Urgent!! the old question

[spickee]

My wife is about to buy a new system for work.

The choices

Athlon 1Ghz
128Mb
20Gb
16Mb TNT
the rest is standard stuff software etc

PIII 933
128Mb
60Gb
32Mb TNT
The usual but less software

The PIII is about £150 more expensive.

She will use it mainly for powerpoint, flash, photoshop

I'll us it for games heh heh!

Which would you go for and why?

Cheers

Spickee

[MadMatt]

Go with the Athlon. Make sure you get a T-bird chip. Considering you want to use Photoshop you might want to think about getting 256mb (could always add later I guess) and you should try for a Geforce 2 card - that TNT is really going to hold the Athlon back, both in gaming and graphics apps.

[NDC]

Well, if you are planning to run Photoshop and other graphics application, I'd say go with the Intel Pentium Chips. If not, I'd say to go the AMD Athlon. We got a few brand new AMD Athlon 900Mhz, 384MB, IDE-7,200rpm at work and it runs slower than the Intel chip with the same system configuration on graphic applications. There was especially a very noticeable difference on Corel Draw, Illustrator, Photoshop, and Adobe Go Live.

As for graphics applications, if you aren't going to be running 3-D rendering programs such as 3-D MAX, Maya, etc., TNT2 with 32MB should be just fine. But if you are going to be running 3-D intensive games, I'd suggest what MADMATT said, get a GEForce2. You will see frame skips with TNT2 on heavy 3-D games. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

I don;t know how heavy your wife uses Photoshop, but 128mb just enough to run Win98 at a decent speed. I would recommend at least 256mb to run Photoshop at a comfortable speed.

I have 768mb on my graphics workstation and as soon as NT is loaded, the memory drops to 80% and drops another 40% working with Images in Photoshop that are the size of A4 paper in 32bit color mode. It really depends on what size your wife will doing most of her image work. Anyway you look at it, if the system will be mainly for your wife's Photoshop application, more ram is better. http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/smile.gif

[This message has been edited by NDC (edited 09-07-2000).]

[otheos]

For all kinds of reasons go with the AMD:

-Price
-Upgradability
-Performance (FPU and memory especially)
-Availability

not to mention ...

For graphics card, get a Matrox G400 (or 450 if available). By far the best 2D quality (the reason it is preferred by 2D proffesionals). The Gforce is money for nothing unless you are a serious gamer where it is a oneway.

good luck

[This message has been edited by otheos (edited 09-07-2000).]

[spickee]

Forgot the athlon is slot 1 so not a tbird, ungrading isn't looking good for it, but at 1ghz will I need to worry. Photoshop is used mostly for preping graphic for powerpoint and websites, so big stuff isn't too much of a problem. The athlon is in a packard bell. PIII is an Advent. So I don't hold out much hope for the mobos in either. The advent is easier to rip the mobo out of though.

More memory is on the shopping list though so we'll probably get another 128Mb.

Cheers so far

spickee

[MadMatt]

I thought Packard Bell was out of business...

[This message has been edited by MadMatt (edited 09-07-2000).]

[wing7788]

Obviously, the Athlon! The money you save for buying the Athlon can be used for upgrades on your AGP, hard disk capacity, etc.

Go! http://sysopt.earthweb.com/forum/redface.gif)