Announcement

**Wizard** · 08-27-2008, 08:53 AM

Re: Bargain or swindle

1. Atom is decent for office use, 95% of browsing, youtube playbacks, music playback and some video playback, 720 would be bit of a limit. The atom board is currently on ITX board and no PCI-E, just one PCI slot.

2. X3100 is memory share video intergated into northbridge chipset. If your friend are gaming, is bad choice same with atom as well.

3. This package gives lot of software for so little hardware plus Vista is still awful for that price. Stick with XP on next build.

Give more details on what your friend do with their computer and what was the current hardware configuration?

Reason I bought 2 Atom boards so far was for low watts (total watts depending on power supply is about 45W (hd, ram, this atom board) for extrended run like low use server for our shop and a web/chat pc at my home to keep room cool during summer (successful).

Cheers, Wizard

**i4004** · 08-27-2008, 10:14 AM

Re: Bargain or swindle

gianni: take a look at component prices...it should be possible to assemble a machine with known good parts for that money...
and the one that would be easy to expand later.

atom is mostly laptop thing.

wizard, i had huuuge discussion on another forum a while back about possibility that pc make rooms too hot.
i just can't see it happen.
when it's summer you either have windows open so that any lil extra heat doesn't mean much, or you have air condition and lil extra heat equally means nothing.

show me on thermometer how much did it lower the temp.
otherwise i ditch such claims.
in that thread there was a lot of talk about server rooms increasing the temp but nobody produced a proof one monitor can cause increase in room temp.
(there it was discussed when somebody said crt make the room too hot for him...i find that silly....like humans can detect 0.x or 0.0x difference in temp and go "bam, that's now too much, i'm buying lcd"...)

**Wizard** · 08-27-2008, 10:38 AM

Re: Bargain or swindle

Hahaha. Does make difference and helps to keep room cooler at night because heat is not absorbed as much from the day's worth of heat from other stuff and this computer stuff. During the summer, mind you. No A/C [1] and window exactly face west so I get extra heat at the end of day during few hours of sunset.

Two years prior: I had athlon 3000+ (66W cpu), 512mb, quiet power supply, 9600XT video card and two hard drives, blah blah. Estimated 150-200W consumed. Samsung 173MF (80W) monitor. Made bedroom hot and I'd get sweaty often. yes there's a fan running trying to move air around.

Year ago around march, bought a Samsung 19" LCD with appox 40W both DVI/VGA ports. Helped some with less heat. Same machine.

Few months ago: E2200 with P5K and 2GB ram, HD3650 512MB blah blah. Big jump in performance but some less heat, not much. Just start of that summer, I installed home built Atom PC for the summer use and this made massive difference in room absorbed heat at each night even we had long summer of cool but there were many days of hot days & humid days.

*Does make difference*. Living room and other rooms (including a master bedroom) even they face west always were COOLER than my bedroom due to absorbed heat it got from 6 hours of computer being on.

I had DX17F that was a massive heat pump monitor. :P

[1] I banned a/c as our apartment manager will not rewire a seperate circuit with own breakers. Even this has space for at least 4 breakers. The whole living room and my bedroom outlets are on one 15A breaker in a 20 years old high rise 9 floor apartment. Go figure.

Cheers, Wizard

**willawake** · 08-27-2008, 11:21 AM

Re: Bargain or swindle

i dont think thats a good deal, not only because of the spec but i dont see anything about that model/brand on the internet. doesnt he want support?

you will find with some cheapies that the manufacturers for the parts wont deal with the customer direct because the parts are supplied in bulk to the oem at special price and with no direct support.

for the cheapest branded stuff can find here sometimes HP or Fujitsu Siemens for 300 euro (box only). I see some here.

So lets see the cheapest pc i can build :

Coolermaster Elite 330 Black - euro 36
Asus P5KPL-VM (s775, DDR2, VGA) - euro 45
E1200 - euro 40
Transcend 1gb 6400 - euro 26
Seagate 320gb - euro 44
Nec 7203 - euro 20
Chieftec 450w - euro 47

Total 258 euro

but if i want a more decent mobo like P5KC (S775, DDR2/3 ,P35), now i am at euro 312
but i will need a graphics card so add 30 euro for EAH3450 or 8400gs, now i am at 342
but if i wanted a better proc Core 2 Duo E7200 (s775/2,53) Box. now i am at euro 407

the problem is that the compromise between around 500 euro and 300 euro is so much in loss of actual value for money.

still if someone told me in pentium II era that i could get a pc for 258 euro i would have said they were crazy.....

**i4004** · 08-27-2008, 02:38 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

wizard let's see the thermometer shots with and without pc on...
you can do without pc for one day, right?

also, who's telling you outside temps were the same during 3 summers?
-------

i wasn't following other thread were gianni asked for help with his friend's pc, but i'm assuming it was less powerfull than 258€ kit willa produced.
if he finds it underpowered, then he can upgrade in the future easilly.

also., he probably has case and hdd from prev. machine.
he can spare that and buy c2d AND video card.

dunno how much are these boards
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=11&l3=584
with g35, if he wants hdmi straight from mobo...

mind you this is real pc, and atom is more of a toy...
toy which will be excellent as soon as it's cheap enough..it'll be much more convenient to use atom umpcs ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_netbooks ) on the move than full size laptops.
to buy atom desktops...i just see no sense in it....

**willawake** · 08-27-2008, 03:08 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

actually eeepc 901, 900A, 1000, 1000H use atom

**Gianni** · 08-27-2008, 03:42 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

@ Wizard: my friend uses the PC to browse, to play games and for video editing.

You can see her configuration in this thread.

Stick with XP on next build

It's not so easy to find a PC with XP, most notebook/desktop have M$ Vista as OS, but we prefer to call it "Svista" because it is pure s..t.

@ i4004: you are right for the price.

About temperature I believe that one PC probably is not able to make temperature rise in one room or at least it makes small difference, but if you have 10 PC and 1 server you can increase temperature.
I cooperate with my daughter's teachers together with some other parents to run the school's computer lab, we had installed Linux Ubuntu and we had created the network with a server, it is a small one; when we turn on all computer and server, we can feel the temperature rising after some minutes. I think the great part of hot air is due to monitor, they are 19" Sony CRT, I can't remember the type.

@ willawake: yes she wants support that's why she always call me.

When I cooperated with a friend who run a PC shop, I have seen a lot of people with a lot of problem with PC coming from big stores. Big stores have not good customer support.
Most of the time people buy a PC without knowing what they are buying, they look only the price, the aesthetics without thinking about support.
Personally I have seen PC sold with some configuration and when we opened it we discovered they were different.
Do you remember when Intel and AMD were fighting about GHz? I have seen a lot of people to spend money just to have the last CPU with higher frequency without knowing if the MOBO, videocard, HDD were good or not.
If you have a Ferrari's engine inside a Fiat500, you can't run at 400KM/h.

still if someone told me in pentium II era that i could get a pc for 258 euro i would have said they were crazy.....

Well selling computer it's not my job, but like everything in electronic field, today you can buy what was impossible 3 years ago because technology and mass production have reduced price a lot.
Unfortunately PC has become a commodity, some people buy it because is trendy, not because they need it or use it (are able to use it), OTOH this is a good thing because small shops have a lot of work when people need support.

As I wrote I'm not in this field, I like PC and I can do some reparation.
For this reason I can't judge very well a configuration, but the one my friend have found it's quite suspect.
If you separate the cost of the camera, I have found it at 76.00€, the PC value is 223.00€ including the cost of OS, Office and Antivirus. I can't believe this can be a decent PC.
I was surprised about your configuration, the price is very good and at least all known brand.
Then I was pessimistic when i wrote "My opinion is that if you want a decent desktop you can't spend less than 400/500€;".

If in the future I will need some suggestion about configuration, can I ask your help?
I don't know how it will finish with the P4PB 400 , but if my friend decide to buy a new PC and she will follow my suggestion, I'm going to order all the stuff to build a PC so she can save some money and buy something reliable.

Thanks to all for you opinion
Gianni

**zandrax** · 08-27-2008, 04:30 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

I agree with Wizard: the motherboard isn't expandeable at all.

My idea is building a pc by yourself:
Price (euro) - Components
75 - Antec NSK 3480: case + Antec Earthwatts 380W psu (Seasonic built, uses the same design of Corsair VX line but with average Teapo caps, anyway better than all no-brand psus bundled in 20-40 euro towers);
65 - Asrock A780 FullDisplayPort: full featured motherboard with a decent integrated graphics. Sadly no info about caps, usually Asrocks' weakness.
70 - AMD Athlon X2 4850E: this is an Energy Efficient edition, low consumption (it peaks at 45W, but average is 10-15 W), not hi-end performances but way better than the Atom ones;
50 - any 160 GB sata hard disk can be purchased for 35-40 euro, but I recommend a 320 GB one since the price difference is low. If I remember correctly, Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 and .10 lines were overall reliable, but you can buy Hitachi and Western Digital drives too;
25 - IMHO any DVD-RW drive will be fine;
10 - memory card reader.
--------------------
295 euro without OS and softwares. Decent pc, expandeable and with low consumption (IMO about 50-60W at idle and light load, near 100 W at peak).
If you prefer better reliability, you may trade the Asrock for the Gigabyte MA78GM-S2H (+20 euro) which employs polymer capacitors and the 4850E for the 4450E (-15 euro), 200 MHz slower.

If you want to run Vista, then you've to choose which Vista version to buy and which license: retail or OEM (cheaper but sold as a pc component: you can't install it on another pc). I don't think you want a Businnes or an Ultimate version, so Vista Home Basic ranges from 65-70 euro (OEM version) to 170 (retail), Home Premium from 85-90 euro (OEM) to 205 (retail). Softwares bundled with the Atom based pc are trial versions which can be freely downloaded, so you get no premiums here: anyway, I'd prefer OpenOffice over MS Office 90 days trial and Avira Antivir Classic (free for personal/home use) over the ubuiquitos Symantec Norton Antivirus trial, at least because Norton is a well-know system decelerator

.

If you want to try linux, choose a distro for beginners: Ubuntu (or Kubuntu if he wants a more Windows-like interface) should do the trick.

Zandrax

**Wizard** · 08-27-2008, 05:02 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

2.8 P4 is DECENT processor and shouldn't be blown any worse.
VIA is a one big headache. What I would do:

Get a good P4P800-VM or P4P800 asus board, pair of 1GB DDR (2GB total) of a brand make (like kingston, OCZ etc). and good power supply. Should fix up the pc for not too much and you can still find OEM XP home with bit of useless hardware somewhere.

Cheers, Wizard

**Gianni** · 08-27-2008, 05:29 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

zandrax thanks for your feedback.
I will keep you in "my contact list" if I need suggestion about HW.

Well... I started to use XP 2 months ago because my old but GOOD Win2000 crashed together HD.
I decided to jump on XP only because some SW were not updated for Win2K.
I think I will start to use Svista in 2015, when it will be reliable and maybe user friendly. Why I have to waste 8GB HD, 2 GB Ram to do the same thing I'm able to do with Win95/98/2000?

I saw Ubuntu at my daughter's school; it is nice but I have no time to play with it. I really would like to work with it but I don't have time to switch from Win to Linux.

For Avira: I'm using it since 2000/2001, I can't remember.
Norton: I can only speak badly about it so I prefer to say nothing.

I'm just curious: I see the MOBOs suggested by willawake and wizard have the parallel port, is it useful today?
What kind of peripheral you can attach? AFAIK today everything is USB.

@ wizard: I have already asked for a new MOBO in a shop where I have bought a PSU, they have one with socket 478 at 65.00€. I have to check if I can keep also Ram and Videocard from old system. For XP I have no problem

Anyway I will consider your suggestion when my friend has decided what to do.
P4P800: I love MOBO that still have 2 UDMA connector for PATA HDD.

Ciao
Gianni

**Wizard** · 08-27-2008, 06:48 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

P4P800 is also usb and works. Comes in 2 kinds (micro atx or ATX). Stable and reliable.

Cheers, Wizard

**linuxguru** · 08-27-2008, 10:19 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

The best value at the moment is the AM2 Athlon 64/X2-4600 (2 x 2.4 GHz), any decent AM2 mobo with polymer caps on Vcore, and 2 x 1 GB DDR2-667 (dual channel). Even with peripherals priced in, it should come in shy of $300. This thing supports x86-64 as well as Pacifica virtualization, so there's no problem using it as a server virtualization building block, either.

Equivalent Intel Core 2 Duo configs are priced higher by $50-$100.

**zandrax** · 08-28-2008, 02:21 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

Originally posted by linuxguru

The best value at the moment is the AM2 Athlon 64/X2-4600 (2 x 2.4 GHz), any decent AM2 mobo with polymer caps on Vcore, and 2 x 1 GB DDR2-667 (dual channel).

Damn, you showed me the light, Linuxguru: I forgot ram!
Well, 2 x 1 GB DDR2-667 or -800, value models from reputable manifacturers (Corsair, Kingston, OCZ), should cost around 50 euro here, maybe a few bucks less. Total cost of my configuration now rises to 345 eur w/out OS.

Originally posted by linuxguru

Even with peripherals priced in, it should come in shy of $300.

Without sales taxes? If so, then it should cost around 300 euro in Italy: despite a dollar being rated 1.45-1.5 euro, prices are charged by taxes and Vat so the effective exchange is near $1 = 1 o 1.1 euro ...

**i4004** · 08-28-2008, 04:31 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

>despite a dollar being rated 1.45-1.5 euro

when was the last time you looked at exchange rates?
thought the other way round(euro=1.5dollaer) might work.

prices in usa are lower than in europe.
one can often find cases of stuff being 2x more expensive in europe.

sure amd is cheaper. it also worse when it comes to compatibility, chipsets reliability etc.

about asus P4P800: is that realy such a bright idea?
such old boards will have their price rising(as you can't get them anymore) and with it you don't really gain anything(2x udma? you can put pci udma controller in new board, just like i did) except limited expandibility.

oh yeah, asrock is cheaper asus, which means it's too cheap and can host badcaps.

I'm just curious: I see the MOBOs suggested by willawake and wizard have the parallel port, is it useful today?
What kind of peripheral you can attach?

no, it' not really usefull today. parallel port printers are mostly gone.

**zandrax** · 08-28-2008, 04:53 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

Originally posted by i4004

>despite a dollar being rated 1.45-1.5 euro

when was the last time you looked at exchange rates?
thought the other way round(euro=1.5dollaer) might work.

Nevermind: I meant 1 euro = $1.5 but tiredness tricked me again (it's 1 am now).

Zandrax

**kc8adu** · 08-28-2008, 05:40 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

i would pass on that.
i assume its mail order so who knows what crap lurks in that thing.
i would seek out hardware with a known good track record even if it means spending more or buying used.
cheap crummy parts mean more profit for the seller.

**Wizard** · 08-28-2008, 05:58 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

What have to do with parallel port!!?

Just don't worry about that, if some people still use it, then that is great.

The newest Atom boards I got did have parallel port along with plenty of usb ports.

P4P800 is reason I suggest because I knew these well. Your cpu 2.8Ghz with 800MHz is always socket 478 cpu so that intemmiately bought up this P4P800. I like this much and little known fact:

Take Asus's CT479 adapter and a 533 mhz fsb mobile pentium and you have another low watts with decent performance. Using with the P4P800. Up to 2.0GHz oh, dual channel DDR. What can you ask with some performance on top?

Cheers, Wizard

**willawake** · 09-27-2008, 01:05 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

Albatron PMG31 34.99
Intel Celeron Dual Core E1200 / 1,6 GHz 40
Transcend Ram 1GB DDR2 DIMM PC2 6400-800 (JM) 13.26
Asus TA-891 Black Case 24.5
Chieftec 450W 24pin 40
Seagate 160GB HDD (8MB Cache, 7200.10, Sata 2, ST3160815AS) 34
NEC 7203 DVDRW +/- Black (IDE, Label Flash, Bulk) 19

total 205.75 euro

lol i think i might build this just for the hell of it......
my albatron with 2.66 celeron providing flawless media centre duties after recapped with mcz

board

cheapest tft is Asus TFT 19" VW195D for 135 euro. that kinda messes things up. in the past an AOC or Samsung CRT was about 60 euro. my AOC on media centre still going strong. i cannot believe that

can throw in an ECS 8400 GS SVGA (PCI-Express, 256MB, Silent) for 26 euro. Already got one of these has chemicon caps and a few odd minors

keyboard could be 4.5 euro for black unknown or 9 for microsoft (the small one with no palm rest). mouse would be 10 for unknown or 12.5 for Microsoft Optical Basic Black USB

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**willawake** · 09-27-2008, 01:57 PM

Re: Bargain or swindle

hmm looks different

still some polymers in the areas which count

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