J
JPD
It's that time again.
I bought a Dell Dimension 8200 three years ago, mostly to run MS
Office apps, Photoshop, and music-notation programs. I had hoped it
would also be good for occasional gaming, home-recording of
guitar-playing, and video-editing.
It wasn't.
MS Office apps were constantly hanging, games would crash, Photoshop
was disappointing, and I never bothered to try it with home-recording.
In fact, the older P3 system I'd built and overclocked prior to the
Dell was a lot more reliable.
Well, now I'd like to try building my own again. This time around I'm
looking for stabililty and compatibility (of course), but I'd also
like to have some fun with it -- that is, I'd like to enjoy snappy
performance from the machine.
I'm thinking about a P4 processor. Is a 2.8 GHz sufficient, or do I
need to look higher? Do the latest popular games require higher? I
don't need to have the fastest PC on the block (not yet, anyway
,
but neither do I want the games to be unplayable.
The next issue is the HDD subsystem. In past machines I've built or
upgraded, I've simply bought a new IDE drive and used the old drive as
an internal backup or secondary drive. Nothing fancy. But now I'm
wondering if I want to get into SCSI, SATA, RAID, or who knows what.
RAID seems too tricky, SATA seems too new, but I don't really know.
Should I plunge into a more involved HDD subsystem?
One notion that sort of appeals to me is to have a Seagate Cheetah 15k
SCSI drive for the OS and programs, and another 15k Cheetah for
whatever else. In the "old days" it was often recommended to place the
OS on one drive and data on another, giving a nice performance boost
-- especially when it came to digital audio workstations (DAWs) -- but
I never tried it and I don't know. Maybe that advice no longer
applies?
I haven't thought much about which motherboard to get, since it seems
to me that I first ought to know which processor and hard drive(s) I
want. (If I want SCSI drives, maybe I want an onboard SCSI
controller?) As for the OS, I'm thinking XP Pro. I've been using W2K
Pro on three of the four machines on the wireless home LAN, and XP
Home on the laptop for the past year or so. I like XP better.
Anyway, it's obvious that I really need guidance on this. I think if I
can get a handle on these two factors -- the processor and the HDD(s)
-- the rest will fall a lot more easily into place.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
JPD
I bought a Dell Dimension 8200 three years ago, mostly to run MS
Office apps, Photoshop, and music-notation programs. I had hoped it
would also be good for occasional gaming, home-recording of
guitar-playing, and video-editing.
It wasn't.
MS Office apps were constantly hanging, games would crash, Photoshop
was disappointing, and I never bothered to try it with home-recording.
In fact, the older P3 system I'd built and overclocked prior to the
Dell was a lot more reliable.
Well, now I'd like to try building my own again. This time around I'm
looking for stabililty and compatibility (of course), but I'd also
like to have some fun with it -- that is, I'd like to enjoy snappy
performance from the machine.
I'm thinking about a P4 processor. Is a 2.8 GHz sufficient, or do I
need to look higher? Do the latest popular games require higher? I
don't need to have the fastest PC on the block (not yet, anyway

but neither do I want the games to be unplayable.
The next issue is the HDD subsystem. In past machines I've built or
upgraded, I've simply bought a new IDE drive and used the old drive as
an internal backup or secondary drive. Nothing fancy. But now I'm
wondering if I want to get into SCSI, SATA, RAID, or who knows what.
RAID seems too tricky, SATA seems too new, but I don't really know.
Should I plunge into a more involved HDD subsystem?
One notion that sort of appeals to me is to have a Seagate Cheetah 15k
SCSI drive for the OS and programs, and another 15k Cheetah for
whatever else. In the "old days" it was often recommended to place the
OS on one drive and data on another, giving a nice performance boost
-- especially when it came to digital audio workstations (DAWs) -- but
I never tried it and I don't know. Maybe that advice no longer
applies?
I haven't thought much about which motherboard to get, since it seems
to me that I first ought to know which processor and hard drive(s) I
want. (If I want SCSI drives, maybe I want an onboard SCSI
controller?) As for the OS, I'm thinking XP Pro. I've been using W2K
Pro on three of the four machines on the wireless home LAN, and XP
Home on the laptop for the past year or so. I like XP better.
Anyway, it's obvious that I really need guidance on this. I think if I
can get a handle on these two factors -- the processor and the HDD(s)
-- the rest will fall a lot more easily into place.
Any help will be greatly appreciated!
JPD