08-08-2005, 10:28 PM
Considering I'm building my entire business around this very concept, I'll throw whatever information I can into the mix. But not now. I have to get dinner to the g/f. It's 6:30 and she's probably already getting ready to chew me a new one for not having her dinner to her yet. ;)
My personal choice: Intel for processors (doubly so for notebooks; NO comparison by any other CPU maker), nVIDIA for video cards, Creative Labs for sound cards (EAX rules!), and Lian-Li for cases (god bless aluminum with lots of quiet case fans).
Abit and Gigabyte make great motherboards, but stay FAR away from ECS. Cheap. MSI is also very good, although I have minimal personal experience with them (ditto for Asus). A good way (although there are exceptions) to tell a good motherboard maker from a bad one: how much do they include, and WHAT do they include? Round cables or flat cables? SATA cables, IDE cables, or both? Just drivers, or additional software (I've seen office software and DVD player software on motherboards before)? How well laid out are the components of the motherboard? How well labeled are they? How strong are the BIOS options, and how easy is it to upgrade (Abit and Gigabyte both allow you to do this "on-the-fly", IIRC)?
NewEgg.com is a good place for parts and reviews, but take the customer comments with a grain of salt. Toms Hardware Guide is your best source for information (outside of here - I'm a walking THG library :P).
One little idea you may want to fiddle with: A SFF (Cube PC, in other words) built around a Pentium M. High speed, low power, all in a compact package. Easy on the eyes and the long-term budget. Definitely something any serious computer user should look into.
Anyway, I'm off for now. I'll post later on with some more in-depth information so you don't have to glean it from 10,000 pages of THG (it can give you a headache just trying). Oh, and one last tip: unless you do a lot of multi-tasking, stay away from Dual Core (AMD is a minor exception to this, but you said yourself you are leery of them).
My personal choice: Intel for processors (doubly so for notebooks; NO comparison by any other CPU maker), nVIDIA for video cards, Creative Labs for sound cards (EAX rules!), and Lian-Li for cases (god bless aluminum with lots of quiet case fans).
Abit and Gigabyte make great motherboards, but stay FAR away from ECS. Cheap. MSI is also very good, although I have minimal personal experience with them (ditto for Asus). A good way (although there are exceptions) to tell a good motherboard maker from a bad one: how much do they include, and WHAT do they include? Round cables or flat cables? SATA cables, IDE cables, or both? Just drivers, or additional software (I've seen office software and DVD player software on motherboards before)? How well laid out are the components of the motherboard? How well labeled are they? How strong are the BIOS options, and how easy is it to upgrade (Abit and Gigabyte both allow you to do this "on-the-fly", IIRC)?
NewEgg.com is a good place for parts and reviews, but take the customer comments with a grain of salt. Toms Hardware Guide is your best source for information (outside of here - I'm a walking THG library :P).
One little idea you may want to fiddle with: A SFF (Cube PC, in other words) built around a Pentium M. High speed, low power, all in a compact package. Easy on the eyes and the long-term budget. Definitely something any serious computer user should look into.
Anyway, I'm off for now. I'll post later on with some more in-depth information so you don't have to glean it from 10,000 pages of THG (it can give you a headache just trying). Oh, and one last tip: unless you do a lot of multi-tasking, stay away from Dual Core (AMD is a minor exception to this, but you said yourself you are leery of them).
Roland *The Gunslinger*