Help me buying a new computer!

[Pekka]

Exactly what I was thinking.. and this is what I'm gonna do.
I found some sites about cases... www.case-mod.com looks cool.
Now my only problems are soundcard, MB and CPU.
And thanks for explaining the importance of power.

[Urban Ranger]

I heard Emermax makes good power supplies.

[Asher]

Some parts I would recommend:

Samsung PC2700 (DDR333) SDRAM: I've used this personally, plus it seems to be getting the best reviews
Enermax power supplies (I've got a 350W for my Athlon, works great)
Western Digital 8MB cache HDs (I've got a 120GB): Very fast, very reliable. Stay away from IBM drives, they're having problems.
Video card: I'd stay away from the Radeon 9000. The Radeon 9000 is actually a castrated Radeon 8500, but at a slightly higher clockrate. Performance CAN be similar to the old 8500, but probably not in upcoming games. I'd go for a GF4 Ti4200, 4400, or 4600 if you don't wanna shell out all the money for a Radeon 9700.

[Rasbelin]

Pekka, I'll look at your PC dilemma in depth now. The components I'm going to pay attention are the graphics accelerator and the sound card. Plus I will also give my case hints.

First of all I do recommend that you buy your gadgets from Finland, because you will get the warranty from a local retailer (it's very easy to return to i.e. Verkkokauppa.com) and you also have the law on your side, in the case the product would be faulty and you don't have a warranty. Please also remember that buying a case with a non-230V power supply abroad is always going to cause more costs as you need in most cases to change your power supply to a new one. And do also remember that you will most likely face customs if you order larger orders from USA.

The graphics accelerator

If your need is to have a nice card for gaming and you also might want to do video editing and get the signal also to a TV; not to forget that you seem to enjoy the picture quality of Matrox's products. This means in the current situation most products based on nVidia's GPU's can be excluded, because they still don't provide as good picture quality as ATI and far from Matrox 5 star quality. So your choice would be ATI or Matrox, unless you want the most expensive and high fidelity extra double priced 3D accelerator monster that currently has a price tag of about 400-500 €. I do not recommend any such cards, because after all there's no games out there that would give you all the astonishing effects available with your card.

ATI - Canadian cards with quality.

If you prefer to have a card from ATI, I would recommend a Radeon 8500 based card, because currently games are just soon about to support all features available with Radeon 8500, so it's certainly not a bad buy. Let's look at the reality and the games coming up soon. The much spoken Doom 3 that is said to be revolutionary demanding when it comes to graphics, actually requires a GPU of the GeForce 3 family for the best results, so the GeForce 4, Radeon 9700 and Parhelia are still premature when it comes to in-game support for all their features. A Radeon 8500 will already be more than fine for Doom 3 (if we use it for comparison). The GeForce 4 doesn't support DirectX 9 at all, Parhelia only partially and Radeon 9700 is the only one now with full support for it. Games that will need DirectX 9 support are still awaiting in a few years time, so there's currently no real need for the DX9 support. The cards are fast; yes, but they will not provide anything new with the current games. Only those 3D demos and 3D Mark can utilise the features, but that's aming quite high, compared to the price tag. And don't forget that there's less use for cards with DX9 compatibility, when there's no DirectX 9 available yet. Pekka, if you want a cost efficient PC that also has modern horse power; head for Radeon 8500, if you want a card from ATI. Don't pay for duffins. As the Radeon 8500 is already disappearing from the shelves, I would in the current situation recommend the Radeon 9000 that is a newer version of the Radeon 8500 with higher clock speed and with several improvements. So basically it's a replacement of the cheaper Radeon 7500, except that it's hot as Radeon 8500 and with several improvements (check out the ATI website for the details or read the review in MikroBitti 9/02, pages 80-81).

Matrox - always the same excellent picture quality.

Matrox has been outside the gaming market for years now, but their latest attempt, Parhelia-512, is actually a very promising one. I don't cover it now, but I do recommend the review in MikroBitti 8/02 (pages 84-85), the Matrox website and the reviews on Neoseeker, AnandTech and Tom's Hardware Guide.

The sound card

If I understood right, you want to play games and watch DVD movies. In that case you most likely want a card that provides you with environmental audio and support for cinema quality sound. As a matter of fact the first question I'm going to ask I suprisingly not what price the card should have, but instead the speakers. Are you going to use your current desktop PC speakers (in that case, could you please specify what speakers those are? Stereo? Quadraphonic [= 4 speakers and possibly a subwoofer]?), are you going to use a home theatre system, or are you perhaps going to buy new speakers? I'll give more details when I hear about your plans, but here's brief suggestions to the 2 previous scenarios; a home theatre or a new audio system for the PC.

Home theatre

If you intend to use a already exsisting home theatre audio system, the most important issue is once again connectivity. Home theatre amplifiers have in most cases optical and RCA digital inputs, so that means your sound card must have one of those digital output options. Without a digital output on your sound card, you can't get Dolby Digital or DTS surround sound. So what card to go for if you want optical or RCA digital output? Currently the market is abit narrow, because Creative is firmly staying to it's SPDIF digital output that isn't a standard, so getting AC3 (= Dolby Digital) sound from Creative cards to a home theatre amplifier isn't exactly easy. I do have experience with a Creative SoundBlaster Live! 5.1 Player and a Creative SoundWorks Desktop Theatre DTT 2500, so not exactly a home theatre amplifier, but I did get plenty of knowledge about Creative's SPDIF ideology. AFAIK you still get that Y-cable to plug into the SPDIF output on your Creative, from which you then get one Digital DIN cable and a standard digital RCA cable for the amplifier. As home theatre amplifiers don't have DIN connectors, this means that you can only plug in the RCA cable. Now the catch of course is that you need to have at least the DIN cable connected, if you want to have your sound. This is not stated anywhere clearly, but it's an easy conclusion if one of the manuals (note, not the SB manual) states that you can try to improve the sound quality by deattaching the RCA cable from the amplifier. This means the Y-cable is more like a SPDIF -> DIN converter. I also want to mention that I did connect the SB and the amplifier, using the Y-cable and the 2 other cables, but that still doesn't seem to quarantee that you will get Dolby Digital, because as long as I used the speaker set with that SB, I can only ne sure that I could get quadraphonic sound and Dolby Pro Logic sound, but I could never say for sure that I received AC3 sound, because the decoder never indicated any AC3 transmission (note that the amplifier was perfectly working). So the SPDIF isn't for home theatres and IMO it's in general too more like a hoax. Just a final note; Creative do also have several products with RCA and optical digital in- and outputs; SoundBlaster Extigy and Audigy Platinum, but that would mean a quite damn expensive investment 180-250 €.

New PC audio system

This is the best option, because now you can choose a speaker system that provides you with environmental audio and cinematic sound for sure. I once again exclude Creative's sound cards, because there's other alternatives that will be cheaper, so you can instead put more money on a good speaker system.

I will look at the alternatives more in depth, but first I would like to know what your expections are for the audio system. That will make it easier for me to get you a tailor made solution.

BTW, I do know what I'm rumbling about, because I have planning my current audio solution for hours, because I wanted to ensure that it would work seamlessly and it wouldn't be too expensive.

Case

The case is something what I'm also paying much attention to. Currently I have several suggestions based on my own personal experiences and comparing to other products and especially the price tags. Yes, you can get a good case without paying for the Antex brand (BTW great cases too, but expensive if you want to be costeffective as Pekka said he wanted to be).

First of all I small sidenote that 300W will be enough, as Tolstoi currently has about as much hardware as Pekka's new PC would have (actually even more) and it's still working just fine. But that's up to the individual PC owner what kind of a power supply he wants.

Enlight Endura 7237 and 7238 are good choices as they provide plenty of space and in overall very working. Check out the details from their website (pictures available) and Verkkokauppa.com.

But the case that will get my personal recommendation based on my experience and it's features (not to forget the price tag) is the AOpen H600A. There's plenty of space and expansion bays, four 80x80 mm case fan places and an overall good assembling system. Look for the details at AOpen's website or Verkkokauppa.com.



Pekka, in general I'm sorry for the delay, but I wanted to keep my promise from Friday, so here's my abit delayed analysis. I will be pleased to help with the audio, but I do need to know first your thoughts about what you expect from the sound system in overall and the answers to my previous questions.

[Rasbelin]

Originally posted by Asher

Samsung PC2700 (DDR333) SDRAM: I've used this personally, plus it seems to be getting the best reviews

I would although recommend these...

6319 - Verkkokauppa.com memory 256MB DDR 333MHz PC-2700, 88 €

6337 - Verkkokauppa.com memory 512MB DDR 333MHz PC-2700, 168,90 €

But it depends much on Pekka's intensions. If he wants to start tweaking with overclocking, then I could agree about the Samsung memory, but as he wanted to have a cost effective PC, the generic memory is just fine. Actually I'm using it in Trotskij.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
The much spoken Doom 3 that is said to be revolutionary demanding when it comes to graphics, actually requires a GPU of the GeForce 3 family for the best results, so the GeForce 4, Radeon 9700 and Parhelia are still premature when it comes to in-game support for all their features. A Radeon 8500 will already be more than fine for Doom 3 (if we use it for comparison).

I'm not sure what you mean about the GeForce 4 being premature when it comes to in-game features. The GeForce 4 is a GeForce 3 with a higher clockrate, faster memory, second vertex shader unit (which doesn't require any work to take advantage of - it's automatic), and support for pixel shaders 1.1, 1.2, and 1.3 while the GF3 is just 1.1.

[Rasbelin]

I just meant that the current games don't yet demand the extra speed and vertex shader provided by the GF4. It's worth waiting for a while that the prices will come down.

BTW, I do agree with your arguements about why one should get a DVD-ROM drive. Besides the prices have come down to a very low level compared to CD-ROM drives, so buying a DVD-ROM drive is a good future investment, unless you want to have a super cheap PC.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
I just meant that the current games don't yet demand the extra speed and vertex shader provided by the GF4. It's worth waiting for a while that the prices will come down.

I'm playing a game right now which requires, at a minimum, a GeForce 4 with 128MB of video RAM, and 512MB of system RAM.

Asheron's Call 2 beta - very high detail add-on.

[Rasbelin]

But it's a beta version of game from the future, not the present.

[Asher]

Originally posted by Rasbelin
But it's a beta version of game from the future, not the present.

But it's out in like 2 months. And publically available.

[Eroberer]

What's all this about image quality? I hadn't heard a thing about image quality being a deciding factor between cards for some time. Could you link to some sites that talk about image quality being that much different?

I am aware that Matrox supposedly holds the high ground in image quality, but I didn't think it was by a whole helluva lot. Thank you! =)

[Asher]

I've never noticed a different between a high end Nvidia board, ATI board, and Matrox board in 2D image quality. Some of the cheap Nvidia boards by low-end vendors have cheap RAMDACs on them and the 2D image quality suffers, but on the high end boards they're usually equal.

For 3D image quality, ATI's anisotropic filtering and anti-aliasing algorithms take "shortcuts" and aren't as "accurate" as Nvidia's, which encompass the whole scene. ATI's algorithms "guess" which parts of the screen need the effects. They're very similar, but ATI's is more efficient and Nvidia's tends to look better in the end.

[Eroberer]

I also thought that DoomIII will use some DX9 features, too.

[Asher]

DOOM III is being designed to have "full effect visuals" with GeForce 3 level technology, which is DirectX 8.

[Rasbelin]

I haven't seen any specific website about picture quality, but the fact is that the differencies do exsist as nVidia hasn't yet done much to improve the picture quality for 2D environments, unlike ATI and Matrox that provide high quality picture with most resolutions. Of course there's several GeForce 3 Titanium cards that are better than the else (especially Elsa's cards). The picture quality is reviewed in most tests so you just need to look in the reviews for the details, or the best alternatives are product round ups of multiple products.