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#21
September 15th 04, 09:30 PM
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-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1 In article .com, Yousuf Khan wrote: Scott Alfter wrote: Toward that end, I have an IBM PC/XT at home... Oh, you mean to say, you still have a working XT? :-) Yes...and a working TRS-80 Color Computer 2, and a working VIC-20, and a working TI-99/4A, and four working Apple IIs (two IIGSes, a IIe, and a II+). I should open a museum. :-) (The IIe and II+ run 24/7 as temperature controllers for my beer, too. A IIGS serves as the development system for the software running on those systems. The rest are packed up, but it'd be nice to have a way to just sit down and use any of them.) _/_ / v \ Scott Alfter (remove the obvious to send mail) (IIGS( http://alfter.us/ Top-posting! \_^_/ rm -rf /bin/laden What's the most annoying thing on Usenet? -----BEGIN PGP SIGNATURE----- Version: GnuPG v1.2.4 (Linux) iD8DBQFBSKZeVgTKos01OwkRAkJQAJ9Z4FrKaWgRBSdajpIcaQ RWKsdBTwCdH3kg QlYlvwaTuEY0prb6B5vjlHA= =HW72 -----END PGP SIGNATURE----- 
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#23
September 16th 04, 09:08 PM
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"No spam" wrote...
So I want the "straight poop" about the AMD 64 FX models. And is there any new AMD 64 FX chip coming in the fourth quarter 2004? The FX-53 is essentially the single-processor version of the Opteron 250 -- same core, but not dual-CPU capable; 939 pins instead of 940. Any thoughts on the best place to order custom built High performance PCs? I can't stand the newer all integrated systems. I do not want integrated Graphics, sound, NIC, ect. NTSI in Boston -- www.ntsi.com. They built my dual Opteron workstation. Their "configurator" will give you an idea of what they have, but it is incomplete. Also, they will quote you a system price for a custom-built system that is significantly less than the sum of the components. After looking through the web site, give them a call or drop them an e-mail with your requirements.
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#24
September 16th 04, 09:42 PM
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In comp.sys.ibm.pc.hardware.chips Yousuf Khan wrote:
Lachoneus wrote: You'd think the 3MB/sec 8-bit ISA bus would be a bottleneck for a GPU that fast, though... maybe I should splurge for the 5900 AT with the 16-bit bus. You know that GPU by itself could probably emulate an 8088 at better than full-speed. :-) Can GPUs actually handle at any decent speed the branches needed for emulation? -- Nate Edel http://www.nkedel.com/ "I do have a cause though. It is obscenity. I'm for it." - Tom Lehrer
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#25
September 17th 04, 04:58 AM
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#26
September 24th 04, 02:46 AM
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Yousuf Khan wrote:
No spam wrote: Hello everyone. I am looking to buy a new desktop PC. I currently have a Compaq Pentium 3 733 MHz desktop and a Dell 2.0 GHz Celeron laptop. I have always been a fan of Intel... mainly because when I got into computers there was no AMD. My first IBM based PC was an 8088 with 640k RAM and a 21 megabyte hard drive. Well hi, and welcome to the 21st Century, Rip Van Winkle. :-) A lot of the rest of us in these newsgroups started on those 8088 PC clones ourselves, and we didn't seem to have much trouble accepting AMD as a credible alternative. Actually, AMD has been making Intel compatible chips for as long as Intel has been making them. Initially it was making them with the complete permission and support of Intel -- AMD was Intel's official second source right from the days of the original IBM PC. And then later it was making them without so much permission and support. :-) I think the first time I'd heard of AMD was when I was shopping for a cheap 287 coprocessor to fit to my 386DX CPU. (Yes, 386's could also be fitted to 287's rather than 387's.) Then later I found out that AMD not only made coprocessors but also direct clones of the processors. This was around 1988 or thereabouts. The first time I had any knowledge of an AMD product was around 1996. Because (and I might be remembering this incorrect ...) but as I remember a good friend of mine had a K5 processor and I remember he had all kinds of problems with Windows 95. MANY MANY more Windows 95 problems than I had on my 80486 SX 25... Or did I have the Packard Hell Pentium (Classic) 100 MHz by then... Lol... I don't remember. The K5 was not AMD's most successful design, not by a long shot. It was AMD's first attempt its own original design. It's previous processors were much more successful (the 386, 486, and 5x86), and it's later processors were much more successful (K6, Athlon, and Athlon 64). So yes, you could call the K5 to be AMD's lowest valley. Prior to the K5, AMD's designs were all direct copies transistor-for-transistor copies of Intel's processors -- since AMD had been Intel's second source for years prior to that. At around the time of the 386 were when AMD and Intel started having their first feuds; Intel no longer wanted to have AMD as its second source, while AMD insisted that they had a binding contract for just that. The court battle eventually came down to an agreement that AMD would stop cloning Intel's chips as of the end of the 486. So K5 was AMD's attempt to engineer a Pentium-workalike, but with their own original design inside. The K5 didn't succeed, but AMD's second attempt was the K6, not really - that was NextGen's attempt - the NX686. The successor to the NX586 (the first RISC-core x86 chip made) which competed with the pentium I. AMD bought NexGen - and simply re-packaged the NX686 and named it k-6. So the k-5 was the only AMD designed chip until the Athlon showed up in 1999 three years later. which was also a Pentium-workalike, and it also fit into the Pentium socket. This was much more successful, and it in fact extended the Pentium infrastructure beyond the Pentium, beyond what Intel had imagined for that infrastructure. The K6 was competing against the Pentium II's and III's, which were on their next-generation infrastructure. competed with - but really fell between the pentuim I and II in speed. FPU was never of the quality of even the pentium I. In fact IDT's-Centuar's Winchip II FPU outperformed the k-6 of equal clock in programs optimized for the pentium I. AMD's next design, the Athlon, was (and is to this day) their most successful original design ever; thanks to its phenominal x87 FPU. - Which AMD learned the hard way with their anemic k-6's FPU. -- http://baltimorechronicle.com/041704reTreason.shtml http://www.truthinaction.net/iraq/illegaljayne.htm As nightfall does not come all at once, neither does oppression. In both instances, there is a twilight when everything remains seemingly unchanged. And it is in such twilight that we all must be aware of change in the air -- however slight -lest we become unwitting victims of the darkness. Justice William O. Douglas, US Supreme Court (1939-75) "It shows us that there were senior people in the Bush administration who were seriously contemplating the use of torture, and trying to figure out whether there were any legal loopholes that might allow them to commit criminal acts, They seem to be putting forward a theory that the president in wartime can essentially do what he wants regardless of what the law may say," Tom Malinowski of Human Rights Watch - commenting upon Defense Department Lawyer Will Dunham's 56-page legalization of torture memo. If you add all of those up, you should have a conservative rebellion against the giant corporation in the White House masquerading as a human being named George W. Bush. Just as progressives have been abandoned by the corporate Democrats and told, "You got nowhere to go other than to stay home or vote for the Democrats", this is the fate of the authentic conservatives in the Republican Party. Ralph Nader - June 2004 - The American Conservative Magazine "But I believe in torture and I will torture you." -An American soldier shares the joys of Democracy with an Iraqi prisoner. "My mother praises me for fighting the Americans. If we are killed, our wives and mothers will rejoice that we died defending the freedom of our country. -Iraqi Mahdi fighter "We were bleeding from 3 a.m. until sunrise, soon American soldiers came. One of them kicked me to see if I was alive. I pretended I was dead so he wouldn't kill me. The soldier was laughing, when Yousef cried, the soldier said: "'No, stop," -Shihab, survivor of USSA bombing of Iraqi wedding. "the absolute convergence of the neoconservatives with the Christian Zionists and the pro-Israel lobby, driving U.S. Mideast policy." -Don Wagner, an evangelical South Carolina minister "Bush, in Austin, criticized President Clinton's administration for the Kosovo military action.'Victory means exit strategy, and it's important for the president to explain to us what the exit strategy is,' Bush said." Houston Chronicle 4/9/99 "Iraqis are sick of foreign people coming in their country and trying to destabilize their country." Washington, D.C., May 5, 2004 "The new administration seems to be paying no attention to the problem of terrorism. What they will do is stagger along until there's a major incident and then suddenly say, 'Oh my God, shouldn't we be organized to deal with this?'" - Paul Bremer, speaking to a McCormick Tribune Foundation conference on terrorism in Wheaton, Ill. on Feb. 26, 2001. "On Jan. 26, 1998, President Clinton received a letter imploring him to use his State of the Union address to make removal of Saddam Hussein's regime the "aim of American foreign policy" and to use military action because "diplomacy is failing." Were Clinton to do that, the signers pledged, they would "offer our full support in this difficult but necessary endeavor." Signing the pledge were Elliott Abrams, Bill Bennett, John Bolton, Robert Kagan, William Kristol, Richard Perle, Richard L. Armitage, Jeffrey Bergner, Paula Dobriansky, Francis Fukuyama, Zalmay Khalilzad, Peter W. Rodman, William Schneider, Jr., Vin Weber, R. James Woolsey and Robert B. Zoellick, Donald Rumsfeld and Paul Wolfowitz. Four years before 9/11, the neocons had Baghdad on their minds." -philip (usenet) "I had better things to do in the 60s than fight in Vietnam," -Richard Cheney, Kerry critic. "I hope they will understand that in order for this government to get up and running - to be effective - some of its sovereignty will have to be given back, if I can put it that way, or limited by them, It's sovereignty but [some] of that sovereignty they are going to allow us to exercise on their behalf and with their permission." - Powell 4/27/04 "We're trying to explain how things are going, and they are going as they are going," he said, adding: "Some things are going well and some things obviously are not going well. You're going to have good days and bad days." On the road to democracy, this "is one moment, and there will be other moments. And there will be good moments and there will be less good moments." - Rumsfeld 4/6/04 "I also have this belief, strong belief, that freedom is not this country's gift to the world; freedom is the Almighty's gift to every man and woman in this world. And as the greatest power on the face of the Earth, we have an obligation to help the spread of freedom." ~ Bush the Crusader RUSSERT: Are you prepared to lose? BUSH: No, I'm not going to lose. RUSSERT: If you did, what would you do? BUSH: Well, I don't plan on losing. I've got a vision for what I want to do for the country. See, I know exactly where I want to lead.................And we got changing times here in America, too., 2/8/04 "And that's very important for, I think, the people to understand where I'm coming from, to know that this is a dangerous world. I wish it wasn't. I'm a war president. I make decisions here in the Oval Office in foreign policy matters with war on my mind. - pResident of the United State of America, 2/8/04 "Let's talk about the nuclear proposition for a minute. We know that based on intelligence, that he has been very, very good at hiding these kinds of efforts. He's had years to get good at it and we know he has been absolutely devoted to trying to acquire nuclear weapons. And we believe he has, in fact, reconstituted nuclear weapons." - Vice President Dick Cheney, on "Meet the Press", 3/16/03 "I don't know anybody that I can think of who has contended that the Iraqis had nuclear weapons." - Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, 6/24/03 "I think in this case international law stood in the way of doing the right thing (invading Iraq)." - Richard Perle "He (Saddam Hussein) has not developed any significant capability with respect to weapons of mass destruction. He is unable to project conventional power against his neighbours." - Colin Powell February 24 2001 "We have been successful for the last ten years in keeping him from developing those weapons and we will continue to be successful." "He threatens not the United States." "But I also thought that we had pretty much removed his stings and frankly for ten years we really have." 'But what is interesting is that with the regime that has been in place for the past ten years, I think a pretty good job has been done of keeping him from breaking out and suddenly showing up one day and saying "look what I got." He hasn't been able to do that.' - Colin Powell February 26 2001
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#27
September 24th 04, 05:47 AM
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gaffo wrote:
big snip Boy, you really didn't have to quote so much of my original message. I know it's worth quoting, but really .... :-) The K5 was not AMD's most successful design, not by a long shot. It was AMD's first attempt its own original design. It's previous processors were much more successful (the 386, 486, and 5x86), and it's later processors were much more successful (K6, Athlon, and Athlon 64). So yes, you could call the K5 to be AMD's lowest valley. Prior to the K5, AMD's designs were all direct copies transistor-for-transistor copies of Intel's processors -- since AMD had been Intel's second source for years prior to that. At around the time of the 386 were when AMD and Intel started having their first feuds; Intel no longer wanted to have AMD as its second source, while AMD insisted that they had a binding contract for just that. The court battle eventually came down to an agreement that AMD would stop cloning Intel's chips as of the end of the 486. So K5 was AMD's attempt to engineer a Pentium-workalike, but with their own original design inside. The K5 didn't succeed, but AMD's second attempt was the K6, not really - that was NextGen's attempt - the NX686. The successor to the NX586 (the first RISC-core x86 chip made) which competed with the pentium I. Well, NexGen was bought because of their NX686/K6 design. By the time it was released, NexGen was already a part of AMD for a year or so. AMD was simultaneously developing the K6 alongside the K5. Also originally NexGen was planning on a completely separate socket layout for the NX686, but when they were brought into AMD, they changed it to be Socket 7 compatible. So the k-5 was the only AMD designed chip until the Athlon showed up in 1999 three years later. NexGen was already integrated into AMD well before the chip was released. which was also a Pentium-workalike, and it also fit into the Pentium socket. This was much more successful, and it in fact extended the Pentium infrastructure beyond the Pentium, beyond what Intel had imagined for that infrastructure. The K6 was competing against the Pentium II's and III's, which were on their next-generation infrastructure. competed with - but really fell between the pentuim I and II in speed. FPU was never of the quality of even the pentium I. In fact IDT's-Centuar's Winchip II FPU outperformed the k-6 of equal clock in programs optimized for the pentium I. I don't think that's quite an "in fact". The K6 had probably the best performing FPU after the Pentium's. The weakest around at that time was Cyrix's, while the IDT barely even reached the same Mhz levels as either Pentiums or K6's. If you're talking about FPU perf/Mhz ratio, then maybe it's possible, but they never even reached any sort of competitive Mhz level. AMD's next design, the Athlon, was (and is to this day) their most successful original design ever; thanks to its phenominal x87 FPU. - Which AMD learned the hard way with their anemic k-6's FPU. I wasn't measuring success by the performance of the FPU. I was measuring it with the longevity of the design. The K6 lasted a long, long time. Probably about 4 years. And the K7 Athlons are still with us to this day, they started life out in 1999 as a Slot-A Athlon Classic, evolved into Socket-A Thunderbird Athlons, Durons, Athlon XP's, Athlon 4's, Athlon MP's, and now Geode NX, and Sempron almost 5 years later. Yousuf Khan
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#28
September 24th 04, 09:17 AM
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On Fri, 24 Sep 2004 01:46:34 GMT, gaffo wrote:
Yousuf Khan wrote: The K5 was not AMD's most successful design, not by a long shot. It was AMD's first attempt its own original design. It's previous processors were much more successful (the 386, 486, and 5x86), and it's later processors were much more successful (K6, Athlon, and Athlon 64). So yes, you could call the K5 to be AMD's lowest valley. Prior to the K5, AMD's designs were all direct copies transistor-for-transistor copies of Intel's processors -- since AMD had been Intel's second source for years prior to that. At around the time of the 386 were when AMD and Intel started having their first feuds; Intel no longer wanted to have AMD as its second source, while AMD insisted that they had a binding contract for just that. The court battle eventually came down to an agreement that AMD would stop cloning Intel's chips as of the end of the 486. So K5 was AMD's attempt to engineer a Pentium-workalike, but with their own original design inside. The K5 didn't succeed, but AMD's second attempt was the K6, not really - that was NextGen's attempt - the NX686. The successor to the NX586 (the first RISC-core x86 chip made) which competed with the pentium I. AMD bought NexGen - and simply re-packaged the NX686 and named it k-6. Well considering AMD bought the company, that kind of makes it an AMD design. After all, it's not like the NX686 ever existed as a real product, nor did the company NexGen exist as a separate entity when the processor came out. Also, there was a bit more than just re-packaging it. At the very least the bus interface was completely redesigned. the FPU integrated and they added MMX support. So the k-5 was the only AMD designed chip until the Athlon showed up in 1999 three years later. The Am5x86 was, at least according to some definitions, an original AMD design. Of course, it may have borrowed somewhat heavily from AMD's previous Am486 chip which was a copy of Intel's i486. which was also a Pentium-workalike, and it also fit into the Pentium socket. This was much more successful, and it in fact extended the Pentium infrastructure beyond the Pentium, beyond what Intel had imagined for that infrastructure. The K6 was competing against the Pentium II's and III's, which were on their next-generation infrastructure. competed with - but really fell between the pentuim I and II in speed. FPU was never of the quality of even the pentium I. Not quite, but it wasn't that far off in most cases. Of course, when compared to the PPro/PII chips, pretty much everything in x86-land else kind of stank when it came to FPU stuff. The difference between the K6 and the Pentium was FAR smaller than the difference between the Pentium and the PII. In fact IDT's-Centuar's Winchip II FPU outperformed the k-6 of equal clock in programs optimized for the pentium I. In some situations yes, though it did so 2-3 years later. On the other hand, the Winchip line of processor was (and still is as VIA processors) an in-order design that had it's share of downfalls. AMD's next design, the Athlon, was (and is to this day) their most successful original design ever; thanks to its phenominal x87 FPU. - Which AMD learned the hard way with their anemic k-6's FPU. It wasn't all THAT anemic. In fact, as much as anything else it was the socket 7 bus that it sat on which was anemic, the memory subsystem pretty much stank. FPU work tends to put a very high stress on the memory subsystem, and if that isn't up to par, even a top-notch FPU is going to look rather poor. As it was, AMD was probably smart not to invest too much into the FPU of the K6 as it really just wouldn't have been able to do much with it anyway. Delaying the chip by 6 months to a year and increasing the cost would have had a much more detrimental impact on the chips sales than a slightly slower FPU. ------------- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca
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#29
November 7th 04, 10:09 PM
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Tony - Great post. One to save I think. Cheers.
Bobby "Tony Hill" wrote in message ... On 12 Sep 2004 19:08:38 -0700, (No spam) wrote: Hello everyone. I am looking to buy a new desktop PC. I currently have a Compaq Pentium 3 733 MHz desktop and a Dell 2.0 GHz Celeron laptop. I have always been a fan of Intel... mainly because when I got into computers there was no AMD. My first IBM based PC was an 8088 with 640k RAM and a 21 megabyte hard drive. Believe it or not, AMD was around at that time to. AMD first got the contract to make x86 chips as a second source for Intel as part of IBM's agreement to use the 8088 on the original PC. The first time I had any knowledge of an AMD product was around 1996. Because (and I might be remembering this incorrect ...) but as I remember a good friend of mine had a K5 processor and I remember he had all kinds of problems with Windows 95. MANY MANY more Windows 95 problems than I had on my 80486 SX 25... Or did I have the Packard Hell Pentium (Classic) 100 MHz by then... Lol... I don't remember. Computer problems are almost never caused by the processor, but rather by all the accompanied hardware. The problem that AMD (and Cyrix) ran into was that their processors were cheaper than Intel's chips and tended to be used alongside cheap components. Take a piece of **** power supply, motherboard, video card, etc. and you will have problems, no matter what processor you use. The K5 exasperated this issue by being, umm.. somewhat of a weak design. It was one of AMD's first attempts at doing a ground-up redesign of the processor (most previous chips had been strongly based on, or often direct copies of, Intel's designs). The design itself wasn't so bad, though a bit late. However when combined with the terrible manufacturing problems that AMD had at that time it ended up being WAY late to market and underperforming. The chip ended up only having about a 1 year lifespan before the MUCH more successful K6 came out. So as time went on I always stuck with Intel. I went from P classic to PMMX to PIII to the latest which is the Celeron laptop. Now I am looking to buy a new desktop and I am looking for the best new technology. I am very interested in 64 bit technology. I know Intel has had Itanium and Itanium II but as I understand it those are not for consumers. You can safely ignore the Itanium line, it's definitely NOT what you're going to be looking for. First off, it's not software compatible with existing applications, requiring emulation to run all your current code. What's probably more important though is that you'll have a heck of a time finding an Itanium system for less than $20,000. So I want the "straight poop" about the AMD 64 FX models. And is there any new AMD 64 FX chip coming in the fourth quarter 2004? Yup, the FX 55. This chip will fit into the relatively new Socket 939 and is basically identical to the Athlon64 FX 53. Of course, you probably don't want an Athlon64 FX unless you've got more money than is good for you. The regular Athlon64 line is nearly identical but selling for much more reasonable prices. An Athlon64 3500+ sells for about $375 and offers better than 90% of the performance of the $850 Athlon64 FX 53. The only difference is that the latter comes with a bit more cache (1MB vs. 512KB) and higher clock speeds (2.4GHz vs. 2.2GHz). So, sticking to the Athlon64 line of processors, you get a few options. First off you've got two basic platforms, Socket 754 and Socket 939. The primary difference been that the older Socket 754 has only a single channel to memory while the newer Socket 939 has a pair of memory channels (ie you add memory in pairs, much like you probably did back on your old Pentium 100). Having twice as much memory bandwidth results in more performance. For comparison, AMD sells a 2.2GHz processor with 512KB of L2 cache in a Socket 754 format as an "Athlon64 3200+", while they rate an identical processor in Socket 939 as an "Athlon64 3500+". One thing you may have noticed is that AMD is not using clock speeds here, but rather model numbers. This is something that Intel has just started doing as well, and it makes a reasonable among of sense since clock speed is a VERY limited measure of performance. Things like the memory subsystem and cache can have a noticeable effect on performance even within a single line of processors, while the internal architecture of the chip can have a HUGE effect when compared to another chip. AMD's model numbers suggest a rough equivalent to Intel's P4 line of processors, ie an Athlon64 3200+ will perform about on-par with Intel's P4 3.2GHz processor (generally speaking AMD is actually a bit conservative with their ratings and they are usually faster than the "equivalent" Intel processors). So... where does this leave us? Well as far as the whole 64-bit thing goes, there's not that much to say at the moment. Microsoft, as usual, is taking forever to get their operating system to market. WinXP 64-bit for AMD64 (aka "x86-64", or "X64" in Microsoft-speak or "EM64T" according to Intel, all the same thing, just different names) has been delayed about 17 times already and probably won't actually be available until Spring of next year. In Linux land, there has been pretty solid support for AMD64 for at least a year now and basically all distributions support it fairly well now. What does a 64-bit operating system buy you? Well, beyond the bragging rights at geek gatherings, it allows for two keep points. First it allows you to properly access more than ~2GB of memory. 32-bit CPUs max out at addressing 4GB of memory, but due to a variety of limitations, in practice things quickly get really ugly as soon as you go beyond about 2GB. Even using more than 1GB of physical memory starts requiring some hacks to work right on 32-bit chips. On the other hand, a 64-bit chip can properly address MANY terabytes of memory, good enough for a few years at least! The second thing that 64-bit x86 buys you is a bit of performance. Despite popular belief, 64-bit code is usually SLOWER than 32-bit code if all else were equal (twice as much data to be tossed around in memory pointers, requires twice as much cache space and memory bandwidth), however in the case of AMD64 all is not equal. AMD took a good look at the x86 instruction set and did some very smart tweaks to it. They streamlined a few operations and, most importantly, doubled the number of integer registers. The result is that with AMD64, AMD managed to actually increase performance by about 5% on average when going from 32-bit to 64-bit. Some applications might be a bit slower, and a few applications could be a LOT faster in 64-bit code, but generally you're looking at about a 5% performance improvement on 64-bit code. Note much, but hey, it's free! Also can anyone explain the Intel roadmap for a consumer 64 bit CPU? Actually that's a good question, even Intel doesn't seem to know what their roadmap for consumer 64-bit CPUs is! About the only thing that is known so far is that Intel's Xeon processors (x86 server chips) have copied the AMD64 instruction set (Intel calls it "EM64T", but it's really AMD64). The latest and greatest desktop Pentium4 chips also support EM64T in hardware, however Intel has decided that consumers aren't ready for this and has disabled this feature. In theory Intel could start selling 64-bit desktop chips tomorrow, but thus far they have shown no interest in doing so. Any thoughts on the best place to order custom built High performance PCs? I can't stand the newer all integrated systems. I do not want integrated Graphics, sound, NIC, ect. Integrated NICs are pretty much standard and, honestly, there's no good reason to get a PCI NIC these days. In many situations add-in NIC cards actually offer LESS performance than integrated ones since integrated ones have a direct path to the chipset while add-in NICs have to go over the (comparatively slow) PCI bus. Even integrated sound can be quite reasonable, and given that about the only add-in sound cards you can buy are Creative Labs trash, many people stick to the integrated sound. Graphics is a slightly different game. Integrated graphics have improved TERMENDOUSLY over the past 5 years, and for 2D stuff they are every bit as good as an add-in card, but for 3D games they are still quite weak. Most PCs targeting business users stick with integrated graphics for good reason, for business type uses they are just as good and a lot cheaper. If you're main purpose is to play games though, get a decent add-in card. I was looking at Alienware. Are there other sites as well? I have to say those Alienware systems always look damn cool. I think you'll find that most of us in these newsgroups tend to build our own systems from parts, so we're probably not the best people to ask. However, if you like Alienware systems you might also want to check out www.voodoopc.com, nice stuff, though not cheap. HPaq also sells some Athlon64 based systems in both their HP Pavilion and Compaq Presario lines, though the quality of such systems might leave a bit to be desired. You can also get some "barebones" systems from most computer stores and add in whatever components you like. Most stores even have an option to have them build the system for you, installing the hardware and OS for a small cost. Shuttle has made a bit of a name for themselves selling small form factor barebones systems, fitting some pretty high-end components into very small enclosures. Others have followed, including some doing full-sized barebones systems. The only trick with these systems is that you need to know a bit more about what components you want. Wewf... hope that wasn't too wordy for you! ------------- Tony Hill hilla underscore 20 at yahoo dot ca
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#30
November 8th 04, 03:13 PM
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Good article! You should save a copy (or at least the article's
Message-ID / Reference number) in case you ever want to say all that again, or point people to the article.  -WBE
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