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I did a quick price check and for 100 terabytes of data on 80GB drives (Best price/size ratio I could find), that's about $111,250 worth of storage. Of course, I guess they would get bulk discounts :).

A geforce4 with tv-out costs $71

Does that mean tv-out costs $71? no, because you can get a tv-out capable card for much less. the $71 is for the gf4.

and yes I know you can find controller adapters, but it will likely cost more than the tv-out. that was the point.

I love the "deals of the day section" where they advertise a 256 meg stick of PC 2100 for $99! What a deal! Pricewatch has them for under 60 shipped. Gratned that's generic, kingston is available for $67, but this company should be sued for offering crappy deals, not DMCA violations.

Actually, your best bet as far as price/performance goes is probably the GeForce4 TI 4200 64MB which is going for $109 on pricewatch.com, as compared to the GeForce4 TI 4600 which is going for $210 dollars yet only gives you an extra 15% gaming performance.

Should be able to pick up a nice 64MB GF2 fairly cheap.

See here ($50) or
here ($40 for MX400).

Hold on for just a second. A can of coke costs about a nickle to make, can, ship and refrigerate and I just payed 0.75$ for it out of a vending machine.

High profit margins don't make you a monopoly. Let's put aside for a moment the fact that a significant portion of that $300 price per unit (the store purchase price) is going to various middlemen. Windows costs $80 as often as not. Not intended as an advertisement, it is just the first quote I grabbed. Also, I'm sure that MS could charge less than $45 and still make a profit - since they'd sell more copies. We'll put all of that aside.

Are their prices out of line for software, generally? Higher than the cost of Linux doesn't count. Is their profit margin out of line for successful software makers in other areas? How much could Blizzard sell Diablo II for and still make a profit? What about other business software bendors - GraphPad software, say? Has anyone examined them to see if they're making too much money on their $400/desktop prism software?

MS has priced their product (successfully, I'm sure) to maximise their profit - which is NOT the cheapest price they could charge, any more than the same is true for Coca-Cola. This is a feature of our modern "capitalist" society; competition only goes so far in the face of advertising and consumer apathy. It has nothing to do with being a monopoly.

If Macs didn't cost so much I'd be a happy Macintosh/OS X user right now. The fact of the matter is that I can't afford that great of a PC, and you get *WAY* more bang for your buck buying an Athlon system with components found on sites like Pricewatch than you would dumping that same amount of cash on a Mac. In fact that same amount of cash might not even get you a Mac, and that's even considering the Microsoft tax.

The bottom line is that if Apple stopped selling "designer computers" and allowed their hardware to be cloned again, there would probably be alot more people like me using Macs (and I told Apple as much a while back when they were soliciting the public's opinions on thier products). Don't pin me as a Microsoft lover because that I am definitely NOT. I can't stand Windows, especially when it comes to developing for it. What I am in favor of is less hassles when it comes to getting my other work done, and unfortunately right now it's either Microsoft or Apple. Due to my finanical limitations, I'm stuck with Microsoft. There are a litany of things that keep me from any other desktop UNIX aside from OS X, the biggest item on that list being the X11 Windowing System (*shudder*).

As a side note, and this will probably either get me flamed or modded down (or both), I'm really not interested in Linux/Name-Your-Other-Favorite-Opensource-OS-Here for use on my desktop. Been there, done that. The UNIXes work great for my server tasks, and for that purpose OpenBSD has served me well, but I'm just not interested in the hassle of Unix/Linux on the desktop. Yes, I know Mac OS X is BSD based, yes I know it sits on top of a UNIX core, but admit it, Mac OS X is so much more than just it's UNIX core. Heck, if Linux was even *close* to OS X people would be beating the doors down on the FTP sites and Linux vendors/distros/whatever-they're-called to get it. Mac OS X and the other UNIX are apples and oranges (no pun intended).

Don't you get it? They've already overclocked it. That's the only way they could get these out... and the only reason why they are so hard to find (it's so overclocked only a very tiny percent of the chips can even handle it).

...and it's probably still slower than a dual Athlon MP rig. I compared a 2.8-GHz P4 rig we recently built at work to the dual 1900+ in my office (both with 512 MB of DDR and 15krpm SCSI hard drives). On a TMPGEnc MPEG-2 encoding job from a Huffyuv-compressed AVI, the dual Athlon ran 41% faster (7:56 for the Athlon vs. 13:21 for the P4). Cost for the two was about the same. Dual Xeons would be faster still, but one 2.6-GHz Xeon costs more than double what you'd pay for a pair of Athlon MP 2200s (so sez Pricewatch). Dual P4s? Forget it...Intel doesn't support it.

According to pricewatch.com the current going price is $30 - $49

Here

I would like to add my "me too!" here. POV-Ray is a very good renderer. Not only is it easy to use but it has its own language built in. The language is similar to that used by Pixar's Renderman but un-alike enough to avoid legal disputes. A number of modellers now support POV-Ray and POV-Ray has proved itself by being used in one or two movies as the render engine for the computer graphics. (I forget which ones but I do remember reading blurbs about it being used.)

Some other useful things:

1. AC3D, Moray, Strata 3D, and Hash have all been mentioned. I believe they all now support POV-Ray output.

2. Go to the POV-Ray website. They have a multitude of links to other locations where you can download and try various pieces of software. A lot of them are free.

3. Go to 3D Cafe to get a lot of 3D models which you can use (most for free some for a fee!) in whatever you want so long as you give the authors credit. They are a great starting point for creating your own models. In fact, there are sites around the world which have tons of free models. For military ones go to military sites. Space - NASA, European Space Agency, etc....

I know I'm deviating a bit here but something to think about with POV-Ray: You can now get IBM PCs dirt cheap on the net. Maya costs $1,500.00 or more. Lightwave is about $3,000.00. You can get six or seven dirt cheap, 800mhz systems for around $200.00 each with 128mb of memory, install Linux on all of them, hook them up via ethernet, and go to town rendering at six times the speed that one copy of Maya or Lightwave will give you. Who cares if it takes six minutes per line? At 1280x1024 it would normally take you 6144 minutes(a little more than four days) but with six systems that is reduced to about 17 hours. In our experience, even dealing with a fully stocked space station, the space shuttle, and all of the items in the space shuttle's cargo bay (with reflects, transparencies, et al) it only normally takes about three to six minutes to render a single frame. (Everything takes up about 500MB to 1GB for all of the models.) In fact - it generally takes POV-Ray longer to read in all of the modelling information than it does to do the actual render. So I'd really think about it. POV-Ray is really very powerful.

GeForce2 MX200 32MB for $60? Please tell me you're joking. I can get a GeForce2 Ti 64MB for ten bucks less than that right now. Your "local little chain store" is eating your wallet for a lunch.

Wrong...check out PriceWatch. You can still get old stuff from some suppliers for a decent price. For example, there's a GF3 TI200 for 70 bucks and A GF2 TI for 50 bucks. Even the prices on some of the newer GF4's are reasonable.

Motherboards can be found at http://www.macresq.com and http://www.shrevesystems.com/ although a lot of times they are refurbished and processors new can be found here http://www.sonnettech.com/ and http://eshop.macsales.com/ . Of course if you have time all these things can be found on http://www.ebay.com/. And for everything else use http://www.pricewatch.com/ for ram, video card, etc. As for specifications on each board starting from g3s go to http://www.info.apple.com/support/applespec.html.

AMD has been losing the speed war for several months now, but I think they have been winning the price war all along

Not really. In most cases, the Athlon model number is chosen to reflect which Pentium 4 speed it competes with. Therefore, the Athlon 2400+ on average performs about as well as the 2.4 GHz P4 in the benchmarks. If you look at the latest prices, the Athlon 2400 is $3 more than the P4 2.4 GHz.

A friend of mine recently built a new computer, and he was choosing between the P4 2.53 GHz and the fastest Athlon available (which did not perform as well as the P4). After adding the costs up for both systems, the P4 system about $10 more. I don't see that as a big win in the price war.

While you do want to make sure your controller supports optical discs, it is not too hard to find ones that do for a reasonable price. ATAPI controller $20 - $30

The first I remember seeing PCI was in a Pentium 60. That's been, what, 7-8 years ago off the top of my head? AGP's been at least 4. No offense but I dont think the computer industry should hold up for your ISA sound card. ISA seriously sucks, you might just have to break down and buy a new $9 PCI sound card.

Just where can you buy one of these? Who has ever heard of Verax or Herolchi, anyway? I searched on google, pricewatch, and newegg; and I couldn't find anything but a single Fortron offering.

I've always had a really hard time finding these "secret" premium low-noise components. I would love to make my desktop quieter, and I would love to believe that these products will do the job. But if they're so awesome, why doesn't anybody sell them?

How about if you could get the CPU and motherboard for $130??

Go here.

Go Storage:Floppy Drives:USB.

Pick the first non-ECS product you see.

Voila, under $40, shipped. Some people pay more for software....

And your point is? (S)he specificially stated portable scanner like the handheld scanners of the 80's before flatbeds became cheap. You just as well could have posted a link to memory, a monitor, or an entire system since they are all are about as relevent to what they were looking for. Why not post a link to the PC scanners also? Maybe that would be of benefit too.

And your point is? (S)he specificially stated portable scanner like the handheld scanners of the 80's before flatbeds became cheap. You just as well could have posted a link to memory, a monitor, or an entire system since they are all are about as relevent to what they were looking for. Why not post a link to the PC scanners also? Maybe that would be of benefit too.

And your point is? (S)he specificially stated portable scanner like the handheld scanners of the 80's before flatbeds became cheap. You just as well could have posted a link to memory, a monitor, or an entire system since they are all are about as relevent to what they were looking for. Why not post a link to the PC scanners also? Maybe that would be of benefit too.

And your point is? (S)he specificially stated portable scanner like the handheld scanners of the 80's before flatbeds became cheap. You just as well could have posted a link to memory, a monitor, or an entire system since they are all are about as relevent to what they were looking for. Why not post a link to the PC scanners also? Maybe that would be of benefit too.

Sorry for replying to myself, but here is the correct link for the Mac compatible scanners on pricewatch...

Pricewatch.com has a whole section for Mac compatible scanners but I didn't see any that were hand-held..

Pricewatch.com has a whole section for Mac compatible scanners but I didn't see any that were hand-held..

By the way, Aten sells USB serial adapters for $19.

That page also has a link to Centrix which, at $9 shipping per order, is remaindering USB serial adapters for $4 and USB parallel adapters for $2. I would not argue that that repesents an equilibrium price though.

DVD-R (4700MB): $0.63 per DVD = $7.46/GB
CD-R (700MB): $0.12 per CD = $5.83/GB

RAID5 (w/ standard ATA disks) is only a little more than $1/GB.

I think I'd go for a combo setup. RAID5 for the larger primary storage, and DVD-R for regular backups of only the most critical data. If a harddisk dies, just swap in another. Lose the whole array (in a fire or whatever), and at least there's some (offsite) backups on DVD.

You still can't rely on CD-R/DVD-R as permanent backup though - the media starts to deteriorate after a few years. Most of my old 1X CDRs are corrupt today.

--

>Of course you have to disagree. Your livelihood is made on the lie that I'm exposing.

My life is founded on a conspiracy theory? Uhhhh, sure...... And Roswell really happened.

I'm not a full time salesman anymore anyways -- I mostly do consulting right now (its probably the best odd job possible for a college student :-).

>Even companies like Gateway and Dell ship crappy products that don't last very long.

In fact, they often ship crappy products.

>You can get PCs of comparable quality to Macintoshes from IBM and probably Toshiba (and maybe HP before they merged with compaq.)

(cough) Aptiva (cough) and whatever HP calls their low-end machines. No way these guys make 100% good PCs.

It all comes down to price. Pay enough and you will get a good quality PC.

Fact is, the price to get a good quality PC is lower than the price for a similar Mac.

Of course, you need to go to the correct retailers. Dell, IBM, Gateway, Compaq, (insert big box store/name here) are just often not the correct retailers. The correct retailer is, almost always, for a home user, your local computer shop. Listen to what they say, and DON'T tell them to build you something on the cheap.

They'll come up with a system that outperforms a Mac, and at a price that's affordable.

>The reason for this (and the reason it will always bee like this) is the PowerPC is much cheaper for Apple and quality PC commodity parts cost the same for it and for PC manufacturers.

So the entire basis of your reasoning that Macs are cheaper than PCs is based on the price of the processor and operating system?

I have news for you: The C3 costs less than $35 US (my guess, considering motherboards using it are ridiculously low in price), and is a 100% x86 compatible CPU. Do currently produced PowerPC CPUs cost less than that for a consumer?

>So, apple doesn't have to pay for windows and gets faster processors for less money and passes the savings on to us.

No, Apple users have to pay for Jaguar. No, Apple users don't get faster processors at all. Mac processors currently look so pathetic to Apple themselves they are considering moving to the x86 platform, or at least away from PowerPC stuff (check slashdot's history in the past month for stories corroborating this). Here's the list price for Jaguar, BTW: $129 USD. It actually costs more than windows: $92 US.

I still don't see how a Mac is cheaper. Even if the CPU was free, PCs can easily beat out a $35 price margin. Even if the OS was free (which is certainly doesn't appear to be anymore) with some work one can build a quality PC that performs as well for less.

I still see no evidence that a Mac system is cheaper than a PC system in any way.

One comes up on Pricewatch and Google, which frequently highlights vendors, has only brought up articles, reviews, passing references for the ST3120023AS

Note: The second Seagate link gives some idea of where SATA is going, starting at 150MBytes/sec external transfer speed, yet their tech spec indicates 150Mbits/sec. So far benchs show no advantage, unless you prefer/need the wiring change. Your milage may vary.

Minimum Advertised Price (MAP) has been around for a while, and not only in the music industry. When I first read this story I remember reading about this somewhere else, and it happens to be in the PC Hardware in a Nutshell book I'm reading from O'Reilly (Thompson & Thompson, 2002). It mentions that a good amount of PC hardware prices are held high due to this same MAP scheme. Fortunately we have pricewatch to help keep computer hardware prices down.

MAP just sounds like another scheme to keep prices up in what would otherwise be a competitive marketplace. Unfortunately, nobody seems to care enough to stop it.

True, graphics accelerator cards cost more than gaming consoles, but you have to look deeper for the true value of a PC versus a console.

I've been pricing a gaming PC I want to build, and I can say with certainty that a gaming PC with a buff graphics board is the better value. Assuming you already have an acceptable monitor, you can piece together a wicked gaming PC for $700-$800 tops. Besides, you're not going to buy a new TV for that gaming console right.

Looking at pricewatch.com:

$100 Athlon 2000XP CPU
$60 mobo to match CPU
$130 512MB DDR RAM
$80 40GB Maxtor drive
$100 fancy case
$150 CD-RW/DVD combo drive
$165 GeForce4 Ti 4200 128MB
$32 Soundblaster Live! 5.1

Total = $817

And you can shave off more or drop more $ on this kind of setup. This is going to last you three years, giving you tip-top gaming at that. You get to play any title ever written for the PC, especially those not suited for consoles.

Now, when this no longer suits your gaming needs, you repurpose it as a sweet workstation or server. You cannot do that with a console.

I have been using a wireless, optical mouse by A4 tech that doesn't use a charging station - there is a usb cord that can plug directly into the mouse - overall it works well. The batteries that came with the mouse suck - nimh batteries that barely hold a charge - but the mouse only cost about $25 (check Pricewatch.com after shipping it comes out to about $32. (all prices listed in US currency). There aren't any extra buttons on the A4 mouse but I do like having the cordless and optical technologies combined into the one mouse and don't really miss any extra buttons. This mouse has the left, right, and center wheel which is sufficient for my usage.

(Of course, I have limited my searching to sites such as Pricescan and PriceWatch.

Hey, that reminds me - are there any places I can still buy a desktop-style case instead of a tower? I sort of prefer the monitor-on-top configuration on a desktop (like my old IBMs), but I couldn't find one anywhere when I was putting together my other machine.

Sure plenty.
This one looks nice. Or here's a bigger one.

Keep an eye on Pricewatch.

I have purchased a number of items only after watching the curves over the course of a few months.

Also look at a pricewatch curve grapher that keeps a history of prices for items in eash catagory. Quite a nice tool to compare like technologies over the past.

Though I doubt you'll find deals on a mac, Thanksgiving is probably your best bet on
finding hot tech deals. Last year I got a 5400 RPM 60 gig
WD harddrive for $50.00 after rebates. Here
we are a year later and I still haven't been able to match that deal.

For keeping an eye on the day to day bargains,
try keeping an eye on:
http://forums.anandtech.com/categories.cfm?ca tid=4 0
and
http://www.gotapex.com/deals.php

for good product reviews and comparison shopping, try:
Epinions

and the old standby for price comparisons,
Pricewatch

Typically, if you can beat the pricewatch price, it's a good deal, Like these in Tomorrow's Best Buy ad:
256 megs of 2100 DDR ValueRAM (by kingston) $40 after rebates.
48x12x48x Memorex burner $45 after rebates.
40x12x48x Digital Research burner $30 after rebates.
Mintek brand DVD/CD/MP3 player $56.92

Current Athlons have 266 bus. You can still get the older 200 bus, but it died out about a year ago. Sorted in price on pricewatch

Four firewire ports on a PCI card and a cable cost $18.50 including shipping. I've seen them for less then that at CompUSA. I don't think that lack of firewire ports is holding anybody back from buying firewire devices.

We seem to see these super jumps forward in memory/store/processing power using various combinations of holography, molecular storage, quantum tunneling and warp space...yet I still see the same size memory available on pricewatch for the same prices.

When will any of these advancements be available for my machine? In a store near me?

--
Mike

Searching eBay for EMC provided some interesting results (these are mostly "buy it now" prices):

EMC Symmetrix 3930 w/ 12 TeraBytes = $57K
(With the proper drive configuration, this unit should be able to deliver up to 70TB in a single system).
This one comes with 12TB of storage (256x50GB HD's). If you throw out all 256 of those 50GB HD's (or just give them to me as a consulting fee for saving your company over $19.5 million) and buy 256X181 GB HD's, you're just short of you 50 TB mark (~46,336 GB).

On Pricewatch those drives come out at $999 ea x 256=$255,744.00 add the initial $57K and you've got a machine that meets your specification significantly less than $20mil

Here are some other EMC machines for sale on eBay:
EMC Symmetrix 3830-36 With 3 TB No Reserve! = $59K

EMC Symmetrix 3700 6TB w/Install & 1YR Mnt! = $48K

EMC Symmetrix 5700 3TB Storage System = $9K

This is what I found by doing minimal research. I'm not 100% sure that the Symmetrix 3930 can handle that configuration (its not my money) so before you go down this road -- do your research (better than I did).

--Turkey

Yea I (Posting as ANON now to preserve Karma) also said the same thing about the Western Digital 200GB drive. Yea, I'm biased cause I hate Western Digital "Play Russian roulette with your data" drives. Still, unless it's a new technology, a faster CPU or a larger hard drive based on prexisting technology isn't news - it's stuff I watch for at pricewatch.com.

Shame stating the obvious gets you moded down on here... I really think a "Product Announcement" catagory is a good idea, and Slashdot could generate some revenue if they could get some sponsors.

Has anyone else noticed that while you can pick up a 2.8Ghz Pentium on pricewatch, the Athlon 2400 and 2600 are nowhere to be seen? Anyone know where they are actually selling these things?

If you're not quoting in Canadian play money, then you need to check out pricewatch.com

Pioneer DVD-R/RW for $264 (58% of your quoted price) and DVD-R media as low as 75 cents in quantity.

40x12x48 CD Recorders EIDE/ATAPI
5.25-inch FireWire Enclosure
And the case, if you must have it stand alone, is only about $60.

40x12x48 CD Recorders EIDE/ATAPI
5.25-inch FireWire Enclosure
And the case, if you must have it stand alone, is only about $60.

As I recall, each speed increase turns out more frisbees than the last. 10x burns less reliably than 8x, etc

If you have a first-generation crappy drive, or use media that isn't designed for that burn speed then that's true.

theoretical maximum number of CDs they can burn

Yes, and HD's have a theoretical average number of hours before failure. So? All mechanical systems fail at one point or another.

yet to see a CD-R rated for more than 24x

You haven't looked recently, have you? Try here, or here, or here.

Plextor at least (apparantly) won't let you burn at a higher speed than the CD-R(W) is rated for

That's dependant on the software, not the hardware. I know you can turn it off in Nero, and probably most other CD burning software.

As others have mentioned, Plextor does. I believe there are some Toshiba models still available too. Just do a search on Pricewatch and you'll see who has what. I know that Newegg carries the Plextor.

Of course, you'll pay a hefty premium ($50 more for the Plextor SCSI, or 300% compared to Lite-On, Cyberdrive, or other inexpensive CD-RWs) and get a much slower drive (12/10/32 vs 40/12/40 or 40/12/52).

Unfortunately you don't have any choice in the matter for your instance. But people building workstation PCs with all SCSI are (by and large) just screwing themselves now.

In the past few years, graphics cards have been more that just an expample mirroring the ridiculous attempt to increase fervor for buying new pcs by tacking on new "features"...they have been even worse perpetrators. First it was the 8MB cards, then 16MB, then 32. Sometime in there AGP got thrown in (I know AGP is better for graphics/acceleration than PCI; the point is that for most AGP was a new buzzword that new gfx cards must have). Then the chips on these cards came in, and cards competed on the GCP (Graphics Processing Unit) and it's capabilites. Now I hear things like "All-in-one", "XTasy", and "Expandable RAM up to 512 MB."

All of these features serve a purpose, mind you. But if there's one thing the mindless pumping of new products to people that have decent ones already does, its precicely this. Create a 70's gas-like war where companies outbit eachother to sell the cheapest yet greatest. This is bad for the consumer, because he can generally get duped into purchasing that's either junk or way more than they need (or both).

This also has a negative impact on the companies. Take the pricewatch model (which I use myself :). Companies get thier business from being at "the top of the list," meaning their stuff is the cheapest. This becomes the only way the get business. They may even grow according to this model somewhat. At some point, they realize they are not really turning any kind of profit, and all their business would go away if they raised their prices. This self-destructive cycle is exemplified by pricewatch, but again, the same thing happened for this company.

The world needs companies that sell high quality products with good support, that work right out of the box, and are well maintained. Oh wait, there already is such a company.