[discobay]

Or you could sit back and print off Dell's specs. Print off a basic spec. and a top of the line spec. Get local prices for the two specs. and total up.
As I said before you will struggle to beat Dell's prices. I would have built my own but I've had enough of getting on the floor with a screwdriver.

[Laughing_Monkey]

Hey, does anyone know if the 'principals' on goldenhk are motherboards or just processor chips? Either way, that place is cheap! Can out together the spec i want for the amount i can spend - which doesnt quite get me what i want from dell or friends... excellant, cheers!

p.s. where can i find out what brands are good or are they all much of a muchness...?

[discobay]

Originally Posted by Laughing_Monkey

Hey, does anyone know if the 'principals' on goldenhk are motherboards or just processor chips?

What do you mean?

Originally Posted by Laughing_Monkey

where can i find out what brands are good or are they all much of a muchness...?

You could read some reviews like at
Tom's or ARS.

[Laughing_Monkey]

Originally Posted by discobay

What do you mean?

Tried translating www.hkgolden.com through Google which uses simplified chinese and it came up with 'principle' for what i assumed was either the processer or motherboard.

Just tried with a different website:
http://www.worldlingo.com/SH0gfCf2o9...sOBO/translate
in traditional chinese and although the paragraph text is completely different (and ridiculous) it translates single words better. Says is processer. Presumably this means i have to buy a motherboard as well?

[JohanSWE]

L_M
Since your a rookie and you wont do that much realtime a mid range G card like radeon9600+ with 128mb would be enough for a while i think, or you can get a build from the ground 3D card such as 3Dlabs they have some low/mid range cards in their series.

Ram is your best buddy if you need a swift and responsive system, especially when your working with sceenes that packs a heavy polygon count.

And before i would have said AMD is the best, but im kinda falling into the CeleronD fanclub. Either way for you it wont matter really if you go for a pure P4 with HT or a celeronD, i can expect the pure P4 to be faster at 2D preformance though.

But makesure you buy a mainboard that will support more powerful cpu's incase you want to upgrade.
Asrock (Asus) makes good mainboards at a good price, try to get a card that uses Nforce 3 or 4 chipset.
Btw about the problem of your comp freezing.. one reson might be a combination of:
hughe number of files or large files on the desktop (avoid having more than 1bg in the desctop folder if your using windows 2000/XP)
Lack of Ram, 512 isnt enough f you gonna do high res work 300dpi in 2500x3000pix for example, and apply lots of filters and other functions that require alot of memory read/write and CPU number crunshing.
And if you have the scratch disk on the came HDD as you installed the program you will lose quiet alot of preformance when it comes to the likes of Photoshop, Corel draw and so on. So get 2 drives to optimize.
You can PM me if you have any questions.

Good luck

[Laughing_Monkey]

Thanks JohanSWE, going to stick a few specs together and get back to you if thats ok...

In the mean time, has anyone seen this cool screensaver?

http://electricsheep.org/

[JohanSWE]

so what happend L_M im waiting for those specs :P

[YOHAN]

Okay, I'm a bit late... but I'll just say what I think anyway.

According to my calculations and experience, building your own system is ALWAYS cheaper than getting them from a branded PC like Dell or HP. You get more out of your buck. But of course, you have to have the technical know-how and time, or you'll end up with a weaker system and a higher price.

I just recently built my own system (4 months ago)... but it's a gaming rig and not for rendering... that is, unless I flash my video card's bios! hehehe. I've always been an Intel fanboy... until I grew up and looked on AMD. Now, I'm AMD all the way!

What cards are you looking at? Nvidia, ATI or Creative? They each have good rendering cards. But they are pretty expensive!

[Laughing_Monkey]

Hey, soz Johan, i've been trying to track down some wonga to fund my purchase... Anyway, i'm doing the specs now so youll have it soon

Im still torn between Intel and AMD, the big numbers of Intel vs, AMD's little 2.8 is troubling me. That said, I know it makes very little difference and i'm almost over my love affair with Intel (the celeron... ahhhh) and thinking clearly!

As for the card, its basically going to be as good as i can afford to spend after a half decent base system - though it has to be pretty good with a min 128Mb...

[vmlinuz]

For what it's worth, I built myself a machine yesterday for precisely $4000:

• Athlon64 3000+ retail - $1170
• Lite-on DVDRW, 16x - $299
• Asrock motherboard, socket 939, network/sound onboard, PATA/SATA/SATA2, PCI/AGP/PCIe and with a slot for a 'future AMD CPU' - $475
• Seagate 160GB SATA HDD - $645
• 2x512MB DDR400 RAM (for the dual channelling) - $310 * 2
• Radeon 9550GT 256MB AGP - $510
• Random case
• 380W PSU

Total - $4000

The only thing missing, which I would have expected to be in with the case, was a power cable - I do have one, but you could add maybe $40 on for it

This is a reasonably well-specced desktop machine - yes, there are faster CPUs out there, but at least it's an Athlon not a Sempr0n, and the graphics card is pretty old, but I need that to get decent Linux support - and $4000 is pretty cheap. From a place called Sam's, on the top floor of the Mong Kok computer centre, which is halfway between Wan Chain and Sham Shui Po in more ways than one...