Dell Computers - What's the Catch?

[Shadowfalcon]

My advice when it comes to dells, is to get their mid-range models. the cheapo ones have the problems stated above, but I find the $800 - $1000 ones run quite nice. They give good deals because they buy parts in uber bulk and get WinXP very cheaply from Micro$oft. BUT GET A DEDICATED GRAPHICS CARD! Or (please don\'t flame me!) look into getting an emachines desktop. low priced and sport some nice specs. My laptop is an emachings, and i love it.

[Seytra]

I think everything has been said on the dell issue, so I might comment on HP: I loathe them. Their support is marginal, at best, and their website was, when I needed it, completely unstructured, incredibly hard to navigate and certainly not crosslinked well. It took one day to find the most basic info on a tape drive made by them, and two more days to actually find where they had hidden (yes, they seem to hide, not make available, things) the manual for it which, BTW, was crap.

As for the FPS issue: The internet connection does not have anything to do with FPS AFAICS. What will make the difference is the quality of the hard- and software and how it is configured.

For example, you can have
1) a slow motherboard chipset
2) slow RAM
3) BIOS at \"failsafe defaults\" instead of \"performance\"
4) loads of unnecessary background tasks hogging the RAM, and eating CPU cycles
5) cheap processor (Celeron vs. Pentium), which does more GHz but less work
6) bad graphics card, maybe even with shared memory
7) old drivers that slow things down
8) driver-driven \"hardware\" instead of intelligent, dedicated SPUs for sound, networking, modem, etc.
9) older / newer CPU revision that has different base clock and cache memory

etc, etc.. Subtle things like the northbrige and other mainboard components can make an insane difference nowadays.

[Platyna]

Dell are crappy that\'s why they are cheap. And they doesn\'t really have great
CPU and stuff, but are made on cheap crap to be cheap. There is no such thing
like \"good and cheap\" unless you are buy a bread, but it is not always...
HP are not really so expensive, recently we have got a HP server for like 1500
PLN which is very cheap, assuming you want to buy a laptop you may choose
HP too. We all, in our company run on HP and we don\'t spent so alot of cash
for them. Dell = no, I had Dell and never again...Generally I am telling everyone
to buy HP or if you are really short in cash - Toshiba.


Regards.

[Moogie]

Thanks for all the tips/info.

I don\'t think I\'ll want to switch to Mac, I need my games too much.

[Induane]

Actually the e-machine thing isnt\' a bad idear - if you want to go cheap, plus they seem better since they were aquired by compaq... or was it gateway?  I think it was Compaq .

Make sure any system you buy:

Doesn\'t have the word \"Shared Memory\" in the advertisment.
Has a dedicated graphics card (these two and connected).
Has an AGP or PCI - E card slots.

To save price get a machine that uses SDRAM - its extremely cheap, and  you can really load up a machine for cheap.  SDRAM has worse performance than DDR or DDR2 but the performance difference between PC133 SDRAM and DDR is only a few percent, but having LOTS of ram makes a bigger difference.  512 SDRAM will beat 256 DDR any day.  IF you get one with SDRAM make sure there are 4 memory bays.  That way you can get at least 1GB of ram in it - which is killer awsome.  Then you can get a videocard - NVIDIA cards seem to do better with their opengl 3d so it might be better to go with an NVIDIA card.  Avoid anything other than:

NVIDIA
Matrox
Ati
Voodoo

Other cards are probabily not worth your money.  Highly reccommend NVIDIA.

Avoid any parts you don\'t need.  If you aren\'t going to use a modem, don\'t get one.  The more add in cards the more system resources are consumed.  A decent soundcard helps with performance too, as the less processing the CPU has to do the better.  Good Sound cards do more of the processing on the card itself.  

As for processor you can go with an AMD Athlon FX line as they are inexpensive, and powerful.  Prices in the Athlon 64 FX rise steeply in the higher end parts of the line though.

A Celeron should be avoided, but a P4 is a good choice as well.

[Cillan]

Your post surprised me Moogie. I?m not sure how your currency converts to the AU$, but I find that Dell machines are somewhat expensive. Looking at laptops anyway.
My mum brought herself a Dell dimension a couple of years ago, and I wasn?t very impressed. The DVD burner included didn?t burn DVD?s, unless you brought some Asian brand that was impossible to find.
That and a few months after the warranty ran out the motherboard packed up. Which had everything on board.
They do have some pretty snazzy cases though!

[GeorgeD]

Originally posted by Induane
Avoid anything other than:

NVIDIA
Matrox
Ati
Voodoo

Other cards are probabily not worth your money.  Highly reccommend NVIDIA.

For a 2d artist I\'d recommend Matrox. But since she \"needs her games\" too, ATI would be the choice. Not sure if this changed lately, and nowadays reviews focus too much on the 3d performance, forgetting that there are also other criterias, but always ATI used to have sharper and generally better 2d picture than nVidia.
And I would avoid Voodoo at all cost  

And combining TFT with on-board graphics should be against the law.

[Induane]

I agree with GeorgeD

NVIDIA has better performance now, though ATI used to be the leader - I\'m talking bleeding edge here i.e. FX 7800

I don\'t know about the 2D part though as far as ATI vs NVIDIA

P.S. What is TFT?

[Khorus]

Originally posted by Induane
P.S. What is TFT?

from Google\'s define:

Thin Film Transistor - a superior type of LCD screen, also referred to as an \'active matrix display\', often used for portable computer displays - each of the screen\'s pixels is controlled by its own transistor, affording an enhanced resolution and refresh rate

So in other words: very good quality flat screen monitor/display

-Khorus

[Rumley Benson]

Originally posted by Moogie
It\'s either a Dell, or another shop-sold brand. The only thing I\'m interested in really is knowing what this catch is.
 

It\'s not Macintosh

[Aldaron]

Originally posted by Moogie
...
  And in all honesty, building a computer myself would not go well either.
...

I think that build your own computer it\'s not so dificult. Sure you need to do some research, and planning but it isn\'t rocket science, i\'m building my own systems and my friend\'s all time.

PD: You also can learn lot of things in the process.

Just do it  

Sorry my bad english.

Salu2.

[Efflixi Aduro]

Originally posted by Induane
Avoid anything other than:

NVIDIA
Matrox
Ati
Voodoo

Other cards are probabily not worth your money.  Highly reccommend NVIDIA.

Correct me if im wrong but didn\'t voodoo go out of the whole cqard business a long time ago?
Oh and I reccomend ATI. Nvidia may have the bigger numbers but ati still out performs it.

[Induane]

Thin Film Transistor - a superior type of LCD screen, also referred to as an \'active matrix display\', often used for portable computer displays - each of the screen\'s pixels is controlled by its own transistor, affording an enhanced resolution and refresh rate

Ahh Active Matrix display huh? Why didn\'t you say so?  

Correct me if im wrong but didn\'t voodoo go out of the whole cqard business a long time ago?

No but you may hear them refered to more nowadays as 3DFX  They tend to make cards for high end workstations and the like now.

Oh and I reccomend ATI. Nvidia may have the bigger numbers but ati still out performs it.

Some benchmarks here...

I couldn\'t actually find any where ATI performed better, since mid 2002 in the benchamrk department.  I will say that in easier environments ATi\'s seem to be able to squeeze out a few more fps, but the NVIDIA cards do well in rendering complex environments without taking a performance hit.

All in all though both are quite good and it is probabily a matter of personal preference and indicidual need.  Both have their stregnths and weaknesses.

[Efflixi Aduro]

I don\'t think you can really base the performance of a graphics card off of 1 game.
And, well, even if the nvidia out performs it:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814143028
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16814102502

Just look at the prices.

[leji]

just dont buy dells packard bell and stuff like that, cause you need to pay for the brand and all the crap they put with your comp, just go to a local dealer and pay ?50 more for him to assemble the machine