August 20, 2010 at 1:50 pm
been building on and off since the 1990's but it's not really fun anymore with everything being integrated and things like the computer being quiet being more important than a little faster. might just do it anyway. my first build had a Nvidia Riva TNT 2, Voodoo 2, a modem card, NIC and i forgot what else. i think all the PCI slots were full. these days it's just a graphics card and the slots are useless.
another reason i was thinking iMac is that it's UNIX and i have an almost 3 year old son and thought it would be better to start him on a ^nix OS
August 20, 2010 at 3:50 pm
alen teplitsky (8/20/2010)
been building on and off since the 1990's but it's not really fun anymore with everything being integrated and things like the computer being quiet being more important than a little faster. might just do it anyway. my first build had a Nvidia Riva TNT 2, Voodoo 2, a modem card, NIC and i forgot what else. i think all the PCI slots were full. these days it's just a graphics card and the slots are useless.another reason i was thinking iMac is that it's UNIX and i have an almost 3 year old son and thought it would be better to start him on a ^nix OS
Oh yeah - the old Voodoo video cards. :laugh: That sure brings back memories - I never could afford one, but I remember wanting one bad!
It sported (was it 8 or 16?) MB of memory and AGP buddy! Screamer! 😎
By the way, I'm not poking fun at you - I am that old.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking
August 23, 2010 at 12:54 am
another reason i was thinking iMac is that it's UNIX and i have an almost 3 year old son and thought it would be better to start him on a ^nix OS
Get a cheap PC and install Linux, FreeBSD or what-have-you on it. You can get a lot closer to the guts of the system on there than you can on Mac OS, which tends to hide a lot of implementation details!
August 23, 2010 at 8:08 am
paul.knibbs (8/23/2010)
another reason i was thinking iMac is that it's UNIX and i have an almost 3 year old son and thought it would be better to start him on a ^nix OS
Get a cheap PC and install Linux, FreeBSD or what-have-you on it. You can get a lot closer to the guts of the system on there than you can on Mac OS, which tends to hide a lot of implementation details!
isn't OS X built on top of FreeBSD? i have an old Mac Mini with 10.4. haven't played with it as much as i wanted to, but it does have a terminal and you can run all the UNIX commands on it. at least it seems that way from the little playing i've done
i've played with Linux and don't like it simply for the fact that it's too fragmented and outside of enterprise software there is nothing to run on it. and half the time it doesn't work because you have the wrong distro.
still not sold on Mac, but UNIX is the big reason i'm considering it. with tech support being a second reason. in my experience Dell/HP tech support is horrible and i've been happy's with Apple's support. Just go to the Apple store and they look at your computer or idevice and they speak English.
August 23, 2010 at 8:09 am
mtillman-921105 (8/20/2010)
alen teplitsky (8/20/2010)
been building on and off since the 1990's but it's not really fun anymore with everything being integrated and things like the computer being quiet being more important than a little faster. might just do it anyway. my first build had a Nvidia Riva TNT 2, Voodoo 2, a modem card, NIC and i forgot what else. i think all the PCI slots were full. these days it's just a graphics card and the slots are useless.another reason i was thinking iMac is that it's UNIX and i have an almost 3 year old son and thought it would be better to start him on a ^nix OS
Oh yeah - the old Voodoo video cards. :laugh: That sure brings back memories - I never could afford one, but I remember wanting one bad!
It sported (was it 8 or 16?) MB of memory and AGP buddy! Screamer! 😎
By the way, I'm not poking fun at you - I am that old.
built my first PC back in early 1998 when i was in the Army and had too much money. bought a 12MB Voodoo2 the day they hit the streets and paired it with a Nvidia RivaTNT2 i bought earlier
Wing Commander Prophecy rocked
August 23, 2010 at 8:18 am
We have an iMac, and lots of Win machines here. I think building a machine can be fun, if you want to do that. Many techies like that, but many of us also just want a machine to work. We don't want to play with the internals, we want the machine working so we can do something in SQL Server or .NET.
I've tried various *Nix machines, but ultimately they didn't perform any better, or worse, than my Windows machines, and they were cumbersome since I haven't worked in *Nix enough over the years.
August 23, 2010 at 8:29 am
my big experience with linux
we used to run netbackup on Solaris to backup our SQL servers. last year we bought a new server and tape robot. original plan was to put it on Red Hat Linux to keep it ^nix so we bought a RH license and a HP server to run it on. everything was on the HCL.
installing RH was easy. but when i tried to configure the robot it never worked. for some reason it wouldn't see the SATA HBA we bought even though it had RH drivers. and installing updated drivers was a PITA due to dependencies for other files to be some version.
after 2 weeks i gave up and installed Windows 2003. it took approximately 4 hours to get up an running to start the first test backup.
played with Ubuntu as well and gave up. installing some things was a big PITA and it wasn't better than Windows
August 23, 2010 at 11:41 am
alen teplitsky (8/20/2010)
been building on and off since the 1990's but it's not really fun anymore with everything being integrated and things like the computer being quiet being more important than a little faster. might just do it anyway. my first build had a Nvidia Riva TNT 2, Voodoo 2, a modem card, NIC and i forgot what else. i think all the PCI slots were full. these days it's just a graphics card and the slots are useless.
No offense, but I could not disagree with you more. I build gaming machines for my lan parties and i just disable all the onboard stuff and then fill up all the slots. Back in the 90s there were plenty of pc makers out there that put everything on the board. Packard Bell was notorious for having basically non-upgradable PCs.
There's about a million times more options now for modding your machine than there was in the 90s. If you get into overclocking your machine you have a ton of options. There's $250 lan cards, liquid cooling, just about any fan configuration you can think up. The case options out there are staggering. If you enjoy tweaking your machine for speed, now is a great time to get into it.
If you do the research, then you'll see that there are a ton of ways that you can tweak your machine for speed without regard for noise. I have a Tornado fan that's as loud as a vaccum cleaner, but moves about the same amount of air. I don't even use it because it's just too freakin loud.
Not sure how building them in the 90s would be remotely as fun as building a rig today.
August 23, 2010 at 12:20 pm
first PC was a cheapo AST with everything integrated. it used to play Wing Commander Privateer so slow i thought it was normal until i played it on a real computer.
my first build i didn't know what i was doing and took me 2 weeks or so to get everything working. i had 2 video cards, a SCSI zip drive, sound blaster card with the CD-ROM on it and i forgot what else. a year later i built a dual celeron system which was pretty cool since the first generation of celerons intel forgot to disable the SMP pins. and i ran windows NT on it for a little while. it was pretty quick ripping CD's from everyone in my barracks. these days plug an play is so good everything just works.
also built a few other PC's at work in those days until i started buying HP and it was less of a hassle
back then i believed the nonsense and used to buy new video cards when they first came out. after the Nvidia Geforce Ti 4600 i got tired of paying $400 for a graphics card and it would useless for 18 months because games wouldn't support the new features. the last system i built was around 5 years ago and it had an Athlon 64. didn't even bother for a dual core since nothing supported it. i junked it earlier this year when i moved and my wife would complain how the fan would start up just by being on the internet. that last build everything was on the motherboard. the sound, NIC, etc. i had a PCIe graphics card and a firewire card i would install sometimes. these days most cheapo PC's come with firewire.
If i build another PC the only card that's not integrated is going to be the graphics. ive asked around on anandtech and people gave advice how to make it quiet. iMac is the same price as building my own which is why i don't know if i'm going to bother with it. the reason i've always built my own was for the good graphics, but i don't feel like paying a premium to ATI/Nvidia anymore for power i probably won't use. and i don't care if some game runs at 200fps since anything over 60fps i probably won't notice a difference unless i play in competitions.
and these days it seems like there is a special DIY industry just to suck money from the build yourself market. super duper RAM, super duper efficient power supplies, all kinds of fans, thermal grease and other products. one tip i got on anandtech was to look up the UL number of some things like the power supplies to see if i can get the brand x model cheaper. reason is that companies like thermaltake are nothing more than brand companies that buy up the same stuff from china that Dell/HP uses and just push their brand like Monster Cables do
one thing i've noticed is that some software like Flash seems to like hyper threading. i have a new core i5 laptop at work and it runs non video flash content very well, along with my P4 desktop at work. the Centrino duo laptop i used to have along with my Athlon would start up the fans when running non-video flash content
October 1, 2010 at 4:14 pm
liebesiech (8/17/2010)
Using a SSD is a really smart idea! Thanks for that!!:satisfied:
You're belated welcome. 😎
There's a new SSD coming out that I'd like to have from OCZ (unless of course a better one comes
along before I buy!). It's 120 GB for only $185 retail . :w00t: It's also faster than its predecessor and has TRIM support.
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking
December 7, 2010 at 10:04 am
Finally it was time, i just ordered a new PC! 'Can't wait! It's been 8 or 9 years since I've bought one.
Here are some of the highlights:
AMD 6 core processor
120 GB SSD
Windows 7 64 bit
1 GB video card
8 GB DDR3 RAM (4GB X 2)
650 Watt power supply
I say,
Let the geekfest begin!
:w00t:
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking
December 7, 2010 at 10:24 am
nice! I love my quad core, 8GB desktop. Be interested to see where you Windows Experience Index comes in. Mine is 4.6
December 7, 2010 at 10:28 am
I still have a Compaq Portable 😛
December 7, 2010 at 11:45 am
Steve Jones - SSC Editor (12/7/2010)
nice! I love my quad core, 8GB desktop. Be interested to see where you Windows Experience Index comes in. Mine is 4.6
Interesting, I'll definitely check that out Steve. I didn't even know what a Windows Experience Index was, but now I do. Unless the SSD makes an significant impact, I doubt there will be much difference. But I did upgrade the mother board a notch (paid an extra $30 for it) and my CPU speed is 3.0 Ghz (paid a little extra for that too).
The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking
December 7, 2010 at 12:16 pm
i've been thinking about it and i think i'm done with desktops. my wife has been bugging me for a Mac, but i don't really want to spend a lot of money on a "computer" anymore since we do so much of our computing on iphones now. and i don't want to have another computer corner. i've thought about a Mac just so my kids can learn UNIX from a young age, but i don't like what Apple has been doing with OS X lately. my wife asked about a MacBook but i said there is no way i'm buying a laptop with a 13" screen for $1000.
my shopping list for 2011 is a laptop in the $700 range once Sandy Bridge comes out. not sure when i'm going to buy. an iPad once the next version comes out in March or so.
the laptop will be to hold the data and for my wife to do photos. and to play some strategy games i still play.
iPad will be for me to use daily to read and to teach my oldest son to read. the App Store has a lot of educational apps. my wife wanted to get the leapfrog and the other crap where you spend $40 for the robot or some kiddie electronic book and then $20 for the add on cartridges or paper cards. i told her once you add up all this money you might as well buy an iPad. and if i need to VPN into work at night i can use the iPad to do it as well and it's faster than turning on my laptop and waiting for it to boot, log on, etc
for 3d games we have a PS3 and X-Box 360 with Kinect. laptop will be for Civ 5 and Total War games i play once in a while
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