Monday, September 01, 2008
11:37 by FoxTwo
Image via Wikipedia Some time last week, my PC died on me. That would kind of explain my disappearance from Plurk, as well as the sudden dearth of updates on this blog.
Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I'm also currently a little tight on budget, hence I couldn't spend too much to replace my dead PC. Thus began my trek down to SLS (Sim Lim Square), the Holy Shrine Of All Things Technological. I kept chanting "Under $500, under $500" to reinforce in myself that I shouldn't exceed my budget even if I come across something that is totally awesomely cool, and to stick to the plan.
So naturally I popped in to Bell Systems up on the 5th floor. It has kinda become my "regular" place eversince my old "regular" shop closed down. For one thing, their service there is actually pretty dang good. They don't bug you or recommend outrageously-priced items hoping to make another sale. As an illustration, I told them my budget was $500. After some calculations, they recommended I go with an AMD system instead of an Intel system, and the whole thing would cost $400 with the case (as opposed to $600+ for an Intel system).
So yeah, I took their advice (which seem pretty reasonable) and went with the best that is available within my budget. In fact, I'd say my new "budget system" is out-performing my old top-of-the-line system by far. Comparing the prices I paid for, this current system is a steal. The old one cost me $1600 approximately. Current one is 1/4 the price!
I tested my usual games on the new PC and yeah, they do play smoother, and I could increase the graphics quality too with no significant loss of framerates.
I have friends who asked me why I didn't want to head down to Comex (which was on at the time I was getting this new system). My reason is simple - at Sim Lim Square, you can custom build your own system. You don't have to "settle" for anything. For example, I chose not to put in a floppy drive for this new PC (seriously, when was the last time you stuck a floppy disk into your PC?) but replaced that drive bay with a slew of memory card readers - SD, MMC, Memory Stick, CF etc. So yeah now I dun need to stick any card readers into USB slots to read my SD cards.
Also, I could install ANY OS I want to on custom-built machines. I could install Linux, or Vista, or XP, or whatever. No they don't do OS installations - they just build the machine for me. I bring it home and do the installations myself.
One thing I can say - RAMS are getting cheaper. I should have gotten 4GBs instead of just 2GBs, for about $27 or so per GB. I think I'll pop by soon and grab 2GB more, and run this PC on dual-channel RAMs instead. Should improve performance somewhat.
So in summary - for just $400 I could get a pretty good system. The motherboard I got was a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H board. Yeah I'm a Gigabyte fan. In my opinion they make the most stable motherboards around. Yes I value stability over "overclockability". As for the CPU, it's an AMD Athlon x2 5000, so it's like about 2.5Ghz per core. What I saved on was the graphics card - ATI Radeon HD3200 built-in on the motherboard, which is actually pretty decent. The only downside to these integrated cards is that the "VRAM" is now your system RAM, so a chunk of it is taken out for graphics. If the graphics chip was an Intel or something sucky, I'd have rejected it.
![Reblog this post [with Zemanta]](http://img.zemanta.com/reblog_e.png?x-id=2ad2a85e-d58d-4bd0-ad17-5b465f45af01)
11:37 by FoxTwo
Image via Wikipedia Some time last week, my PC died on me. That would kind of explain my disappearance from Plurk, as well as the sudden dearth of updates on this blog.Due to some unfortunate circumstances, I'm also currently a little tight on budget, hence I couldn't spend too much to replace my dead PC. Thus began my trek down to SLS (Sim Lim Square), the Holy Shrine Of All Things Technological. I kept chanting "Under $500, under $500" to reinforce in myself that I shouldn't exceed my budget even if I come across something that is totally awesomely cool, and to stick to the plan.
So naturally I popped in to Bell Systems up on the 5th floor. It has kinda become my "regular" place eversince my old "regular" shop closed down. For one thing, their service there is actually pretty dang good. They don't bug you or recommend outrageously-priced items hoping to make another sale. As an illustration, I told them my budget was $500. After some calculations, they recommended I go with an AMD system instead of an Intel system, and the whole thing would cost $400 with the case (as opposed to $600+ for an Intel system).
So yeah, I took their advice (which seem pretty reasonable) and went with the best that is available within my budget. In fact, I'd say my new "budget system" is out-performing my old top-of-the-line system by far. Comparing the prices I paid for, this current system is a steal. The old one cost me $1600 approximately. Current one is 1/4 the price!
I tested my usual games on the new PC and yeah, they do play smoother, and I could increase the graphics quality too with no significant loss of framerates.
I have friends who asked me why I didn't want to head down to Comex (which was on at the time I was getting this new system). My reason is simple - at Sim Lim Square, you can custom build your own system. You don't have to "settle" for anything. For example, I chose not to put in a floppy drive for this new PC (seriously, when was the last time you stuck a floppy disk into your PC?) but replaced that drive bay with a slew of memory card readers - SD, MMC, Memory Stick, CF etc. So yeah now I dun need to stick any card readers into USB slots to read my SD cards.
Also, I could install ANY OS I want to on custom-built machines. I could install Linux, or Vista, or XP, or whatever. No they don't do OS installations - they just build the machine for me. I bring it home and do the installations myself.
One thing I can say - RAMS are getting cheaper. I should have gotten 4GBs instead of just 2GBs, for about $27 or so per GB. I think I'll pop by soon and grab 2GB more, and run this PC on dual-channel RAMs instead. Should improve performance somewhat.
So in summary - for just $400 I could get a pretty good system. The motherboard I got was a Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H board. Yeah I'm a Gigabyte fan. In my opinion they make the most stable motherboards around. Yes I value stability over "overclockability". As for the CPU, it's an AMD Athlon x2 5000, so it's like about 2.5Ghz per core. What I saved on was the graphics card - ATI Radeon HD3200 built-in on the motherboard, which is actually pretty decent. The only downside to these integrated cards is that the "VRAM" is now your system RAM, so a chunk of it is taken out for graphics. If the graphics chip was an Intel or something sucky, I'd have rejected it.
Labels: self
