Shopping for a PC

[Ouchyfish]

I am looking for a new PC for my wife that can handle EQ relatively well. I don't want to buy/build something that can be used to control Space Shuttles in orbit or some other kind of powerhouse mega hard NSA thing but I'd like to know minimum Processor, RAM, and Vid-Card to be able to handle EQ and/or WoW/EQ2/whatever else comes down the pike in the next year or so.

Looking to spend anywhere from 500-2000.

Thanks!

(Wasn't sure about posting this here or tech so move at will.)

[supnoobs]

64 bit amd, dual Gf 6800.

2 hardrives, sound card, cd rom, 1gig $2200

___

amd 3200+ k7n2 delta board, ati9800pro or gf6800, 1g -1100$

[Ouchyfish]

2 hds?

[supnoobs]

hard rives. 2 or 4 that what raid thing is, the info is shared between 2 or more hard drives for faster access. dual gf6800 setup is presented here http://www.hardwareanalysis.com/content/article/1728/

[Finalzion Damanasponge]

jizm..

[Ouchyfish]

jizm..

/agree!!

[Martrae]

If you want it to push the new stuff coming make one that can control space shuttles.

[Solaar Powar]

wiping off my screen

[Langston]

Martrae - the first space shuttle had less processing power than my Palm pilot.

And - regarding the RAID for a home machine... if you want to go RAID-5 then you may notice an increase in performance if you use striping. RAID-0 (two drives) is NOT faster. It is mirroring between the two drive for fault tolerance only. Either way, it will require you to spend extra money on a RAID controller as well as having to buy SCSI drives... all for a totally unnoticeable speed difference. A home machine used for home purposes will NEVER need that kind of performance... you just don't generate anywhere NEAR the number of read/writes necessary to see a performance increase.

Stick with a plain Jane drive... go big though - 120GB.

[Martrae]

Yeah, but I was using it in the context he meant. Meaning get the fastest, biggest you can afford.

[vonkaar]

And - regarding the RAID for a home machine... if you want to go RAID-5 then you may notice an increase in performance if you use striping. RAID-0 (two drives) is NOT faster. It is mirroring between the two drive for fault tolerance only.

Incorrect.

Raid-0 is striping only, no fault tolerance. Raid-1 is mirroring, no striping. Raid-0 is most definitely faster for a home computer. Almost all of the top benchmark systems out there either use the SATA Raid controller built on their motherboard, or they go with some of the more fancy 'huge cache' controllers that you can find nowadays. Regardless, there definitely is a large performance boost to be found with a pair (or more) of 10k RPM SATA drives in one of the stiping RAID configurations. I used to run a pair of 36Gb 10k SATA Raptors... I can get the data thoroughput and access times if you want.

reference:

RAID-0. This technique has striping but no redundancy of data. It offers the best performance but no fault-tolerance.
RAID-1. This type is also known as disk mirroring and consists of at least two drives that duplicate the storage of data. There is no striping. Read performance is improved since either disk can be read at the same time. Write performance is the same as for single disk storage. RAID-1 provides the best performance and the best fault-tolerance in a multi-user system.
RAID-2. This type uses striping across disks with some disks storing error checking and correcting (ECC) information. It has no advantage over RAID-3.
RAID-3. This type uses striping and dedicates one drive to storing parity information. The embedded error checking (ECC) information is used to detect errors. Data recovery is accomplished by calculating the exclusive OR (XOR) of the information recorded on the other drives. Since an I/O operation addresses all drives at the same time, RAID-3 cannot overlap I/O. For this reason, RAID-3 is best for single-user systems with long record applications.
RAID-4. This type uses large stripes, which means you can read records from any single drive. This allows you to take advantage of overlapped I/O for read operations. Since all write operations have to update the parity drive, no I/O overlapping is possible. RAID-4 offers no advantage over RAID-5.
RAID-5. This type includes a rotating parity array, thus addressing the write limitation in RAID-4. Thus, all read and write operations can be overlapped. RAID-5 stores parity information but not redundant data (but parity information can be used to reconstruct data). RAID-5 requires at least three and usually five disks for the array. It's best for multi-user systems in which performance is not critical or which do few write operations.
RAID-6. This type is similar to RAID-5 but includes a second parity scheme that is distributed across different drives and thus offers extremely high fault- and drive-failure tolerance. There are few or no commercial examples currently.
RAID-7. This type includes a real-time embedded operating system as a controller, caching via a high-speed bus, and other characteristics of a stand-alone computer. One vendor offers this system.
RAID-10. This type offers an array of stripes in which each stripe is a RAID-1 array of drives. This offers higher performance than RAID-1 but at much higher cost.
RAID-53. This type offers an array of stripes in which each stripe is a RAID-3 array of disks. This offers higher performance than RAID-3 but at much higher cost.

[greatdark]

Try checking out http://www.alienware.com

[Langston]

Gah - you caught me in an error, Vonk!

QQ~

[Harrison]

People who buy alienware are retarded.

[Dragons]

Try checking out http://www.alienware.com

Do yourself a favor, and don't.

[10sun]

You can get IDE raid fyi. Used to run a Promise Ultra IDE controller mod'd to be a RAID controller. Simple little thing I paid less than $30 total for. Made a huge impact on system performance.

-Adam