Desktop Opinions Welcomed

So I've been running a homebuilt desktop for a while...basically a 1gb AMD Athlon XP 2800+ with a Geforce 4300 video card. It has been a rock solid performer and I have no complaints whatsoever, except when my cpu water cooler sprung a leak...that was a mess.

But now that I discovered this box of pocketpcs that I'm going to sell off, I think it is time for me to get a new desktop.

I thought about scratch building another, but the price of a used machine is so cheap these days, I can't see that it is worth it.

I don't need state-of-the-art...and actually I was looking at an HP DC7700 with an Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 running at 1.86GHz with 2GB of ram. Or maybe a Gateway E-4610S with an Intel Core 2 Duo 2.4 Ghz E6600, again with 2GB of ram.

I can pick up either for less than $100 delivered. And either would probably run rings around my homebuilt.

So whatcha think...comments, suggestions? Intel Core 2 Duo or AMD Athlon X2?

Core 2 without a doubt.

Give the price of RAM at the moment, I would reall suggest going for 4GB instead of 2. You'll be able to run an x64 OS - Windows, Linux of even OS X quite happily if you do. It will also last you longer. The E6300 has VT-x on it too, so it will run Virtualised OS's quite well too. That said, it is a Q3 2006 processor. Have you looked into a Q6xxx at all? Or even a Generation one i3?

The E6600 is the one of the two to go for though.
Definately the Intel though and it's worth shellign out for the RAM seeing that it's peanuts these days - $30 for 2GB from what I can see. Looks like both systems can take up to 8GB. So either should run Windows XP through Windows 8 and probably Windows 9 without too many problems; though you may need a VGA upgrade.

The old desktop would probably make a fair server for Hawley inc.

If you want it to be fast I'd recommend changing the hard drive for an SSD (essentially a high speed compact flash card with a SATA connection) regardless of what you get. Many people think the CPU or RAM are the most important for speed but they are actually the about the least important part affecting system speed. The reason is the CPU and RAM are already the 2 fastest components in a computer, it's the slowest part of the computer (the hard drive) that determines overall system performance.

Imagine you have a 4" diameter pipe (the CPU) which goes through a valve that's only 1/2" diameter (the hard drive) and then connects back to 4" pipe (the RAM). Obviously the water will barely be trickling out of the 4" pipe because it's reduced to 1/2" at the valve. To increase the flow of water would you make either the pipe before or after the valve bigger such replace the 4" pipe with 6" pipe, or would you replace the 1/2" valve with a 2 inch or more valve? Obviously making either of the 4" pipes bigger won't improve the flow whatsoever, it's the valve that needs to be bigger, or in a computer, the hard drive that needs to be faster.

My computer has a quad core 3.2Ghz CPU and the fastest 7200 RPM hard drive on the market but only 2 GB of RAM and I normally have 100 processes running and 30-40 windows open, before I had an SSD even opening the Windows calculator could take 30-60 seconds to load, opening a bigger program could be 2-15 minutes. Last summer I bought 8 GB RAM and an SSD to improve the system speed. I started by putting just the RAM and there wasn't much improvement in speed at all. Eventually I had to return to my original 2 GB RAM because my TV card has a bug preventing me from having more than 3 GB of RAM. Then I installed the SSD, and I cloned my hard drive to the SSD, so any improvement in speed is due solely to the SSD because I did not do a clean installation. Now the Windows calculator opens instantly, and big programs like Photoshop that took 2-15 minutes to load now load in about 3 seconds, and I haven't rebooted in months and have had 100+ processes running all along.

However watch out for low end SSDs, they are actually slower than mechanical hard drives, mine is rated for 550 MB/Sec, which is only 500% faster than my hard drive (110 MB/Sec) on paper, but in real life it's literally thousands of times faster. I'd recommend getting one rated for at least 200MB/Sec, but ideally go for the 500+ MB/Sec models. I got a 120 GB model and still use my mechanical hard drive for storing videos and MP3s, and I have Windows and all software on the SSD, giving me the speed of SSD and mass storage of a mechanical drive, without it slowing down the system in any way.

Edit: Do the models you're looking at have SATA connectors? I'm not sure if they have SSDs in the now obsolete IDE interface, but you could add a SATA PCI card.


Edited by aab 2011-12-01 8:27 PM

30-40 windows open!!!??? Man, you are a computer power glutton for sure! I normally have only a single window open. Sometimes when I am editing graphics and such I may have several applications multitasking, such as my graphics program, a web browser, and a screen capture program...but never have I had 30 open windows.

At the time when I built this one, SATA was never even thought of...Firewire was the new option this motherboard supported. It had 3 memory slots and 512mb ram chips was all I could afford. But now with memory and everything else so cheap...it becomes feasible to upgrade inexpensively. Almost all new machines support SATA drives, including the two I mentioned above. My old IDE drive is long overdue for a rest. It is a 7200rpm drive, but I can see it slow down when I start overloading the system ram and it starts using the HD as a virtual ram buffer while browsing the web.

I also enjoyed your 4" water pipe analogy. But you are assuming that potential and kinetic energy levels remain constant. Bernoulli and Venturi might suggest that we can get an equivalent output equal to the input, despite the valve choking you mention, if we can somehow increase data flow or buffer it. Still your analogy makes the point, if I interpret it correctly, that you feel a faster hard drive is the key to speeding up things. That premise certainly doesn't hurt my goals.

I don't think I'll go the SSD route as it is cost prohibitive, and I already have a couple 120GB SATA drives sitting in the closet unused. I will however populate the machine to the max with RAM...8GB if I can afford it.

While aab is spot on about the benefits of a fast drive, I'd like to point out that it's not actually the disk that is the biggest problem; it's the disk controller. You can stick a 15,000 RPM drive on the end of the pipe but if the caching and logic in the controller aren't up to spec then even a SATA controller will make a new system feel sluggish. How many new cheap-end PC's have I see with 7200 Seagates in that feel slower than a PII 440BX UATA 2 controller. The physical disk at the end can make a huge difference though; especially its cache size.

SSD's can sertainly help a lot in many areas but they can be difficult to optimise and are still pretty pricy. Saying that with recent HDD supply problems so are magnetic spindle disks.
Core 2 generation are all SATA and I expect both of the above to be SATA II generation chipsets.

Not that I think Rich is looking for an ultra speed deamon.

AAB, sounds like you have a Hauppauge tuner in it I thought that they'd fixed that though? I've never had problems being over 3 GB with mine despite it being one of the ones that is supposed to have the problem.

Final Decision Time - Which do I buy?

This one: HP DC7800

or

This one: Gateway E-4610S

Gateway has E6600 processor, HP has E6550 processor
Gateway has 80Gb HD, HP has 160Gb HD
Gateway has cardreader, HP has none
Gateway has 128MB ATI Radeon X1300LE Graphics video, HP has GMA3100
Gateway has multiformat DVD writer, HP has standard DVD rom
Gateway comes with keyboard and mouse (big deal), HP comes with nothing.

Both have comparable pci expansion slots, usb ports, both have 2Gb or RAM installed, similar power supplies, etc.

Gateway delivered is $107.29, HP delivered is $103.95.

I've owned HP before...decent machines, nothing to brag about...never owned Gateway before, but remember the old days when they had proprietory hardware and you could only use Gateway stuff to upgrade. Guess that no longer holds true...

I'm leanig towards the Gateway...convince me I'm making a mistake...

E6550 hands down. It's a Q3 2007 CPU with a 1333 MHz FSB on it while the E6600 is a Q3 2006 CPU with a 1066 MHz bus. The GMA can be upgraded easily but the GMAX3100 does support Aero anyway for Vista/7/8. Card readers are a £10 cost off of eBay. The lack of a DVD writer is annoying, but you can pickup a BD-RW drive farily cheap these days.

The faster bus means it is at least a year newer and will take faster RAM i.e. it'll last a tad longer (in theory). The faster RAM tends to be cheaper too.

So unless te Gateway has a faster bus but a cheaper CPU in it, the hp is the better paper spec.

Well, for the rest of you who were interested in what I would end up with...I ended up buying the Gateway E-4610S, but not the one above. I bought it from the same people, but had sent them an offer and a cut and paste of C:Amie's last post about the cpu FSB and how I was concerned about future expansion.

Well, to make matters short, they rejected my $75 offer, but countered with an $82 offer and the same machine with an E6700 core 2 duo processor.

I took it. Looks like I'll now be joining you folks in the space age...time to leave the stone age behind.

BTW, total cost delivered is $105.21 USD. Not too bad when I consider that I paid $1900 for my old Zenith Z-150 system, and that was a big discount offered to DOD employees back in the mid-1980s.

About 6% the costs of what I paid back then and I get a computer that is...how many times more powerful? I wouldn't know how to figure it out.

Welcome to the space age, lol

I'm afraid to report that the E6700 is a 1066 MHz, not an 1333 MHz (It's another Q3 2006 one). The E6x50's are the 2007 refresh. You got an extra 200 MHz on the clock though. It still has VT-x/VT-d just doesn't carry Intel TxT.

£60 isn't bad at all though.

What OS(s) do you plan on installing?

From what I can tell, this motherboard only supports 1066MHz max...so maybe that is why they couldn't do the newer cpu. I don't remember his email right now, but he said something about 500, 800, and 1066MHz...does that sound right?

I'll stick with XP Pro for now. I haven't bought Win 7 yet...I've been resisting it.

And while I may be an old Mercury capsule in the space age...at least I'm won't be flying a Sopwith Camel any longer...

I don't understand, 8 GB RAM costs about the same as a good SSD (remember, you keep a mechanical hard drive for mass storage, the SSD is in addition to the hard drive, not instead of it, so even the smallest capacity is enough for Windows and your software which is all you need on the SSD).

Not only that, but 8 GB RAM would be completely wasted if you only have 1-2 windows opened. Even with my 30-40 windows I would only need 8 GB RAM to eliminate the pagefile (virtual memory) completely. Even before you run out of RAM, an SSD makes an unbelievable improvement, for example Windows 7 starts in about 10 seconds from boot up, and virtually everything is always instant. And don't forget I went from 2 GB RAM to 8 GB RAM with virtually no improvement whatsoever in speed (even with just 1-2 programs running, because they still need to be read from a slow hard drive which is the root of the problem). My previous upgrade from 1 to 2 GB RAM also made no difference whatsoever other than wasted money.

Similarly, before SSD I used to have a RAID 0 made of 2 identical hard drives, essentially all files saved to the drive get split in two halves and each half is recorded onto each drive simultaneously, doubling the read and write speeds. Moving from a single hard drive to a RAID 0 of 2 identical hard drives provided the biggest performance increase I ever saw on a computer before the SSD, again with all RAM upgrades making no difference at all because the problem is the hard drive, not lack of RAM, because the data needs to be read from the hard drive in the first place.

That's why even a 50 mhz handheld pc can outperform today's latest computers in terms of rebooting and starting programs, they essentially all run from SSD, and even with just 1-2 MB RAM available, they boot up faster than any desktop computer using a hard drive, but my desktop with an SSD now boots up as fast as my handheld PCs, because it now has fast access to the OS and programs to load them nearly instantly.

I've had enough experience in RAM upgrades and hard drive/RAID 0/SSD to tell you without a doubt that 8 GB RAM would be wasted and that money should be put towards an SSD. 8 GB RAM is about $60 now and a good SSD of about 300 MB/Sec is about $80, for $20 more, your computer would literally be 1000 times faster, even with 1-2 GB RAM.


Edited by aab 2011-12-03 9:46 AM

Maybe I'll try both!

My problem is not boot time, I don't care about that so much as I pretty much leave the machine running all the time. My gripe as been using IE and eating up memory. I can open the task manager and watch the processes and see the mem usage go up and up depending on what I am doing online. When it gets to about the 800,000K mark, things slow down tremendously as it starts using virtual memory on the HD.

I figured with 8Gb of RAM versus the current 1Gb I am using, that would essentially disappear. And I may already have some memory chips so I probably won't have to spend any additional money on them.

But I do like SS drives as well. The one on my old HP 2533T Thin Client was wonderful for speed...and it was a slow 1GHz machine. So eventually I'll probably go that route. I don't use massive storage, so even a small 20Gb drive would meet my needs, and a 50-60Gb SSD is pretty cheap these days.

Rich that's right, 533, 800, 1066, 1333 are FSB speeds and require the bus on the motherboard to support it. The hp machine had a 1333 FSB

The point is that if you match the MB, CPU and RAM with the same bus speed there will be no bottleneck in the processor pipeline.

aab,
While I agree that 8 GB is probably overkill, 4 is not. If Rich goes up to 4 leaving empty slots to populate up to 8 the machine is future proofed.
Windows 7 x86 is not comfortable in 1 GB unless you do some extreme service pruning. It needs 1.5 GB while x64 needs 2 GB to stop excess paging at boot.

The belief that more RAM = Faster PC is a misnomer past the users pre-page threshold. Web browsers are increasingly becoming RAM hogs because of all the new client side scripting that they have to do coupled with more intense graphical rendering. This will only get worse with HTML 5.

If you want to do anything with graphics, video or virtualisation 2GB will not be enough and frankly doesn't future-proof. 4 GB will future proof it to run Windows 8 and should provide enough to ensure that everything gets loaded from RAM instead of the disk once booted.
You aren't wrong about the speed of SSD, but compared to running from RAM it's insignificant - This is what Windows SuperFetch does and why Windows Vista and to some extent 7 are criticised for scratching the disk at boot time. It's pre-fetching the OS and apps into RAM to improve start-up.

As Rich leaves the system on all the time, there won't be too much to worry about from a little boot up scratching.

The problem with a $80 SSD is that it'll be 40/50/60 GB max which may leave you somewhat pushed and reliant on a magnetic drive anyway. With only 2GB of RAM you'll be pushing into the page file quite a lot and that does the SSD a real dis-service.

What is more important is that Rich optimises the BIOS. Update it to whatever the latest build is first then start hitting menus. Most significantly the system may support AHCI (or RAID/AHCI) instead of plain IDE - make sure you enable that before installing. Why? Native Command Queuing and SATA hot-swap.
Ensure that it is in SATA II mode instead of legacy, disable any ports that you don't need to free IRQ's and if you put 1066 RAM in it make sure that the BIOS is in 1066 mode - I often see BIOS's that don't step up to the correct frequency.
If you want to play with virtualisation enabling Intel VT-d wouldn't hurt either.

Has it turned up yet Mr. Hawley?

Yep, got it all hooked up and plugged in and running. Much much faster than my old one in every aspect. Had to dig through my stash of computer stuff and find a low profile bracket for a serial port. There is a header on the motherboard, but not hooked up. And since I still use some serial sync cables with some old Mobilepros, I wanted serial as well as USB. Well I got that running and then there was the matter of the BIOS.

I flashed the newest version of that, formatted the HD, and installed WinXP Pro X64 version. I've nevers used the X64 version before...I have XP Pro with multiple licenses and XP Pro X64 with a single usage license. It seems identical except I notice that there are two program files folders...one for normal stuff and one for X64 stuff. I don't really have any software that I know of that is specifically made for dual core use. And finding all the hardware drivers was something of a pain in the ass.

So when all was said and done, I reformatted and started over with simple good old fashioned XP Pro. And everthing went as smooth as silk...no driver problems or anything.

Then I went by the university and picked up a faculty copy of Win 7 Professional. Another OS I haven't tried before. Maybe I'll make the switch to that some day, but for now I can't see learning something new when everything I have works fine with what I am already used to.

Am still awaiting 4Gb of memory chips to add to the existing 2 already installed...

Also, what is all this new hype about USB3.0 these days...is it worth it to get a USB3.0 PCI card? For what reason could I possibly need faster USB speed?