RE: planned obsolescence rules

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.

  -----Original Message-----
  From: Tom Ferguson [mailto:tomf2468@pipeline.com]
  Sent: Monday, November 22, 2004 8:57 AM
  To: alt-photo-process-l@sask.usask.ca
  Subject: Re: planned obsolescence rules

  OK, consider me chilled :-)

  Having never put a computer together from scratch, I'm a little confused
by your shopping list. "1 gig of memory on a 2.6 ghz processor for $315" and
"AMD 2600 processor: $105" look to me to be duplicates? Isn't AMD considered
a "second class" processor compared to Pentiums (or is my PC knowledge
outdated/wrong?). I don't see an enclosure, I don't see a power supply, I
don't see a video card, I don't see a hard drive, I don't see an optical
drive (CD/DVD). But to compare that to the price of a manufactured Apple (or
PC) would be sad, the manufactured box would run about $1500 to $1700.

  Can PCs run RAID right off of the motherboard? That would be nice (I don't
"think" Apples can).

  And (most SERIOUSLY) I don't see SCSI, which is how I entered this now
completely off topic thread ;-)

  I would love to try a project like this, but I doubt that 98% of the
computer buying public would want to!

  On Sunday, November 21, 2004, at 01:23 PM, Keith Gerling wrote:

    Tom. Chill. I was just kidding. I use my friend's dual cpu Mac and it
is very very sweet. The OS and hardware is engineered like a BMW as
compared to my Mustang GT which is fast but clunky.

    You might be surprised at how easy it is to build a PC these days. The
motherboard manufatureres supply glossy well-illustrated fold out
instructions that are very simple to follow. No setting jumpers and
tweaking the BIOS anymore. Anyone that can follow instruction to make a
platinum print (or, god forbid, a gum) can put one together these days.

    The other day I put together a system for my wife: 1 gig of memory on a
2.6 ghz processor for $315. Asus motherboard: $50. Two strips 512 strips
of DDR: $160. AMD 2600 processor: $105. It took me twenty minutes, and I'm
no wiz at this stuff. She's got a very fast system with 1280 screen
resolution, 6 USB slots, firewire, Serial ATA, RAID , and great sound and
there's not a single card in it.

    Yes, I love Macs. I've got a PowerBook on my Christmas wish list (oh
pleeeese, Santa..), and I love my iPod. But I'm curious as to what a Mac
system comparable to the one above would cost. Any idea?

  --------------
  Tom Ferguson
  http://www.ferguson-photo-design.com
Received on Mon Nov 22 13:26:51 2004