Re: planned obsolescence rules

Sorry to make this my "maiden" contribution to this list -- and without an introduction!

However, I must say (as a professional in the field, for what that's worth) that there are simply no statistical reliability differences between AMD and Intel processors. (But "statistics" says nothing about individual cases, of course.) You can get awful samples of either. I have had the good fortune to be so "blessed", on a few occasions, over the years.

I have no stock in either company, but AMD CPUs consistently outperform Intel CPUs in industry tests, dollar for dollar and clock speed for clock speed. I've used AMD for the last 7 or 8 years for my desktop at home; on the other hand, my laptop is an Intel.

If you buy a "bare bones" system from one of the many providers, you can almost always get an OEM copy of W2K or XP pre-installed. If you buy the system starting from piece-parts, things become somewhat more dicey in this respect. It is usually cheaper and easier to find a bare bones system somewhat close to what you want, then add to it. That is the normal way the bare bones suppliers do business; they expect that you'll considerably customize the system from their base listings.

In any case, for $1K to $1.5K carefully spent you can get a system that will simply knock your socks off running any conceivable current application.

- Don Feinberg
ducque@mindspring.com
 
  ----- Original Message -----
  From: Bill Laidley
  To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
  Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 4:28 PM
  Subject: Re: planned obsolescence rules

  A couple of comments...

  The pricing does not include purchasing Windows, which isn't cheap. Sometimes you can get OEM pricing, but depending on the version of Windows you choose it could easily add $200 to the price.

  I had a system built using an AMD CPU several years ago - several times a day i got the 'blue screen of death' (Windows died horribly) and I lost whatever i was working on at the time. I decided that the amount of time I lost wasn't free and had the CPU changed to Intel. The problem immediately went away. It may have been AMD, it may have been Windows - I never found the cause. Things may have improved since then, but I still only use Intel CPUs.

  On 22-Nov-04, at 2:00 PM, Tom Ferguson wrote:

    WOW! That does give one reason to pau$e!

    On Monday, November 22, 2004, at 01:27 PM, Keith Gerling wrote:

      Tom,
       
      I put this stuff in an existing box, so I guess you could call this an upgrade. These days video, audio, and networking functions are often (usually) available on the mainboard, thus no cards. Her Asus board has built in SATA RAID, and I've been running onboard ATA RAID for years on an old Abit board. Checking today's specials at Newegg.com, I see that you can buy a 16X DVD drive for $62 and a pretty decent case/power supply for $30. I see that Outpost.com is offering a 200 MB Seagate drive for $70 I've got a whole box of SCSI cards that I hopefully will never need again, but I see Newegg has one for $17. So it wouldn't be a major hit to put an entire system together from scratch.
       
       
      So, If I were putting a system together today with a $1700 Apple budget, I'd do this:
       
      2 200 GB Seagate drives
        RAID drives 140
      MSI dual cpu mainboard 205
      2 10,000 RPM 40MB
        SATA drives (RAID) 210
      DVD 65
      2 AMD 64 bit processors 300
      2 additional video cards 80
      case/power supply 50
      4 Gig RAM 700
       
      Wow! Ponder that for a moment. You have 4 gigs of RAM, and you put your Photoshop scratch disk on your RAID SATA drives which are spinning at 10,000. You still have 400 GB of RAID storage. All that, and DUAL 64 bit processors. AND, you have three monitors. The connoisseur side of me says "go Apple". but the financially poor computer side of me wins out!
       
      As for AMD vs. Intel? Well, that's entirely different war. AMD seems to be ahead of Intel with the ability tof offer fancy chipsets, 64bit, etc. I certainly wouldn't call them "second class". I prefer AMD over Intel because they always win out in the benchmark tests running Photoshop, which is my primary application. Also, for some reason, dual AMDs of similar speed run some applications (like video editting and 3d rendering) at FAR greater speeds than similar dual Pentiums.

    --------------
    Tom Ferguson
    http://www.ferguson-photo-design.com

  ---------------
  Bill Laidley

  wlaidley@shaw.ca
Received on Mon Nov 22 16:53:38 2004