hey there all a mate at work is getting a new PC he hasn't told me where he is getting the parts from but its on the gold coast, machine will be used for CAD web site building and flight sim's.

Intel system

Motherboard Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 420.00
CPU Intel Core 2 Quad Q9450 500.00
RAM Corsair TW3X4G1600C9DHX - 4 GB 500.00
Graphics Card ATI FireGL V5600 880.00
Monitor Viewsonic VP2250WB 22" 575.00
Hard Drive #1 Western Digital Raptor - 74GB 195.00
Hard Drive #2 Seagate Barracuda ST3500320AS - 500 GB 150.00
Portable Hard Drive Lacie 500 GB Rugged Mobile 430.00
Optical Drive Samsung SH-S203D 55.00
Sound Card AOpen Cobra AW-870LP 50.00
Speakers Use existing speaker system Nil
Modem D-Link DSL-502T - already have the modem Nil
Case Budget 300.00
Case Cooling Budget 100.00
Keyboard / Mouse Budget 150.00
Power Supply Budget 300.00
Power Protection Budget 200.00
Operating System Already have Windows XP Professional Nil


4805.00
AMD system

Motherboard ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe 310.00
CPU AMD Phenom x4 9850 Quad Core - Black Edition 340.00
RAM Corsair TW3X4G1600C9DHX - 4 GB 500.00
Graphics Card ATI FireGL V5600 880.00
Monitor Viewsonic VP2250WB 22" 575.00
Hard Drive #1 Western Digital Raptor - 74GB 195.00
Hard Drive #2 Seagate Barracuda ST3500320AS - 500 GB 150.00
Portable Hard Drive Lacie 500 GB Rugged Mobile 430.00
Optical Drive Samsung SH-S203D 55.00
Sound Card AOpen Cobra AW-870LP 50.00
Speakers Use existing speaker system Nil
Modem D-Link DSL-502T - already have the modem Nil
Case Budget 300.00
Case Cooling Budget 100.00
Keyboard / Mouse Budget 150.00
Power Supply Budget 300.00
Power Protection Budget 200.00
Operating System Already have Windows XP Professional Nil


4535.00
Your thoughts please ??

my initial thought is that, $4,500 could buy a lot of coke and hookers. but f*** that's a massive setup.

Well he's obviously single.

nope hes a family man "evis" but he hasn't upgraded in a long time 5 years or so, changed OS a while back but with old hardware his machine barely runs xp and hes not going anywhere near vista.

isnt 4gb ram useless in xp?

Why is he getting an ATI card? Doesn't Nvidia have the best cards out at the moment? Clearly he's not to concerned about cost.

And yeah, 4GB is useless unless he uses a 64bit OS. Well, not useless, but a waste.

both are 64 bit systems ok.

Yeah, but if he's using his existing copy from 5 years ago, chances are that it's not 64bit ok.

it's a workstation/CAD card. hence "fireGL".

i'd definately go the intel system. it's much better for CAD work

double edit: NM, saw it's DDR3

last edited by Erik-the-Red at 19:23:35 21/Apr/08

this mate wouldn't be tanaka would it? and cats don't count as "family"

Tanaka's budget is more than double that.

I think it's a bit exe for both systems..

Stay the f*** away from Gigabyte....

Case Budget 300.00
Case Cooling Budget 100.00
Keyboard / Mouse Budget 150.00
Power Supply Budget 300.00
Power Protection Budget 200.00

WTF?!?!?!?!
BUDGET?!?!?!?!

jesus christ. I'd hate to see what those c***s spend on a "budget" car! :o

any case without power that costs you that many $$ and DOESN"T already come with cooling and you ahve to spend $100 extra on it, then I'd think it's a waste of money. Secondly, is this all configured and tested? I reckon even Computer Alliance would be cheaper than this, and they're normally a little pricier (with good warranty benefits) than most.

Stay the f*** away from Gigabyte....

or is that "budget" as in that's how much he's set aside for the stuff?

Stay the f*** away from ASUS....

why reso, who is better than ASUS?

I had 1 mobo fry some ram so I reckon that's enough for a don't buy ASUS post.

Well played reso sir.

yea stay the f*** away from Abit.

After 3 plus years of perfection something weird is happening to some USB ports. ABIT SUCKS.
.. But i think its just software related. but still wtf!

wait on, so one example is enough to warrant never buying that particular brand again?

Now i know that Asus do have some incidences of bad motherboards, but they are a whole lot less common than any other brand of board.

Essentially, per 100 boards, over a 3 year period you're gonna see fewer Asuses die than any other brand of board.

half a TB for $150!!

man.

Bring on SSD!

There's a lot of really bad generalisations here. there's no ONE brand that's perfect. Asus has a lot of bad products too sometimes. Depends on the week and the price they pay for each component on their boards at the time. I see equal amount of warranty of both ASUS and GIGABYTE. There's no one particular brand that stands out as a s***ty brand.

Ye old hard disks may be going the way of the humble tape in the not too distant future.

Imagine a quarter gig of SSD on your laptop with an idle couple TB in external backup available. Noice :)

^^ Every PC I've bought that's lasted has been ASUS. They are pretty good, imo.

there's no ONE brand that's perfect.

Exactly. Every brand has good and bad models over time, so it's silly to say "stay away from gigabyte, or ASUS for life".

I remember everyone was raving about Antec power supplies. Then they came out with a horribly unreliable range (what was it, 20% failure rate?). Everyone then rode the "Antec sucks" bandwagon. Now their range is good again ...

Same happened with A-bit. Remember the awesome NF7-S, then whatever came after that people stayed away from ...

Hence I always look for specific models and their reviews, mostly ignoring brands. While you can't guarantee that you'll avoid a DOA piece of hardware, at least you can go for a specific model (not brand) that is statistically known to be reliable and loved by users.

last edited by parabol at 22:06:39 21/Apr/08

That's just ridiculous parabol.

Motherboard Gigabyte GA-X48T-DQ6 420.00

He doesn't need the latest board, stick with the P35 series.

RAM Corsair TW3X4G1600C9DHX - 4 GB 500.00

Unless the OS can handle the 4GB, no point in going it. Also DDR3 is just another e-penis factor at the moment, performance compared to price is just pathetic.

Sound Card AOpen Cobra AW-870LP 50.00

The onboard will be better. Scrap it.

Case Budget 300.00 Case Cooling Budget 100.00 Keyboard / Mouse Budget 150.00 Power Supply Budget 300.00 Power Protection Budget 200.00

Plenty of money to go into that, that's good.

Overall the prices he's listed are marked up and a half.

hey moo, would that be because gigabyte only has a two year warranty where as asus has three years?
the number of times, back in the day, when i saw people with dead gigabyte boards at just over two years old that needed to scrap their setup and start afresh (minus drives) simply because their gigabyte motherboard died out of warranty, where as if they had bought an asus board that failed in the same way they would be right to soldier on once more.

regardless of opinion about gigabyte vs asus failure rates, the simple fact of asus' 3 year warranty remains to be the deciding factor for me, and i dare say others, time and time again.

I think it's hugely over priced .. what does he want to do with his system?

machine will be used for CAD web site building and flight sim's.

Oh my bad, missed that .. well in that case, I still think it's hugely over priced. I'd probably swap the CPU for a dual core, video card for nVidia and what the f***s with the budget on case+PSU+cooling - that's insane-o.

Why is the 22" Viewsonic $575? That's about $200 more than they cost normally. If he is willing to spend that much tell him to go an extra $200 and buy the 28" Viewsonic. Kicks some serious ass.

How about, he gives me that much money and I'll build his pc exactly to those specs?

Rev makes a good point. For CAD stuff you'd probably benefit from a higher resolution than 1680x1050? demon?

I'd probably swap the CPU for a dual core,

for CAD rendering optimised for multi core processors, the quad core will eat the dual

also, if it's a workstation setup, i'd seriously consider an Intel branded motherboard, not just the chipset

Tanaka's budget is more than double that.

LOL, I'm surprised anyone even remembers that =)

Give us more info about the design sw he's using

it's a workstation/CAD card. hence "fireGL".

could also consider an nvidia quadro..

You may like to look into the performance of the flight sims with a cad card.. im sure that because that card is very high end it shouldnt be a problem but with some more of the cheaper end quadros or firegl's arent the best for gaming needs (however like i said, because its new and higher end it shouldnt pose a problem)


Id also suggest to stay away from teh gigabyte board - ive had about 4 different models of gigabyte boards die on me (leaking capaciters usually) - i would never buy another gigabyte..

With the hard drives - rather than getting a 74gb raptor and a 500gb sata, he'd probably be way better off with a raid of 2x500gb (and if worried about reliability, get a 3rd hd for backup) or possibly raplace the raptor with an SAS drive (like raptor x or Seagate Cheetah or Hitachi UltraStar) - should achieve better performance then the standard raptor (at a slightly higher cost). RAID controllers (if not controlled on board - which most mobos do now) do not cost much either (although cost doesnt seem to matter).

- if it was me id get 2x500gb for the same price and raid them rather than paying out the bs price for the raptor



Also noticed you have listed a viewsonic monitor, although ive only tried 1 of the viewsonic brand (19" wide, about 3 months ago) i found that the colour & contrast in it was fairly substandard, horrible in comparison with a samsung monitor. - also $575 is wayyy overpriced for a 22" monitor, you could get a samsung cheaper than that. - im looking at getting a Benq x2000w 22" (okay.. maybe not, i just realised its only a 20") for only around the $300 mark.

But you can get like a 2ms samsung 2253BW for around $300 (i havent compared the specs with the viewsonic but i would be reluctant to pay that price for a 22" screen when you probably wouldnt notice the difference in quality over a cheaper one)

As for power protection & power, whatever power supply you choose - get a UPS that will be able to handle that amount of power (and if feasible the monitor's power too). If you can get a UPS with USB support (some only have serial) then thats good too if you want it to tell the pc to shutdown if the power dies.

last edited by Jerry at 20:18:50 23/Apr/08

Also noticed you have listed a viewsonic monitor, although ive only tried 1 of the viewsonic brand (19" wide, about 3 months ago) i found that the colour & contrast in it was fairly substandard, horrible in comparison with a samsung monitor

Again brand is usually irrelevant.

I've got a 19" 5:4 ratio Viewsonic LCD. 170-178 degree viewing angle, awesome 8-bit colour, fully tiltable/rotatable/portraitable. Cost me a bit a couple of years ago, and it completely raped almost all the Samsung range at the time (apart from 1 model that was rarely in stock).

I only say this to show that you can't base all your opinions about a brand on a single product of theirs you have used in your life. An underlying aspect of statistics and probability is that you need a large enough sample size to make useful observations and generalisations. A sample size of 1 is hardly close enough.

last edited by parabol at 19:08:40 23/Apr/08