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Topic: Buying New Computer
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-16-2004 11:28 PM
William, if you can stand to wait several months I would very strongly recommend it --especially if you are looking to buy a high end PC. By the late half of this year the hardware in PCs will be very different. Don't worry about any of the following if you just want to buy a low cost system:
PCI Express
This may be the biggest hardware development of the year because it will make so many other things possible. The old, slow PCI standard will be replaced by this new 2-way, packeted standard which will allow expansion cards direct 2-way use of CPU and memory without having to share the same, single bus. The AGP 8X graphics card standard will be replaced by a "16-lane" 164-pin PCI-X slot that pumps 4GB of data per second, twice the bandwidth of AGP 8X's 2.1GB max. We'll finally see things like true Gigabit Ethernet and RAID discs will be able to yield big performance gains without dealing with that 133MB/sec bottleneck. PCI-X will also have external hot-plug device standards, which could make for some radical changes in how computer cases are designed.
Serial ATA II
The Serial ATA I standard has a 150MB/sec burst rate capability. By the later part of the year SATA II drives with 300MB/sec burst rates will appear. Also by that time the new 10,000 rpm SATA drives now being introduced will be more affordable. That will be great for those wanting to do SATA RAID.
Better graphics cards
Over the past two years we have been seeing only incremental gains from the cards of ATI and nVidia while prices stayed high. With the new PCI-X-16 slot coming the competition might get interesting and more price competitive again. And we'll need all that extra power just to be able to play "Doom III" at a respectable frame rate.
Faster Memory
Companies like Micron have been pumping up DDR2 memory production in single modules of up to 4GB in size. Right now the main or only place where you'll find DDR2 memory is in a top-end video card. PC2-4300 and faster DDR2 memory should become common as system memory for desktops pretty soon.
Firewire 800
The newest version of Firewire will become widespread. Apple is the only big computer maker currently offering Firewire 800 ports on new machines. You can buy Firewire 800 PCI cards for Windows PCs, but you can't get such ports built onto the front side of a new Dell. That should change soon.
IEEE 802.16 "Wimax"
While we're waiting on Cable and DSL standards to improve, this new wireless broadband standard being readied has the potential to kill off both. Imagine having up to 100Mb/sec via a wireless access point from up to 30 miles away! Service providers could strategically install a few towers to cover expansive areas and give users the capability of streaming HD-quality video. Depending on how fast this standard is introduced, it could really steal the thunder of ADSL-2 and ADSL-2+.
Of course, there's lots of other stuff in the pipeline besides the stuff I mentioned.
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Bobby Henderson
"Ask me about Trajan."
Posts: 10973
From: Lawton, OK, USA
Registered: Apr 2001
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posted 01-18-2004 01:55 PM
In general, it is wise to avoid buying any computer sold at a retail store, be it a Sony VAIO, HP/Compaq or any number of other brands. The huge amount of JUNK SOFTWARE loaded into these machines brings about all kinds of problems from a totally cluttered system registry. And there's no real way to get rid of it either. When doing a system restore on the average Compaq box you'll get all that shitbag software loaded on there again!
That's one of the advantages of buying a Dell or Gateway system. You can actually get a system without all kinds of spam/shit software loaded into the thing. My father has a Compaq machine bought at CompUSA that has given him nothing but trouble. Each time the thing broke down he had to box it up and take it to the store. My 3-year old Dell machine has had few troubles. I had a hard drive fail once, but Dell sent a tech-serivce guy to my house to swap it out free of charge. Better customer service.
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I have never experienced dropped frames even in the old days when I would use only one drive.
I don't know how the Macs manage good video capture using one physical hard disc. Even with that being said, I've seen plenty of posts in various DV forums recommending the use of a separate drive for video capture and print-to-tape even when using a Mac.
Video capture on single drives just doesn't work worth a popcorn fart on Windows machines. The way Windows runs its virtual memory scheme the OS is constantly screwing around with the hard disc. One would think that if you maxed out a PC main board with 1GB or 2GB of RAM that virtual memory hits to the hard disc would be unneccesary. Of course virtual memory is just one of many processes running in the background as soon as any PC finishes its boot cycle.
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Sure, but hasn`t (the situation with PCs constantly changing) been like that for the past 20 years?
Sure, the guts inside of computers constantly change. That's the way of any digital technology. Moore's Law of CPU changes is still holding up for now. We may see 4GHz Intel CPUs by year's end (if not sooner).
However, some changes happen faster than others. While CPUs and video cards have improved dramatically many other parts of PCs have been painfully slow to change. In recent years RAM has finally seen good improvements. The PCI bus has not changed very much at all in the past 10 years, just an incremental jump from 32-bit 60MHz/66MHz to 32-bit/64-bit 133MHz now. The PCI bus is the worst bottleneck in computers today. PCI Express will relieve a great deal of that bottleneck. Hard disc drives are another source of bottleneck. After years and years of vaporware talk, Serial ATA is finally getting established and the Serial ATA II standard combined with PCI-X will bring out much faster machines.
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