holy shit! i won a $4500 pc
 

I entered a competetion in a new computer mag for £3000UK to build my own custom pc and today i got a letter saying i had one. All i have to do is keep a diary of the parts i buy and why i bought them and give like a final roundup on my thoughts about building pcs at home.

I did build my last 2 pcs myself but i dont know all that much about hardware.

If you had the money what would you be buying with it(i need ideas)

Graphic card = Radeon 9700 PRO...

Dang, $4500 can buy a nice PC these days.

deep blue

How did you get a letter on a Sunday?

The letter was courier delivered, its not unusual here (innercity london)

Congrats, you lucky fuck... :)

RADEON 9700 PRO 128MB AGP $399

That seems pretty expensive for a gfx card, is it worth the money?

??? as in IBM supercomputer?

Go get yourself a nice little 42" screen... then you'll have $100 left to buy the other parts :)
http://www.necvisualsystems.com/appl...Product_id=260

I depends on your needs, this is the fastest you can get right now. If you like 3d accelerated games then it´s a must :winkwink:

Looks OK:
http://store.apple.com/1-800-MY-APPL...9.3.1.1.0?46,4

No shit, I paid about 1500 last month and I got most of the stuff *I* need. If you can spend an additional 3k on luxury parts, that is a blast.

- Stuff it with RAM
- A nice 20-something Flatscreen monitor
- Multiple HDs
- DVD drive / CD Rom drive, both rewritable
the list can go on for ages.


Congrats!


ps. London is my favorite city, although I have not been there for the last .....13 years. Gotta love it there!

Congratulations! Why don't you opt for economy, build two, and send one to ... well, me?

I have the RADEON 8500 128MB (w/dual heads), and I am more than impressed with it ... I think 9700 might be overkill ...

TBH id would much rather be working in the US but cant afford to relocate now ad i doubt i get a green card as porn pimp.

London is OK atleast it has a good nightlife.

My favourite city has to be adelaide in australia. I love it there.

I'm near Amsterdam, so I am not in the US either:p

Adelaide is the asshole of Australia. Are you insane?

SHIT your nuts bro www.tigerdirect.com :thumbsup

i'm really satisfied with my Geforce4 ti4400 and it only cost me a little over $200 ;)

You won't see me sitting in a plane for that long any time soon, it is like a 22 hour flight. Not even going to the US, otherwise I would have been in Vegas many times already:winkwink:

LOL no.. i was born there. Are you in australia? I also like melbourne alot, most of my family lives there.

SCSI :thumbsup

for $4500 I'd budget like this...

laptop $2300
wacom drawing tablet $200
digital camera $1000
sound sytem $1000

Make sure your neighbors can hear your video game monsters!

dude

If you DO NOT get SCSI EVERYTHING, then you are a moron :)

JOIN THE SCSI REVOLUTION :)

SCSI is not that important anymore, the IDE drives really have improved in the last years! For home use I would never buy SCSI.. it´s a better investment to spend the extra cash on a big chunk of RAM and a killer GFX CARD/CPU :Graucho

All you newbies are fucking dorks with your graphics cards on steroids. Fuck all you really need is 2 meg to get 1024x768 and lots of pretty colors... any more than 4 meg, you are just a Quake playing fag. How fast do you really need to render your 3D games -- give me a fucking break. Grow up.

And don't give me the bullshit that you need realtime rendering for your 3D animation job ahaha... That's a load of crap.

SCSI is far superior to IDE in every facet except price. Sure you can do the "poor-man's SCSI" and raid two IDE drives together for faster read time but it still does not match up. SCSI is also true multi-tasking whereas IDE can still only do ONE thing at at time (things take turns -- pinch yourself in two areas and you can only feel pain in one area at a time -- if your body was SCSI, you'd feel pain in both areas simultaneously).

That's why skuzzy girls are good in bed.

:drinkup

Pete id love to buy a laptop but the rules of the competition state i must buy parts and build the pc myself.

As mentioned before with the macs id also like one of them for my photoshop work but rules are rules..

Yeah that's why I mentioned the drawing tablet -- that's a part -- you attach them together -- now you have built a PC... LOL

You should still do something funky... Buy the cheapest parts you can -- get an old Sound Blaster -- spend the other $4000 on speakers and audio equipment -- install DOS, an old tracker -- then make some MOD files and become the neighborhood MOBY. LOL

Or get some video projectors and some old school screen savers and have a rave party at your house... LOL

Plus ATI is a Canadian company, Keep It In The Commonwealth, Baby!

Funny thing about that is they all still need to be re-booted from time to time, whether it cost $700 or $5K. :)


The Dawg

did you know windows crashes every 49 days due to a buffer overflow? that is, if you leaven it on for 49 days without a restart..

For all the bragging IBM made about the stability of OS/2 -- it crashed just as much as Windows 95

:1orglaugh :1orglaugh :1orglaugh
use linux and install kde or gnome.

windows is shit and it has several memory management bugs :repuke

get a fast pc and a big tft monitor and good sound system

the spec i would have if i had £3000 would be

Coolermaster ATCS-210 Azure AX-1 case - £170
CD Rewriter Lite-on 48x12x48 IDE SMART-Burn Retail - £60
AMD Athlon XP 2100 (266MHz) Retail x2 - £110e
Pioneer DVR-A04 DVD/CD Rewriter IDE - £195
Maxtor DiamondMax D740X 80GB x 2 - £75
Microsoft Intellimouse Optical PS2 / USB - £25
Crucial 512MB DDR x2 - £100e
any kt-333 dual mobo - £180?
3com network cards x2 - £30e
3com 9 port 100mb switch - £80
SoundBlaster Audigy Platinum EX - £200
Creative Inspire 5700 5.1 Surround Sound - £230
ATI 128Mb Radeon 9700 - £280
dvb card - £180?
= 2220

then get a huge tft for 780 :)

Then by your definition, all you really need is a P-120 with 32MB of ram. It'll get you on the internet, you can write up your HTML code, and that's it.

But let's be honest, the PC industry has grown by leaps and bounds BECAUSE of gaming. No office needs a 2.8GHz CPU, nobody needs 512MB of ram (unless you're a graphic artist obviously).

:2 cents:

Mistat,

I would avoid the ATI card for now. I've worked int he graphic card industry and left actually just this summer. I've delt with ATI directly and although on paper it's fantastic, I still have to push NVidia. This depends on what you want to do with this system of course. If you're a gamer, go with a GeForce 4 4600 128MB DDR. The REASON I say this is because if you look at most games that are recent, they ALL have an NVidia logo on it. It's a certification program that NVidia created I think last year and pushed through the game developers. It's the primary chipset that the game manufacturers will test with.

As for a system as a whole, with that cash, get something good.
Intel P4-2.8GHz
1GB ram
Intel Motherboard
Pioneer Slot DVD-Rom
Liteon CD-RW
SB-Live Audigy
GeForce 4 4600 128MB DDR
350W Powersupply
Logitech Optical Freedom (I think it's that, wireless mouse/keyb in black)
19" Samsung 955DF monitor (flat screen CRT)
Scanner
Color printer

that's just great :thumbsup