte GA-8IEXP (Intel 845E)
AMD Athlon MB: ASUS A7V333 (VIA KT333)

Just flip a coin, any system with these motherboards should (will) work perfectly as long as you don't play "cheap ass" with the rest of the computer components...

Ars Technica's God Box / Hot Rod / Budget Box series is a good place to go to find out what is the current best buy depending on your budget. It's updated monthly too. Currently for Hot Rod they have just swithced from AMD to Intel P4-2Ghz

http://www.arstechnica.com/guide/system/hotrod.html

P4 Northwood (speed depends on your money, p4 with hyper threading would be nice)
DDR or RDRAM
seagate or maxtor hd
plextor cdwriter, prioneer dvd
geforce 4 or one of the new radeons... chose some budget model if u don't want to play games.

hm what else do u need ?

I've built two AMD/VIA systems, other with ASUS A7V and other with ABit KT7-Raid and one Intel/VIA system with Abit VH6. The crackling was always there, both with SB Live! and Terratec EWX24/96. The crackling was especially bad when using Terratec with ASIO drivers and 24-bit sampling rate. I eventually had to delay my music projects until I got a better system.

The net is full of articles which prove that VIA chipsets have problems in PCI bus control. Latency patch may or may not solve these problems.

And yes, I ground my computer. I had to get a 15m extension cord for that.

Hmmm, I've neer heard of grounding your computer Can you point me to some sites that that me why and how? Thanks

Oh I guess I was wrong. I thought AMD and Intel both had heat problems while trying to improve scalability of their chips...

Oh well chips are getting so fast is it worth it to overclock them?

Doesn't that extra third prong in the power supply cable ground your computer?

Those unfortunate enough to be outside of the UK probably don't have the third pin...

And I have never heard any crackling or indeed any other artifacts from my AMD XP2100+ / VIA KT333 system...

No...in the US all PSU and cables have three prongs so I guess 100% of people have their computers grounded rather than 2%.

My main machine at home is an overclocked 80286 (not sure what MHz, haven't found a oscilloscope that's fast enough to measure it). I've got good memory expansion capabilities in that it has (4) 30 pin wide slots, and I have used only (2) of them (using 1MB x 30 FPM RAM). I like fast video, so I jammed a late model GeForce 4 AGP card in the ISA slot. Using a 500MB SCSI 1 drive. Too much overhead in SCSI 2 and especially UltraSCSI. The monitor is a 14" Acer. I don't want to chance any burn-in so I dropped the refresh rate down to 30 Hz interlaced. Resolution is 1280x1024x8bit. Have the disks partitioned as C: & D: (file compression enabled on D). I have Win2000 installed. Did some registry hacks and so it's much faster than stock .

I continually update & tweak the system so I'll keep you guys posted on any future enhancements I make (off the top of my head though....dual booting into Linux).

Xenno

PS: Forgot to mention that since I leave it running all the time (and hooked to the Net), and since I love astronomy, I let SETI do some of their processing on it (I installed a math coprocessor on it recently).

Hahaha!

edited: Oh man!!.. i can't believe how stupid of me! Only now i noticed the sarcastic humor.. Should have read well

Anyway... on another note ()
I don't know what all this, ahm, nonsense about Geforce 4 not being fast is all about.
Sure, ATI Redeon 9700 Pro is "K|nG" and all..
But, i have a geforce 4 4200ti and am very satisfied with it.
It's not very expensive, about 160$. And has great performence for that price.
For example, did you ever use GLExcess as a benchmark?
Try it sometime, tweek your system, tweak all, then start the benchmark (mark all tests), and see how many XSMarks you get. I remember i got more than 6600 points (without "overoverclocking" it untill it freezes my computer like many do..). At 1024X768, 32bit. Now that's a very fine result for this very fine, not so expensive card. And it performs completely stunning in everything else i have, not just GLExcess, no complaints here.