[aphelionart]

hi, i'm about to graduate and my wonderful parents are offering to get me a digital camera and new computer for college.. i'm wondering about which brands/kinds to look at. here's what i'm wanting:

monitor: not sure about flatscreen vs. regular, tho if im usin it for movies ill prolly want a regular so people can watch it from the side right? i also would rather sacrifice space for quality. planning on doing photoshop and illustrator work, mostly.

camera: i really just want this so i can take reference shots, so something cheap but decent and effective.

everything else: any suggestions for video cards, amount of disk space, etc. are welcome. again, mostly painting and watchin movies... not really gonna be rendering or playing a ton of video games.

i've got my own ideas but i want to hear what you guys might suggest. thanks!

-matt

[Sumaleth]

I just upgraded my system after about a week of research, and while my requirements were different to you what I came up with might still be of some interest.

. AMD Athlon 2800+ cpu

I went with this processor because it's cheaper than the Pentium4 equiv (about a P4 2.4-2.5Mhz) and I couldn't find any negatives in using an Athlon.

The 2800+ is the fastest of the well-priced Athlons at the moment. This will change in 6 months, but right now the faster Athlons (3000+ etc) are all like ~10% faster for ~30-50% more money. Not worth it, and the 2800+ is a good processor.

. Asus A7N8X Deluxe (rev 2) motherboard

There seem to be a number of good mbs for Athlon processors, but the one that gets the most kudos right now is the nForce2-based A7N8X Deluxe (the rev2 version).

The "Deluxe" version of this mb adds a number of cool features that I would otherwise have had to purchase PCI cards for, like:

- double video ports, so you can instantly get a dual-monitor setup from one card
- double ethernet ports (this computer plugged straight into the internet and my lan without any extra installation)
- sata port (a raid-like IDE-based challenger to scsi harddrives)
- lots of other stuff I can't remember

. 1 gig of DDR RAM

I originally intended to get 512meg, but reading around it seems that 1gig is becoming standard for highend systems these days.

And I got the gig as 2x 512meg. The A7N8X mb is actually faster if you have two identical ram chips instead of one big one (plus 2x 512meg cards are cheaper than 1x 1gig).

. 80gig Western Digital 8meg-cache HD

The 8meg cache HDs are a little more expensive than the 1meg HDs, but I plan to be working with lots of very large PSD files (for example) and an 8meg cache apparently makes loading/saving much faster.

. Radeon 9700+ Pro vid card

The Radeon video cards are THE cards to get right now, although there is a new nVidia card right around the corner which may or may not knock the Radeons from their perch.

But the high end Radeons are perfect for stuff like games and photoshop and (hopefully) 3D software.

Like the Athlon, the Radeon 9700+ Pro is the best of the series that is currently at a competitive price. There is an 9800+ Pro too, but almost everything I read about it said that it wasn't really enough of an improvement over the 9700+ Pro to warrant the huge price difference.

. ViewSonic G90f 19" monitor

I read a LOT of reviews of 19" monitors, and the one that had the most-positive reviews was the ViewSonic range. There are some other very good brands too (Philips/Sony), but they seemed to be quite a bit more expensive.

The "G" series is for "Graphics", and it is the 2nd highest quality series in the ViewSonic range. The 'P'/Professional series goes to higher resolutions, but from my experience anything higher than 1600x on a 19" monitor is too hard to read. So I'm happy with the G monitor.

The 'f' in the model number I assume means 'flat'. There's really not a huge different between flat monitors and non-flat monitors these days, so I don't really get the big deal, but I'm happy with the picture quality of this monitor.

This is a CRT monitor btw. Equivalent LCD monitors are about twice the price and I find the picture on LCD displays to be kinda unnatural. Maybe thats just me. Got to say that carrying an LCD monitor up 6 flights of stairs would have been easier though.

If you're planning to use the monitor for television viewing from a distance you would probably find the 19" too small. Although I've got this 19" sitting right next to my own 21" (now used as the dual-monitor), and there looks to be only an inch difference between them - possibly because I can use a lot more of the screen space on the 19"-flat.

. Silent 400watt power supply

I've got a lot of stuff in this case (haven't mentioned my old 40gig HD/cdrw/dvd drives) so a 400watt PS was a good bet (the standard is a 150watt ps I think). And I got a silent one (more expensive) because I hate the sound of fans, but it turns out that there are so many other things spinning in there (cpu fan, radeon fan, and two harddrives), that it's still as loud as my last computer.

--

And there you have the concluding hardware of my researching, which is heavily biased towards my requirements of:

. Doom3/Halflife2
. 3D Software like Maya/Lightwave
. Photoshop using dual-monitors
. Permanent cable internet connection.

--

I've been using this setup for a few days now and it's a lot better than my old one (actually, I worked out that its roughly 3x more powerful than the combined power of all 6 computers I owned before this one).

I just need to work out how to calibrate my monitors.
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[sensei77]

Ooh! Ooh! Computer parts! I expect there are quite a few folks around here that could make some very educated suggestions for you. Do you have any idea how much money your parents are willing to part with?

I agree that the Radeon 9700 is a fine card, but I'm more of an nVidia fan due to their committment to releasing new drivers every other week. I recently bought a GeForce 4 Ti4200 w/ 128 mb RAM. As far as I can tell, it's the most bang for the buck right now, and if you won't be doing much gaming or rendering BOTH cards will be a waste of power. The Ti4200 costs about $100 less, though, which I'd prefer to put toward my camera. At least I WOULD if I weren't already daydreaming about the afore mentioned Doom 3.

Agreed on the RAM, though. The 1gb of RAM should only cost about $150-$175, so load up.

Monitors: I do so love the dual monitor setup. It's so choice. If you have the means, I highly recommend you pick one up. If for price reasons you need to drop down and get 2 17"ers instead of a single 19", you still come out with more desktop space, and somewhere else to throw your Photoshop tools. The 2 smaller monitors are even more attractive if you plan on doing minimal gaming.

Hard drives: Watching movies, eh? This is where the bigger monitor would come in handy, but you want to be more of a producer than a consumer anyway, right? Oh, so hard drives. Magnetic storage is so stupidly cheap. A 120 gb HD should be going for somewhere under $200. You could fit a nice collection of flicks on that, as well as a few images.

I agree on the Athlon as well. AMD is a great way to get identical performance to Intel, and spend a significant portion less.
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"made for the extrememe priority the good looks"

[B0b]

i agree with Sumaleth -but i'd go for a Abit Mobo - overclock city


also camera wise - olympus or fuji film.. make sure u get 128mb card with it tho'

[Ragnarok]

I'm a happy owner of a Sony ldm-x72 TFT monitor. It's 17" and the image looks like the one of a 19" crt monitor (if I'm not mistaken). The image quality is absolutly gorgeous. There's little to no pixel shading and just yesterday was watching here Mononke Hime and I've been playing UT2003 and Q3 without any problems at all. It's expensive, I know, but imho it's worth it. The definition it gives is so sharp you'll feel you can see every single pixel of every word.

About the other options, I think they're all pretty good. Here Athlons and Pentiums are priced similar so I just upgraded and got a P4 2.4, 1 gb RAM, ASUS p4pe, ati radeon 9000 pro (my budget wasn't enough to buy a better one) and some other similar components to suma's one.

Also, I recommend you to surf googles' news and webs like www.tomshardware.com
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"Ever forward, my darling wind." -Master Yuppa
Seigetsu

[B0b]

the problem with toms*cough*i'll love your product if u pay me*cough*hardware, is that its not as good as its made out to be..

i take my reccomendations from m8's of mine who buy alot of hardware and do their own independant tests..

[aphelionart]

thanks guys, that helps a lot (especially thanks to suma, that was a lot of good info!) .. i graduate saturday so i dont know how much of it theyve already gotten me, but i fowarded all of it to my bro, who's doin most of the shopping. i think he was already considering the 9700 and athlon... big question (i think) still hanging is the monitor and camera. ill prolly end up getting a non-flatscreen (crt?) because u get better quality for what u pay - it seems like all u lose is a lil desk space (o well). i havnt gotten a good look at cameras but ill check out the reviews on different fuji and olympus ones thanks guys...

-matt

[B0b]

get my Viewsonic P90f next week

[spooge demon]

Sumaleth, how is your card running your 3-d apps? I have been trying to find out the diff between the gaming cards and workstation cards. Some say the WS cards are more precise, some say that games use an incomplete set of openGL functions so the card makers, being in a price war, optimize only for those functions that games use. Poking about AW site, they seem to recommend the WS cards. But they might be thinking of animators using hardware rendering.

Anybody throw some light on this?

[cheney]

First, go here and read my essay at the bottom to understand the need for high end hardware and why it matters with Photoshop.

http://forums.sijun.com/viewtopic.php?t=33165

Then I will suggest a SMP based system. If you plan to render any large scale 3D then you need high power CPUs and a great 3D vid card. If you plan to work in a strictly 2d environment then sacrifice everything for memory bandwidth. Its all in my essay, so go read it to fully understand hardware.
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http://prettydiff.com/

[Sumaleth]

[cheney]

The idea behind using a good 3D card to help render 3D is like using yet another processor. The processor on a vid card is going to be horribly retarted compared to your primary CPU, but have the world's greatest memory bandwidth. So, in effect, the GPU can catch 3D instruction sets far before the system CPUs, but will process them more slowly.

A nice 3D card is a nice thing, but focus more on building a high power renderfarm. Redundant system CPUs will render anything far faster than any contribution from a video card.

To get more specifics I recommend these following sites:
http://www.2cpu.com/
http://www.anandtech.com/
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http://prettydiff.com/

[BadMange]

I know nothing about AMD, so that's why I bought a 2.4GHz P4 w/ 533MHz FSB. Intel just released a Hyperthreading-enabled 2.4 with 800MHz FSB, and my Asus P4PE with newest BIOS is supposedly able to handle this chip. I probably won't get a chance to find out, as I'm a poor student.

Anyway, I can only stress the importance of researching not only the CPU and motherboard, but the chipset it uses. Intel is most stable, and I've heard bad things about VIA and SIS, but have no experience with them myself.

For graphics, I'm using a GeForce4 Ti 4200 with a "softquadro" mod. The drivers are patched and the system thinks it's a Quadro4 700XGL. 3DMark2003 benchmarks were performed on the GF4 and SoftQuadro4 and the SQ4 was noticeably faster in Maya 4.5. There are nay-sayers out there that say it doesn't really work, but there is very little difference between the GF and Quadro cards, they even use the same drivers. But to each their own...

Good luck, building systems is fun.
-Bad Mange
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Have a bad mange!

[B0b]

u can turn ur Radeon's into FireGL's using the same app thats available to GeForce users

but i'm sticking with my 3Dlabs