New Dell Desktop.
Discussion
£1k will by a lot of machine.
Is performance in games essential or are you looking for maximum grunt in other areas?
Games = Dell's XPS range, they are apparently very good (have a M170? Laptop and it's a stonker).
Grunt = maybe a Precision 380 with a few extras (DVD rewriter and such) thrown in or a Dimension 9150?
Is performance in games essential or are you looking for maximum grunt in other areas?
Games = Dell's XPS range, they are apparently very good (have a M170? Laptop and it's a stonker).
Grunt = maybe a Precision 380 with a few extras (DVD rewriter and such) thrown in or a Dimension 9150?
Always had Dell, currently running an old P3 500 I got as a second from Dell about 1998, never had any problems with it. We also most of our desktops at work are Dell as are a number of servers which to me have always been better than the new HP's we run. Not really after a games machine more a decent future proof setup.
Edited by markys on Sunday 30th July 17:30
I prefer Dell too, not because they're better but because they're kind of standard at work and most customers I visit so its handy if I forget my power supply or something.
If you're looking to run Vista then you'd do better to wait until its released (probably January). Machine sold now may have 'Designed for Vista' stickers but they remind me a lot of the 'Designed for Windows 95' stickers that were on machines a few months before the release of that operating system. I remember that most of those machines did run Win95, but extremely slowly.
If you need a machine now then I'd be looking for 2Gb of RAM as a minimum (at least make sure you configure it so you have some freem memory slots to add more RAM later). Vista also makes use of certain graphics extensions which extremely few cards on the market support at the moment, look into this and see if you can get one of those cards. Finally, get a big fast hard disk (160Gb / 7200rpm) or get 2 smaller hard disks but make sure they're 7200rpm. That should be relatively future proof and fit into budget.
PS: If you wait a few months then the price of the new Core 2 Duo CPUs should come down a bit - in either case go for the 2Ghz or 2.16Ghz but not the top-end processor 'cos it costs much much more than what the few extra Mhz are worth.
If you're looking to run Vista then you'd do better to wait until its released (probably January). Machine sold now may have 'Designed for Vista' stickers but they remind me a lot of the 'Designed for Windows 95' stickers that were on machines a few months before the release of that operating system. I remember that most of those machines did run Win95, but extremely slowly.
If you need a machine now then I'd be looking for 2Gb of RAM as a minimum (at least make sure you configure it so you have some freem memory slots to add more RAM later). Vista also makes use of certain graphics extensions which extremely few cards on the market support at the moment, look into this and see if you can get one of those cards. Finally, get a big fast hard disk (160Gb / 7200rpm) or get 2 smaller hard disks but make sure they're 7200rpm. That should be relatively future proof and fit into budget.
PS: If you wait a few months then the price of the new Core 2 Duo CPUs should come down a bit - in either case go for the 2Ghz or 2.16Ghz but not the top-end processor 'cos it costs much much more than what the few extra Mhz are worth.
Edited by Jared_m on Sunday 30th July 18:31
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