The Computer Buzz

February 22th, 2007

Nome and Paul Van Middlesworth - owners - The Computer Factory
 

Selecting A New PC

The decision process involved in selecting a new PC should be identical to that employed in buying a new car, boat, house, TV set or living room suite. One simply matches ones requirements to the attributes of the merchandise being considered.

For the rich and famous, decisions are easy. They simply buy the biggest, fastest or best of everything regardless of cost. They don't bother with the details. We love PC customers like them but they are few and far between.

Most of our customers seek a balance between costs and need. It would be ridiculous for a business to spend thousands of dollars for a lightning fast gaming PC to be used in the accounting department. On the other hand, a $500 PC for a 16-year-old high end gamer or for someone who does video and audio transcription simply won't cut it.

One of the things that independent PC makers like The Computer Factory do very well is to help users define their needs before they buy. Buying an "open architecture" PC as opposed to a proprietary "package PC" allows users to design a PC that optimizes the cost function trade-off.

"Open architecture PCs" are much easier to upgrade and maintain than "package PCs." That means "open architecture" PCs are easier to keep up with technology and lower in lifetime maintenance cost.

Although we create some interesting and exotic PCs and servers for special commercial/industrial applications, we have a single page configuration sheet that allows us to design 90 % of the PCs we build for home and business workstations.

The heart of any PC is the CPU. We use the AMD Sempron 3400 CPU in our basic systems. The Sempron workstation has a 375-Watt power supply, 20X-DVD/CD burner, 512Mb of RAM and a 80Gb hard drive. Using the same motherboard, case and DVD burner, if you give us an extra half hour we can build a dual core Athlon 5200 workstation with a 600-Watt power supply. 4.0Gb of RAM, dual 320Gb hard drives and a 512Mb video card that's design flexibility.

The point is that although these two configurations differ widely in cost and performance, there are hundreds of possible configurations between the two extremes. One of them will meet your specific set of needs.

We use four CPU families in our standard systems. The Sempron 3400 for standard applications. The Athlon 3800 for high performance gaming and graphics. The Athlon 2X 3800-5200 and the Intel Core 2 Duo E series are used for servers and other applications requiring dual core CPUs.

In a dollar for dollar comparison, the Athlon 2X and the Intel "E" series processors are roughly equal in performance but the most expensive Intel CPU is faster and more expensive than the fastest Athlon 2X .If you're rich and famous, the Intel 2 Quad 6600 is for you.

Whatever new PC you select, we strongly recommend avoiding the Vista operating system entirely until Microsoft releases its de-bugged version early in 2008.