What do you think of this Dell PC?
 

http://configure.us.dell.com/dellsto...XPS700R2&s=dhs

I'm considering it as I havent had a new decent desktop system for several years now, and I wouldnt mind playing a few high end games now and then.

Overpriced with default specs? Good value? Alternatives?

Looks like a very nice system. Should serve you well. The 24" monitor would be a good upgrade imho

Yeah, I would do that but they dont seem to allow you to deduct money for the included 20 inch and add the 24 inch. Thats the one area I was concerned about. I would almost feel like the monitor would not be able to take good enough advantage of those killer graphics cards.

Ah I see, was just a speaker compatibility issue.. So for $400 the 24 inch screen is not bad.

it doesn't look that bad.

Me personally I'd hold off if you can. First of all why not wait until Vista comes out so isntead of have to buy and install Vista you can get a system that already has it installed?

Secondly by time Intel will have come out or soon thereafter with it's Core 2 duo line of chips so prices for the CPU you want to put into your system will be less. Cnet said that AMD's Athlon 64 X2 5000+ peforms better than Intel's Pentium Extreme Edition 965 and they recomend holding off getting that until Intel comes out with the Core 2 Duo details.

Also here's what they say about your graphics card.

"The good: Compact design; comparatively affordable; fast; simple Quad SLI design; reasonable power-supply demands.

The bad: Impending DirectX 10 cards will make this card obsolete in short order; ATI is still the current leader with 3D image quality.

The bottom line: Nvidia's GeForce 7950 GX2 should have been an Editors' Choice contender. It brings two graphics processors to a single slot, costs half as much as similarly fast setups, and lays the groundwork for do-it-yourself Quad SLI. But the gap between this chip generation and the next is too close, so we recommend you pass on the 7950 GX2. "

I feel that if you can wait 6-8 months you can get a better system for that same price or the same system for much cheaper because the CPU, graphics card and pehaps even the memory shoudl drop in price. If you are going to get the system why not opt for one of the cheaper graphics cards if you are going to have to upgrade the card in 6 months anyways?

Just my opinion and I'm not any sort of expert.

there s always be somethin you can wait, and anytime you buy your pc, the day after it will be cheaper, it will be better, dont need to wait imo

Well I agree it has always been that way, but if that very expensive graphics card is going to obsolete in 6 months then why get it? He's waited several years, what's a few more months. I mean if money isn't an issue then fine go for it. Everything is relative. For me $3500 would be quite an investment. So personally I would wait, but that's me.

Yeah I hear you , Gatorb. I've been waiting for a few years though, and I'm kind of itching. It's 64bit Vista ready, I wouldnt mind buying it, (probably use reward points), when it comes out and is bug free for 6 months or so.. I usually wait on OS upgrades. I skipped windows 95 entirely for example, lol. win98 came out before I decided I needed an upgrade, hehe.

Where did you read that review? Cnet? I'll take a look.
I've read several reviews at anandtech.com, tomshardware, xbits etc.. And a discussion forum or two. Overall it's supposed to kick some butt, especially with dual cards.

It is a dual core pentium, which would server me much better than the celeron in my current desktop (I got it free when I ordered a high end laptop a few years ago, haha). I also read several reviews on it by buyers from newegg.com and other places. Evidently it's pretty nice and stable and cool running, even overclocked to over 4ghz.

Not sure I can prevent the hole burning in my pocket on this one.

ALWAYS get a second hard-drive. Use your boot drive for the operating system and applications only. Keep it fast.

Looks like a great machine but I would definately upgrade to XP pro OS over Home Edition

They gave it an 8 out of 10 and if you won't be getting Vista for another year or mre then hell go get it. Here's the link to the review

http://reviews.cnet.com/Nvidia_GeFor...2.html?tag=sub

...it's a nice PC!! :thumbsup

I hear you. I'm one of those types that pays bills, buys groceries, and nothing else. I'm the most likely person to talk myself out of any big purchase really.. I'll research it some more because I'm picky like that.

XP Pro would be nice yeah, and a second 10k rpm drive in a raid setup is something else I was looking at.

Dell computers flake after 6 months. Mostly their CD/DVD-Rom's... Though they do have good LCDs

Build one and save a few dollars!

Yeah but would your boot drive need to be 160 GB? Couldn't you just get a 40GB drive and use that for the boot drive? Could probally do it with even a smaller hard drive, but I don't think they sell them any smaller now.

I have replaced, RAM, graphics cards, hard drives, power supplies, cd/dvd drives and even a CPU. About everything but a motherboard, but building my owns still kind of scares me. I'm afraid I'll fuck up.

they have one of the best pcs out there...go for it man!

It's really pretty simple. The only thing that scares me when building one is putting the heat sync on the cpu. Those things are hard to get on and take off. I tend to push too hard :Oh crap

It's simple man and you can get all parts are rock bottom prices www.pricewatch.com or www.egghead.com (more exp.). If you replaced all that then you can do it! I have faith in ya lol

upgrade the monitor to 24" its worth it

Larger drives are faster, they write from the top down. Imagine a penny taped to the top of an album ... see how much faster it turns vs if it was down near the label?

24" monitor is a definite.

Oh man, yeah I could build one, but I tell ya, the older you get, the more you just want it to plug in and Go. For me anyway. I'd putz around for months looking at components before deciding on a case, power supply, mother board, chips chips chips blah blah ugh.

Wouldn't all drives start from, the top down? I don't see a 40 GB drive taking that much space up just using it as a boot drive to make much of a difference, but perhaps I'm wrong. Just thinking out loud.

I dont like dells at all........ too many bad experiences helping friends sort theirs out. HP has always been my choice.

I'll bet he buys this computer in the next week.

Gator, correct all drives write from the top down, that is what makes a larger drive faster ... or go to a Raptor 15,000 rpm 150gb drive ... fastest out there right now.

Well, a 40gb drive has the same physical platter size as a 160gb drive, and since the boot sector is towards the center, it'd boot faster from a bigger drive. The drive heads would have to move physically less of a distance the tighter the data is "wrapped" around the center. I think I explained that right anyway.

I havent had a Dell yet. Of course I'm using 2 Gateways primarily right now, and I heard a lot of bad things about them too, lol.

WDchris, you could be right. Although I will keep looking for more pro's and con's around the internet for several days anyway.

I have a great system.. and it took me a while to get the apple monitors but I am much happier with the Apple displays hooked up to my pc.. you might want to think about doing the same.

Fucking hell that thing is overpriced :Oh crap

I would wait until the end of July though. Intel and AMD are offering big price cuts.
http://www.hkepc.com/bbs/itnews.php?...me=0&endtime=0

It's scary building computers, you never know when you'll accidently fuck something up. Then again, that's half the fun in itself ;p I've been building computers since the early 90's, made a pretty good killing off of it in the area I'm at (let's just say these people are not the brightest leds in the array). The worst mistake I ever did while building computers:

On around my tenth computer system I built, they had just started to introduce larger heatsinks with fans on top (I think this particular system was a AMD K6-2 or K6-3). Well the heatsink was touching one of the capacitors... and since I have been completely self-taught using electronics and computers, I didn't know that was a bad thing ;p Turned on the computer, instantly smelled burning resin. Ram had burnt out, CPU was fried, motherboard and video card was dead. Only two things really recoverable were the hard drive and power supply. At the time this was a top of the line computer system that I had just fried >_<

Now days nothing like that is scary, only thing that really scares me is building water-cooled pc's. Don't get me wrong, they are fucking fantastic and they get rid of heat like nothing else (well other than peltier cooling) and are nearly silent... but water and electronics just don't mix god damn it! I'm constantly afraid that one day, one of them is going to spring a leak, killing everything inside instantly. Oh well, I guess statistically I have a better chance of getting laid (lmao, yeah right) than that happening, but it still bugs the shit out of me.

I overclocked my Pentium D 3ghz (930) to 3.8ghz and the hottest it got was 65C while rendering 2 hours worth of video and playing the game F.E.A.R with all graphic settings set to the highest possible. (Geforce 7800GT)

I don't want to get a 64-bit OS yet since it may make the current applications that I use run like shit since they are 32-bit apps.