Rate My PC

[uncle_jimbo]

Rate my new PC from a scale of 1 to 10.

*1.8Ghz Pentium 4 "Northwood"
*Gigabyte GA-8SRX Motherboard
*256mb PC2100 (DDR266) RAM
*40Gb Wetern Digital Hard Drive
*64Mb nVidia GeForce4
*Windows XP

Please Be Honest.

- [UGC]Uncle_Jimbo

[rextex]

Gave you a 7.Because you're not using scsi.That's the mistake most people make.Blazing fast processor,but failure to communicate!

--p.s. I only have celeron and no scsi either, so your system blows mine away!

[uncle_jimbo]

No SCSI because it is quite expensive and according to Maximum PC its "days are numbered".

[rextex]

Agree it is expensive.Maybe I should've gave better rating.I rated from standpoint of "Ideal".The chip you have is that, and I wish I had that type of RAM.
If you Mod the case and get an extra stick of RAM and if the HDD is +7000 rpm ATA100+ I'll give you more!

[Tor]

It looks great! Better than mine.

P3 933 (Coppermine)
384 Meg Crucial pc133
30 GB hdd
32 meg ATI Rage Fury Pro (great for watching DVD on my TV since all I have is the DVD player on my computer.)
Not much else, works great for what I do with it. I may upgrade when prescott comes out.

T

[michaeln]

Looks good but more importantly, how does it run?

Most users (myself included) will rarely use more than about 10% of the system's capabilities.

I have 5 pc's running here ranging from an AMD 266 running at 300, three AMD 450's running at 500 (running Win98SE) and one Athlon 1300 running at 1300 (running Win XP Pro).

All 5 do the same job, the only difference being that the 1300 is faster.

[Fatal_Exception]

Two questions:

1. Is a score of 1 high or low?
2. Is something wrong with you computer that you need help fixing?

[$1500-P4 gamer]

Originally posted by uncle_jimbo
No SCSI because it is quite expensive and according to Maximum PC its "days are numbered".

Why are its days #?Last I checked IDE 7200rpm drives were failing left and right(mine died last week@ 6months old).The SCSI drives are faster than raid ide and are longer lasting.What are servers going to run now pray-tell?Ide,thats a joke.No high end server would be caught dead with IDE under the hood.

I'm really interested in why they said this.I cant see any reason to believe anything but the opposite.Other than reasons staited above I've seen them getting cheaper.That makes me believe that the SCSI market is getting stronger not weaker.As IDE is comeing up with more and more probs. and the speed barrier of IDE is getting closer.ATA133 is getting near the physical limits of the IDE ribbon itself.I would think that would push the industry into mainstreaming the SCSI lineup.


Does anyone have any info on this?

Anyhow I rate your system a 6.
I cant see a higher rateing than that as it is ddr and everybody knows the P4 chokes to death with that little of mem bandwidth.You are totaly throwing the fsb/mem balance out of wack.That is were rdram comes into play.The only justification for running ddr is extreeme overclocking.And I mean extreeme as I can get 120mhz fsb on rdram and if I set to 3x I can go the full 133mhz.If it were rdram I would give it a 8.If it were rdram and Asus mobo I would rate it a 9.Can't get a 10 from me unless you are runing the flagship chip 2.2A.But heh don't feel bad who can afford that beast of a chip-not me.

[ironik311]

I gave an 8

SCSI is too expensive for the average joe so I wouldn't even worry about it. You setup is way better than mine!

[rextex]

All the claim about SCSI on its way out comes from stuff saying ATA133 Ide drives and "Serial ATA" or "Firewire" ,etc. is supposed to close the speed / data transfer barrier.
I don't have SCSI right now either.But I am not attempting to build an expensive Top-of -the-Line system.
If I did I'd buy the SCSI Devices first.That's because I RTFM!
I just built a Celeron II system running stock at 850 MHZ.The chip cost me $70 Retail box.The board I got for $35.Its an Aopen AX34 ProII.
This early revision has only ATA66.That's all I need for now.It does what I need.It can use a PIII chip to like 1.2Ghz or whatever.It is using 256MB PC133MHZ RAM and Win98SE.It can be overclocked.It is extremely stable.It has the ability to run the RAM at 133 regardless of the 100MHZ Celeron II, there are more features,too.It has a lot of features.I'm running at defaults and it is faster than PIII 933 on an ASUS board the computer next to it has, and I haven't even set the Turbo features and CAS is at 3 now, though I can run at 2.And the RAM is at 100MHZ still.I have a 300 Watt Enlight Power supply.It delivers a higher core voltage to the CPU and that is why it is faster than the 933, which has a supply that delivers a slightly lower than needed core voltage due to the regulator.
I put what I had around in it for the peripherals, etc.
-The point of this is you build a system based on what you need and can afford.And you RTFM.
All those "P4 2G" "Athlon XP" buzzwords don't make a system top notch if you don't understand technology!

SCSI has all the advantages.I could probaly take this system I have right now, tweak it and add SCSI and get close to the performance for opening an Explorer window or whatever of most of those new Athlon and P4 systems!You doubt because you don't understand that the access time and data transfer to disk bandwidth is a crucial part of performance.And the bloat of your App.s and O.S. are probaly much greater than mine.
With SCSI you can simultaneously keep data transfer between devices on the buses going without the intervention of the O.S. and CPU.,etc.,etc.,rant...rant...
(Whoops..well maybe I'm a little off the mark here about the O.S. thing but the point irratates me....Oh well, ****"Attention..Crew!!"..***..."Stand by for flames!!!"*** )

[Madtripper]

Thats a nice setup even for having a Pentium! About equal to mine although your cpu is bumped a bit higher. I'm not sure but if you are looking for top of the line, USB 2.0 and/or IEEE 1394(Firewire) would be a nice addition.

As far as ScSSi, I think it is the best. I can't afford it so I use two 20G UltraATA 133, 7200 RPM drives at RAID 0. I have extremely sufficient transfer rates.

For a complete review and score, you should add your case, monitor, various drives and so on. But, its still rockin so I'll give you a 8.745. Not bad considering I'm a die hard AMD supporter. Sounds like the type of machine I'd like to meet up with in an Unreal Tournement!!


Tripper

visit www.deadspacesociety.com

[Philip1952]

Your system is pretty good. But like a few others have said. SCSI would be a better choise for the hard drive system. As far as price. With good shopping for used parts. You can go SCSI for not much more. A used 29160 Adaptec card will bring around $100. A used Atlas 2 or 3 10k SCSI drive is around $100 or so.
With an access time of 6 or 7 mls and a transfer rate of 40 mps. This will blow any single IDE drive away.
IDE raid 0 will give you about the same transfer rate. But with an access time of around 12 to 14 mls and no data security
A new Cheetah 15k 18gig drive right now at www.hypermicro.com is running $225. + shipping. (mine sould be in Friday)
My system spec's are not that far from yours. I did see a very nice boost going to a 10k SCSI drive setup with 98. Can't wait to try XP on the new drive.

[BigBlue66]

I gave you a five, not to be cruel or anything, but to say that the system is outdated already. DDR333 and the boards to support it are out now. P4's are way over 2GHz now.

You don't say what video card you have, other than it's a GF4. Is it the MX version, or a Ti version?

Also, to get the most bang out of a quad pumped P4, you should be using RDRAM. I don't care what they say about the cost or the longevity of it. It is clearly proven in benchmark after benchmark that the 800Mhz RDRAM makes full use of the quadpumped 100Mhz FSB Pentium 4. And now they have come out with even faster Rambus, so guess that means it will be around for awhile.

So with all that said and only giving you a five, you need to give me that system and go out and buy a new system with all the things I mentioned above.

But seriously, even though it's outdated and not as fast as it could be, it should last you a good long while. Don't worry, be happy.

[Lycia]

I gave it a five, for the same amout, or even less, you could have an 2000+XP, K7T266a motherboard, more ram and a larger harddrive.

[bubblehd]

Lycia:
"I gave it a five, for the same amout, or even less, you could have an 2000+XP, K7T266a motherboard, more ram and a larger harddrive."

I fail to see your reasoning behind this statement. I didn't see a post stating what uncle_jimbo paid for his system. While unlikely, it is possible that he may have built most of it from parts given to him, or picked up second hand. I seem to sense a little bit of cross brand envy here.

As far as the system goes, I gave it a 7. The only basis for evaluation that I have is wheather or not this system would do what I want a system to do, and how well would it do it. Truth be told, the only one who can realistically evaluate this system is the person who is using it. I also believe that Hardware alone does not make a computer. You also have to consider the O/S and the individual applications. After all, this system with no O/S or no applications wouldn't even make a good boat anchor.

As far as the SCSI issue goes, that's personnal preference. I could buy three IDE drives for the cost of one SCSI drive, and I don't need a controller card for it. My vote is for IDE.

What am I running? Nothing as nice as uncle_jimbo's system, but it does what I want it to do, and I haven't been successful at typing faster than it can throw characters on the screen.

P-4 1.4Ghz
Intel D850GB mobo
384Mb PC-800 Ram
40GB 7200rpm ATA-100 Western Digital HDD
Evga Gforce II MX 64Mb
Enlight case with Antech 350Watt P.S.
Netgear NIC
SB Live! Value
Zoom 56K external V.90 modem
Microsoft Track Ball
Airboard Wireless keyboard
Compaq MV700 17" Monitor

Bubblehd