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If you are really too fucking stupid (which is a possibility seeing how the quality has gone down here at /.) to tell the difference between a real post and a shill, let your old pal Hairyfeet point out the differences:

1.-The shill will bring up the product no matter whether the post has anything to do with it or not. Example: Look at the first post on the Nook hack, what does it say? "I wish Microsoft would have come out with the Courier" complete with link for those that don't know what the fuck that piece of bullshit vaporware was. Now did that have a God damned thing to do with Nooks? Nope but the guy is being paid by the post (and probably getting a bonus for first posts) so dammit he's getting his plug in. Now show me a single post in a non AMD/ATI story where I bring up either company? you can't because I speak about whatever topic is at hand, in this case it was AMD because that's the topic dipshit or can't you RTFS?

2.- first posts at any cost even when they make NO sense. See example #1. My post on the other hand was answering a guy who was spouting the old "ATI drivers suck!" meme, which is like saying "Windows BSODs all the time!" as they are both about the same age.

3.-NEVER say anything bad about the product EVER. See the post history of the Nook guy as an example, whereas I said "once AMD bought them out the drivers have been rock solid" implying quite clearly that before AMD bought them out their drivers sucked because you know what? They really did. They sucked massive amounts.

4.-Give NO reason why you have a preference, if required to give a preference use marketing speak and be sure to hit the bullet points. See the MSFT shills we've had the past week for a good example of "buzzword bingo". Personally all I need is Synergy to get a diagonal and maybe win the crockpot. Now compare to mine where I pointed out malfeasance on the part of the competitors in the rigging of compilers on the Intel side along with bribery, and on Nvidia's side we have trying to shaft customers who got burnt by their bad GPUs. As someone who has supported a fair and open free market this kind of dirty shit don't fly, just as I argued MSFT should have been broken up over bribing OEMs.

So in conclusion please use the above handy checklist for the stupid so that even total dipshits such as yourself can easily tell the difference between someone who is happy with a product and a paid shill. For the record I have gotten exactly ZERO in terms of cash, hardware, or even discounts, from either company, hell they haven't even offered me a T-Shirt. I sell AMD/ATI because they give prices any of my customers can afford (show me where I can get quad core Intel with a decent amount of RAM in a full kit for under $260 after MIR like this deal) while having damned good performance and being rock solid stable. Will Intel kill them in the top end? Hell yes, and 4-6 times the price! My customers are working folks, they need a good machine that will last at a price that won't break them, and AMD gives them that while giving them the ability to upgrade. The Intel socket bingo is frankly getting nuts. What are they up to now, something like FOUR sockets all active ATM?

So thanks AMD, I've been selling your desktops and laptops and have had NO complaints. They're cheap, may not be the fastest but are more than fast enough for a good 90% of those that walk through my door, and the new IGPs and discrete chips are awesome. And BTW if you have read my past posting you know I put my money where my mouth is...AMD 925 X4, 8 Gb of DDR 2 800MHz, dual 500Gb HDDs, and I just replaced my old workhorse HD4650 (which still works great and will be handed down to a nephew) for an HD4850 thanks to my GF deciding she wanted to "support my inner geek". Personally I think its bribery as the grandbaby will be here next month and I bet she's planning on us doing a lot of babysitting, but gift horses and mouths and all.

At least 9 higher then 1080 here
http://www.newegg.com/Store/SubCategory.aspx?SubCategory=20&name=LCD-Monitors#

4 here
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/guidedSearch.asp?CatId=12&name=Monitor-LCDs

15 here
http://www.buy.com/SR/SearchResults.aspx?tcid=3494

Not really a rare and exotic thing. Its becoming more common place all the time.

I have to agree, especially when he is using an HP bottom o' the line dual box. A MUCH better deal would be start with something like this Asus Quad, which with an OEM Win 7 HP X64 will only set you back $400. Add this Radeon 6850 for eyefinity and then final out with the three monitors of your choice. Personally I'd prefer a single big ass monitor over triple with the lines dividing, but whatever floats your boat.

But all told you could get out at right around $1000 and have a much better machine than that junker HP, and have more upgrade options down the road to boot. I can also vouch that that particular machine plays games nicely as I just built one for a customer to plug into his new 32 inch 1080p TV, and with an HD4830 it plays L4D I&II, Bioshock I&II and Just Cause II quite nicely with lots o' purty. He just had me add a wireless keyboard and mouse and he was good to go. Also kicks ass on Netflix and an AV center. The case isn't exactly subtle, but then again he isn't either so having the light up bling bling made him quite happy, and in the end that's what counts.

I have to agree, especially when he is using an HP bottom o' the line dual box. A MUCH better deal would be start with something like this Asus Quad, which with an OEM Win 7 HP X64 will only set you back $400. Add this Radeon 6850 for eyefinity and then final out with the three monitors of your choice. Personally I'd prefer a single big ass monitor over triple with the lines dividing, but whatever floats your boat.

But all told you could get out at right around $1000 and have a much better machine than that junker HP, and have more upgrade options down the road to boot. I can also vouch that that particular machine plays games nicely as I just built one for a customer to plug into his new 32 inch 1080p TV, and with an HD4830 it plays L4D I&II, Bioshock I&II and Just Cause II quite nicely with lots o' purty. He just had me add a wireless keyboard and mouse and he was good to go. Also kicks ass on Netflix and an AV center. The case isn't exactly subtle, but then again he isn't either so having the light up bling bling made him quite happy, and in the end that's what counts.

They make half height PCI cards for SATA, usually just one or two dollars more. I don't see how anyone would manage to use up all their PCI slots anymore, as onboard sound has been good enough for years and if you are talking P3 you probably have AGP for graphics (unless you bought one of those shitty low end Compaqs with no graphics port, in which case I'm sorry) and if your PC is so short of cycles it can't drive a SATA card then it really is time to move up, and as far as OS goes they usually have 98-Win 7 drivers and Linux usually have those chips covered so unless you are running BeOS?

And frankly I wouldn't be surprised if the new AMD CPUs used less power than your P3. Between the lower powered chipsets, the more efficient PSU, and Cool&Quiet cycling down the CPU in the tenths of a second range they really are power sippers. They have new low power duals and triple dirt cheap, and even the quads just don't crank the heat like the old days. My 925 quad usually runs at around 84 degrees f, and when I pound the hell out of it the temp rarely reaches 120f.

It all comes down to like I said, being careful not to be penny wise and pound foolish. When you have AMD quad barebone kits at just $200 it would be pound foolish to stick with something seriously old. Browsers, AV, and other applications are only gonna get more resource intensive as security features like sandboxing and virtualization is added, and if your machine is more than 5 years old there are simply going to be more and more websites and programs that you simply won't be able to run as time goes on.

I can see hanging onto a late model P4 to save some money, even though it will probably come out behind on electricity in the long run, but a P3? I'm sorry dude but surfing the modern web on that has to be borderline masochism. Better to use the truly ancient junk as a file server and have a good cheapie to do your everyday surfing and programs on.

A lot of vid cards come with hdmi these days.

The big advantage of a media pc is versatility. Many different wireless controllers/mice/keyboards. You can have some fantastic setups like uTorrent watching an RSS feed to auto-download your shows. Boxie watching your video directories and automatically adding the shows into your queue. Then you get in an argument with your GF about what movie that actor was in you can alt-tab google it and alt-tab back.

In support of my vid card statement, over 200 different cards: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/Category/guidedSearch.asp?CatId=28&sel=Detail;236_1246_18861_18861

I recently bought a 250gb sata drive for 38$. Used it in a hobo computer.

link: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4837457&CatId=2458
picture of a hobo computer: http://i4.photobucket.com/albums/y104/tibman/Hobo%20Computer/DSCN1086.jpg

Uhhhhh...question: If you are currently using a PC from 2005, why not just buy something cheap like this and use it until you outgrow it? By then the AM3s will not only have been out awhile but the Bulldozer chips will be cheap as well. Then you can always either use the other as a spare, a renderbox, give it to family, or sell it on Craigslist. At that price you should be able to easily get your money's worth out of it, just add a cheap 5450 GPU and you could probably get another 2-4 years if you are running a 2005 PC.

Hell I'm running a 925 quad and can easily see myself getting another 4 to 5 years out of it, by simply upgrading the GPU occasionally. By the time I've outgrown it the next gen Bulldozers will be uber cheap and I can just skip the 6 core and go straight to 16 HT cores! but I can tell you right now most apps don't even strain a dual core, so this quad could easily last you three to four years unless some breakthrough in parallel computing comes out which we haven't seen any hint of.

Exactly. I built my current machine for around $600 after rebate and it has a 925 2.8GHz quad, 8GB of DDR2 800MHz, an HD460, a pair of 500GB HDDs, and Windows 7 HP X64. To build an Intel machine at the roughly same specs I was looking at a minimum of around $200 more thanks to the higher prices on Intel motherboards, and if I wanted anything even slightly future proof I would have had to go DDR3 which 8GB would have put a serious bite in my wallet.

Plus if you support having a free market and competition your really should be looking at AMD first. Intel was caught bribing OEMs and rigging their compilers to sabotage AMD chips, which is why they paid AMD 1.25 Billion to try to make the heat go away. Personally I think Intel will still be looking at EU fines as well as a host of lawsuits by AGs. I'm all for someone winning a good chunk of the market by having better products, performance, marketing, etc, but sabotaging the market through payoff and rigging just makes the market a sham.

So unless you are in one of the niches where the insane price difference is worth it to squeeze every amount of speed you can get I would look at AMD first. Since Intel got caught rigging and bribing and Nvidia pulled bumpgate I have switched my shop to AMD only and my customers couldn't be happier. I just sent out a triple core with 4GB of RAM and a TB of HDD along with an HD4350 for the local print shop and it cost them just $485 after paying me. According to the owner which had already added a quad I built to the office the performance is great and the lower price is allowing him to accelerate the replacement of the older machines in his business. Hell you can get quad kit with Win 7 for $400 or supply your own OS and get a get a triple for $220. Intel just doesn't have anything similar at those price points unless you get the bottom o' the line Celery or Pentium duals. At those prices the bang for the buck is firmly in the AMD camp. And if you are looking at mobile the Turion and Neo chips make for nice laptops you can actually play games and watch HD video on without breaking the bank. Not a hard choice IMHO.

Exactly. I built my current machine for around $600 after rebate and it has a 925 2.8GHz quad, 8GB of DDR2 800MHz, an HD460, a pair of 500GB HDDs, and Windows 7 HP X64. To build an Intel machine at the roughly same specs I was looking at a minimum of around $200 more thanks to the higher prices on Intel motherboards, and if I wanted anything even slightly future proof I would have had to go DDR3 which 8GB would have put a serious bite in my wallet.

Plus if you support having a free market and competition your really should be looking at AMD first. Intel was caught bribing OEMs and rigging their compilers to sabotage AMD chips, which is why they paid AMD 1.25 Billion to try to make the heat go away. Personally I think Intel will still be looking at EU fines as well as a host of lawsuits by AGs. I'm all for someone winning a good chunk of the market by having better products, performance, marketing, etc, but sabotaging the market through payoff and rigging just makes the market a sham.

So unless you are in one of the niches where the insane price difference is worth it to squeeze every amount of speed you can get I would look at AMD first. Since Intel got caught rigging and bribing and Nvidia pulled bumpgate I have switched my shop to AMD only and my customers couldn't be happier. I just sent out a triple core with 4GB of RAM and a TB of HDD along with an HD4350 for the local print shop and it cost them just $485 after paying me. According to the owner which had already added a quad I built to the office the performance is great and the lower price is allowing him to accelerate the replacement of the older machines in his business. Hell you can get quad kit with Win 7 for $400 or supply your own OS and get a get a triple for $220. Intel just doesn't have anything similar at those price points unless you get the bottom o' the line Celery or Pentium duals. At those prices the bang for the buck is firmly in the AMD camp. And if you are looking at mobile the Turion and Neo chips make for nice laptops you can actually play games and watch HD video on without breaking the bank. Not a hard choice IMHO.

Hell even the bottom of the line AMD machines have nice Radeon IGPs that play games just fine.

So can you recommend a make and model of bottom-of-the-line AMD machine in a slimline form factor that I can in turn recommend to friends and family? Google slim AMD PC pulled up this eMachines product as the first result; is it any good? Or this Compaq?

Yeah it is truly crazy how much "bang for the buck" from AMD and lets be honest here: VERY few of us are gonna have the kind of day to day work lined up that is gonna pound the dog snot out of the CPU hard enough to make the price difference worth it. For less than $530 after MIR I got an AMD 925 quad with 8Mb of Lvl 2 cache, 8GB of DDR 2 800MHz RAM, 2 500GB HDDs, a HD4650 1Gb GPU, a 20x DVD burner, and a nice case to put it all in. You really can't beat that.

And everyone here on /. is always talking about "voting with your dollars, now here is your chance. We have Intel being caught in bribery, rigging their compiler, and bribing OEMs so badly that nearly 40% of Dell's "profits" some quarters were nothing but Intel kickbacks. If you value a free market you might want to look at something like what I linked to below. And don't forget FOSS guys that AMD has been good to the FOSS community, as they have been opening up the ATI specs as fast as they can crank out the docs and they also support the x86 Open64 Compiler which unlike Intel's accelerates BOTH Intel and AMD CPUs.

So if anyone is shopping for desktops this Xmas? How would you like a quad desktop fully loaded for $199? That is with a Phenom X4 at 2.4GHz, 2Gb of RAM, DVD burner, 500Gb HDD, and case. Just buy a CPU fan and put whatever OS suits your fancy. Hell with prices so cheap when my dad decided it was time to retire his old P4 I went ahead and got him almost the same deal, just went with 4Gb of RAM instead of 2. Will my dad ever need that kind of power? I doubt it, but with C&Q it drops down to just 800MHz and is whisper quiet, and I know that for the foreseeable future he will not need anything done to this PC. Well, except for adding more USB ports. I swear that man can go through USB ports like crap through a goose.

Un huh. EER, SEER, and COP are all standards for measuring efficiency. They do nothing to "prove" your point that heat pumps are greater than 100% efficiency

They are indeed standards for measuring efficiency. What you apparently did not do is check THE NUMBERS. COP is the simplest example. A COP of 1 would be "100% efficient", yet heatpumps get COP ratings of more than 1.

For EER and SEER, look up the equations for converting to/from COP.

Also, you could just look at the ratings of commonly available air conditioners. Ratings are in watts for power consumption, and BTUs for heat moved, yet if you convert the BTUs to watts, you get a value higher than the power consumption (in fact always around 3:1, as I keep saying). Here's a quick link:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=6046606&CatId=4566

http://www.mhi-inc.com/Converter/watt_calculator.htm

And wikipedia calls you an loud-mouthed idiot too: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coefficient_of_performance#Example

If you can't read, or can't understand what it says, don't blame me for your ignorance.

I bought and use that exact water cooler on an AMD965 (Phenom IIx4 3.4Ghz Black-Edition). It works great and i highly recommend it. My only advice for anyone is make sure your side panel doesn't have fans or protrusions in the back near your 120mm exhaust port. My case has a 180mm side fan that prevented the radiator (sandwiched between two 120mm fans) from being mounted inside the case. I dremeled out a slot so the coolant tubes could pass through the back (it's a closed coolant system, so you can't just dremel holes). Right now there is a 120mm fan inside, the case wall, radiator outside, then another 120mm fan. It's extremely quiet and i really enjoy it.

My case, if anyone is interested: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=4034179&CatId=32

The third digit is key in the same series, whereas the second tell you which series, higher is better on BOTH the second and third numbers when comparing cards. For example a 4670 is better than a 4650, but a 4870 beats both. The only time that isn't true is if the last digit is a 3, which equals bargain basement, for example a 4630.Basically the easy way to remember is 3 is low, 5 is low mid, 6 is mid, 7 is high mid, and 8 and 9 are high. That goes for the second AND the third digit.

As for liquid cooling you might want to check out this which a gamer friend turned me on to. he said it took less than 30 minutes to install, and dropped his temp by a good 20 degrees under load, and idle it is often room temp. Hell a decent air cooler will cost you more than that, and if you are gonna crack the case open anyway, why not?

Unless you have to have the biggest ePeen stay away from the i series, as they are just too high. You can buy a fully loaded AMD Six core kit for just $430 after MIR, add $99 for Windows 7 Home and for $530 you have a damned powerful machine that'll last you for years to come. If you don't need that much you can get a nice dual for $250 or a triple for $320. Again add $99 for Windows 7 Home (or $89 for XP Home if you prefer) and you have a machine that is more than powerful enough for just about any task.

After Intel got caught bribing OEMs and Nvidia screwed everyone with Bumpgate I went totally AMD/ATI in my shop and my customers couldn't be happier. I myself like the performance and the lowered cooling enough I went Phenom II quad and this baby runs like a champ for video transcoding, gaming, you name it it does it. Oh and before you believe benchmarks you might want to read this and do a little research. It turns out Intel was not only bribing OEMs it was screwing software developers as well. It was using the Get_CPUID flag in its compiler and if it didn't get a return of "GenuineIntel" it would run a 486 code path even though AMD has had SSE - SSE 3 for ages. Nice company you got there Grove.

Unless you have to have the biggest ePeen stay away from the i series, as they are just too high. You can buy a fully loaded AMD Six core kit for just $430 after MIR, add $99 for Windows 7 Home and for $530 you have a damned powerful machine that'll last you for years to come. If you don't need that much you can get a nice dual for $250 or a triple for $320. Again add $99 for Windows 7 Home (or $89 for XP Home if you prefer) and you have a machine that is more than powerful enough for just about any task.

After Intel got caught bribing OEMs and Nvidia screwed everyone with Bumpgate I went totally AMD/ATI in my shop and my customers couldn't be happier. I myself like the performance and the lowered cooling enough I went Phenom II quad and this baby runs like a champ for video transcoding, gaming, you name it it does it. Oh and before you believe benchmarks you might want to read this and do a little research. It turns out Intel was not only bribing OEMs it was screwing software developers as well. It was using the Get_CPUID flag in its compiler and if it didn't get a return of "GenuineIntel" it would run a 486 code path even though AMD has had SSE - SSE 3 for ages. Nice company you got there Grove.

Unless you have to have the biggest ePeen stay away from the i series, as they are just too high. You can buy a fully loaded AMD Six core kit for just $430 after MIR, add $99 for Windows 7 Home and for $530 you have a damned powerful machine that'll last you for years to come. If you don't need that much you can get a nice dual for $250 or a triple for $320. Again add $99 for Windows 7 Home (or $89 for XP Home if you prefer) and you have a machine that is more than powerful enough for just about any task.

After Intel got caught bribing OEMs and Nvidia screwed everyone with Bumpgate I went totally AMD/ATI in my shop and my customers couldn't be happier. I myself like the performance and the lowered cooling enough I went Phenom II quad and this baby runs like a champ for video transcoding, gaming, you name it it does it. Oh and before you believe benchmarks you might want to read this and do a little research. It turns out Intel was not only bribing OEMs it was screwing software developers as well. It was using the Get_CPUID flag in its compiler and if it didn't get a return of "GenuineIntel" it would run a 486 code path even though AMD has had SSE - SSE 3 for ages. Nice company you got there Grove.

Uhhh..dude? You can buy nice AMD quad kits at Tigerdirect starting at $299. Add $100 for whatever OS you want and $50 for a discrete card (I paid $36 after MIR for my HD4650 1Gb and it plays Bioshock II and anything else I throw it at at my monitors native 1600x900 just fine) and you have a PC that can not only game, but do video transcoding, surf the web, do IM, hell you can even hook to your TV via HDMI and go to town.

Then you have to figure in the lifetime of the machine, as I've seen very few consoles last more than 3 years whereas I have PCs pushing the decade mark with the only change being a HDD replacement. You then just pass them down to relatives or use them for different jobs like this 1.8GHz Sempron I'm typing on that makes a great nettop now. BTW no need to pay anything for AV, as Comodo Internet Security is free and from what I've seen has one of the best detection rates in the biz, as well as sandboxing.

So it really isn't hard to build yourself a decent PC that'll last quite a long time for less than $500, and it is really easy to do. Hell my 15 year old built his own Frankenbox out of some PC parts I had lying around, even built his own XP install media with drivers built in, and did it without me helping or even guiding, just basic common sense and the power of the Google. Oh and finally from the sounds of it you may be having power problems, as I've seen bad power from the line cook all kinds of electronics. Better to get a UPS to run all your electronics on, as it don't take much of a spike to fry components.

If you've got a way to receive and watch over the air media during a power outage, I'd like to subscribe to your newsletter.

These usually get you by for short periods: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/category/category_slc.asp?CatId=234&name=UPS%20Battery%20Backup%20700VA%20and%20more

These work well for a interim solution or if you are in a suburbant area: http://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/style/gasoline-generators.php?source=goog&keyword=gas%20generator&gclid=CLr-oNanoaQCFVVx5Qod-Ce27Q

And these for areas where you need to worry about extended periods: http://www.electricgeneratorsdirect.com/stories/38-How-to-Pick-the-Perfect-Whole-House-Generator.html

Of course you could also have solar panels or other means of producing electricity as well. I'll make sure to contact you if I ever start a news letter. ;-)

Well after it came out that Intel was paying off OEMs not to use AMD chips I switched all my builds for customers and myself to AMD after being a lifelong Intel+Nvidia man, and my customers and I couldn't be happier. The bang for the buck is just insane as is seen in TFA, their 95w quads give damned good performance without turning my apt into a space heater, and when paired with an ATI chipset you have a great platform at a great price.

I currently use my 925 quad for video editing and audio creation, and even with multiple realtime Cubase amp sims it just purrs like a big kitten, the Radeon onboard was powerful enough I played SWAT 3 and Bioshock on it with decent framerates until my HD4650 arrived , and I've been selling AMD Neo based netbooks to those customers that were thinking of Atom. After getting their Neo and seeing how nicely it runs compared to an Atom all they do is rave, with the Radeon onboard making it a smooth multimedia portable.

So please, if you care about having real competition in the market as I do, give AMD a try. We really don't want to go back to the bad old days, when Intel would charge insane money for even their shitty chips, and the new AMDs will do any job you throw at them quite well and quite affordable. And where else can you buy a dual kit for $250 a quad for $300 or a fully loaded monster 6 core for $580?

Well after it came out that Intel was paying off OEMs not to use AMD chips I switched all my builds for customers and myself to AMD after being a lifelong Intel+Nvidia man, and my customers and I couldn't be happier. The bang for the buck is just insane as is seen in TFA, their 95w quads give damned good performance without turning my apt into a space heater, and when paired with an ATI chipset you have a great platform at a great price.

I currently use my 925 quad for video editing and audio creation, and even with multiple realtime Cubase amp sims it just purrs like a big kitten, the Radeon onboard was powerful enough I played SWAT 3 and Bioshock on it with decent framerates until my HD4650 arrived , and I've been selling AMD Neo based netbooks to those customers that were thinking of Atom. After getting their Neo and seeing how nicely it runs compared to an Atom all they do is rave, with the Radeon onboard making it a smooth multimedia portable.

So please, if you care about having real competition in the market as I do, give AMD a try. We really don't want to go back to the bad old days, when Intel would charge insane money for even their shitty chips, and the new AMDs will do any job you throw at them quite well and quite affordable. And where else can you buy a dual kit for $250 a quad for $300 or a fully loaded monster 6 core for $580?

Well after it came out that Intel was paying off OEMs not to use AMD chips I switched all my builds for customers and myself to AMD after being a lifelong Intel+Nvidia man, and my customers and I couldn't be happier. The bang for the buck is just insane as is seen in TFA, their 95w quads give damned good performance without turning my apt into a space heater, and when paired with an ATI chipset you have a great platform at a great price.

I currently use my 925 quad for video editing and audio creation, and even with multiple realtime Cubase amp sims it just purrs like a big kitten, the Radeon onboard was powerful enough I played SWAT 3 and Bioshock on it with decent framerates until my HD4650 arrived , and I've been selling AMD Neo based netbooks to those customers that were thinking of Atom. After getting their Neo and seeing how nicely it runs compared to an Atom all they do is rave, with the Radeon onboard making it a smooth multimedia portable.

So please, if you care about having real competition in the market as I do, give AMD a try. We really don't want to go back to the bad old days, when Intel would charge insane money for even their shitty chips, and the new AMDs will do any job you throw at them quite well and quite affordable. And where else can you buy a dual kit for $250 a quad for $300 or a fully loaded monster 6 core for $580?

If you feel this way like I do please put your money where your mouth is and support AMD. There isn't a single thing other than having the biggest ePeen that would force you to buy from this company, who has been paying off OEMs to try to kill the free market. You want an Atom? Try the AMD Neo, I've sold several and liked them so much I bought one for my dad. since they pair the Neo single and dual with Radeon GPUs you actually get decent multimedia performance from your netbook. Low end dual? Try the Athlon II or for a few dollars more the Athlon X3 or X4. for most day to day tasks they run like a champ and one can even get low wattage CPUs to help save on electricity. Finally if you're like me and like to pound your system with video transcoding get the Phenom II, I pound mine for hours with virtualdub batch transcoding and it purrs like a kitten and remains decently cool even with a stock HSF.

The only way a free market works is we vote with our dollars and don't take mistreatment from vendors. Intel has already been trying to rig the game by paying off OEMs not to stock AMD, and now they are trying to gouge for more money after the sale. As many have pointed out this is nothing but a greedy pure profit money grab, so to show your distaste do as I've done and only build and sell AMD. And when you can get a fully loaded X3 Phenom kit for just $280 it is certainly easy on your (or your customers) pocket. We need real competition, which means a healthy and strong AMD. Otherwise it'll be like the bad old days where Intel charged a king's ransom for even the junk chips and your choice was take it or do without.

Well I would say whether you are building this machine as an "ePeen" or not. By that I mean I have a couple of customers who spend frankly insane money just so they can brag they get some huge number on benchmarks. Now if you aren't building for an ePeen, I'd say go AMD as the lower price will allow you to put nicer gear in the rig. For example my PC is an AMD Phenom II Quad 925, with 8Gb of DDR2 800, 2 500Gb HDDs, a nice case with 500w PSU, and finally an HD 4650 (I'm not much of a gamer, so the 4650 is all I need, although it plays Wolfenstein and Bioshock II like a champ) and Windows 7 HP x64, all for $650 before MIR and around $570 after.

If you don't want to wait you can buy AMD now and thanks to socket compatibility drop in a bigger CPU later. That's what I did, buying a cheap dual core kit and upgrading to the quad with some of my Xmas bonus. You can see they have real cheap quad kits and you can even get a 6 core kit for under $600. All you have to do is pick your favorite OS and whichever video card you like (I'm partial to ATI after the bumpgate fiasco, never had a bit of trouble from Gigabyte Radeon cards) and you are good to go. Most games now are just starting to hit dual cores, so a quad will last you quite awhile and a 6 core will be pretty future proof.

So if you are just getting back into the game personally I'd go AMD. There is nothing wrong with the Intel but when you figure in the higher prices plus them getting caught paying off OEMs...well I believe in competition and a REAL free market. But of course your main reason will be performance and my AMD quad purrs like a kitten, with an idle of less than 96f and the hottest it ever got was 135f after hours of transcoding, and that is on a stock HSF. But I really torture my machines, audio and video recording and transcoding, audio and video editing, and my AMD takes everything I throw at it and then some. I can also tell you as a system builder I've not had a bit of trouble from any of my AMD builds, even those I have built for extreme conditions like construction trailers. They take a licking and keep on ticking. Let me know how it goes!

Oh, a word of advice...Once your build is done use Autopatcher and Ninite. Just use Autopatcher to have the updates for whichever Windows you choose already downloaded and ready to go, and then use Ninite to get all the basics like Firefox, K-Lite Codec Pack (great for hardware acceleration) and Open Office. Using those two together will save you several hours on a build. Enjoy!

Well I would say whether you are building this machine as an "ePeen" or not. By that I mean I have a couple of customers who spend frankly insane money just so they can brag they get some huge number on benchmarks. Now if you aren't building for an ePeen, I'd say go AMD as the lower price will allow you to put nicer gear in the rig. For example my PC is an AMD Phenom II Quad 925, with 8Gb of DDR2 800, 2 500Gb HDDs, a nice case with 500w PSU, and finally an HD 4650 (I'm not much of a gamer, so the 4650 is all I need, although it plays Wolfenstein and Bioshock II like a champ) and Windows 7 HP x64, all for $650 before MIR and around $570 after.

If you don't want to wait you can buy AMD now and thanks to socket compatibility drop in a bigger CPU later. That's what I did, buying a cheap dual core kit and upgrading to the quad with some of my Xmas bonus. You can see they have real cheap quad kits and you can even get a 6 core kit for under $600. All you have to do is pick your favorite OS and whichever video card you like (I'm partial to ATI after the bumpgate fiasco, never had a bit of trouble from Gigabyte Radeon cards) and you are good to go. Most games now are just starting to hit dual cores, so a quad will last you quite awhile and a 6 core will be pretty future proof.

So if you are just getting back into the game personally I'd go AMD. There is nothing wrong with the Intel but when you figure in the higher prices plus them getting caught paying off OEMs...well I believe in competition and a REAL free market. But of course your main reason will be performance and my AMD quad purrs like a kitten, with an idle of less than 96f and the hottest it ever got was 135f after hours of transcoding, and that is on a stock HSF. But I really torture my machines, audio and video recording and transcoding, audio and video editing, and my AMD takes everything I throw at it and then some. I can also tell you as a system builder I've not had a bit of trouble from any of my AMD builds, even those I have built for extreme conditions like construction trailers. They take a licking and keep on ticking. Let me know how it goes!

Oh, a word of advice...Once your build is done use Autopatcher and Ninite. Just use Autopatcher to have the updates for whichever Windows you choose already downloaded and ready to go, and then use Ninite to get all the basics like Firefox, K-Lite Codec Pack (great for hardware acceleration) and Open Office. Using those two together will save you several hours on a build. Enjoy!

And whose fault was that? (hint it rhymes with Smell) When AMD was on top, and the only thing Intel had was the POS space heating Netburst, pretty much the ONLY AMD chips you saw coming in Dell, Compaq, pretty much all the major OEMs, were the bottom of the line Sempron and Duron chips, which of course were about the same as a Celeron.

Now that we know about the payoff I'd say it is pretty safe to assume that any chips by AMD that would kick Netbrust's ass (which was pretty much ALL the Athlon chips at that time) was nixed by Intel. How sad that so many had to deal with much higher power bills and having PCs that sounded like jet engines because Intel rigged the market. I am typing this on a circa 2005 Compaq with a Sempron in it, and while it makes a great nettop, it sure as hell ain't no Athlon.

So I would say the reason the Dell AMDs bombed was because Dell WANTED them to bomb, so they could keep getting those big fat checks from Intel. This is a perfect example of why we need markets regulated so one big bully can't simply kill the market for everyone else. You say you want AMD to succeed (I personally put my money where my mouth is and pretty much build and sell AMD exclusively now) but how many of those other chip manufacturers like Cyrix and Transmeta might still be around if Intel hadn't been distorting the market?

With something as important as CPUS we have to have competition, otherwise we end up like the bad old days when an Intel chip would set you back a thousand bucks. That is why I encourage all my fellow geeks to buy AMD/ATI wherever possible. for a good 90% of the tasks their more than fast enough, cool & quiet keeps them from heating up your place, the bang for the buck can't be beat (triples for $60? Quads starting at $99? Great for new builds), the new AMD Neo makes a great netbook chip (the Neo paired with a Radeon GPU makes for a heck of a media oriented netbook) and they have proved to be friends of FOSS by opening up the specs on their ATI GPUs.

So buy AMD, hell you can get a dual core kit for just $209. Hell by going AMD I built a nice Deneb quad loaded with 8Gb of RAM fully loaded for just $650 after rebate. How can you go wrong with that? And sorry about the length, I just feel strongly about having competition in a REAL free market. Go AMD!

They're not hard to find, if you look around a little.

Dude I have built decent gaming PCs for less than $300. Here is a dual core AMD kit for $200, go to your local mom&pop shop and pick up a dead box with an XP OEM license (usually around $30-$50, and you can get some good parts like an extra HDD or DVD ROM) and a $70-$100 graphics card and you are good to go.

In a way the consoles dragging their feet on putting out a new rev has helped lower the cost of PC gaming. Both consoles have a 7600 era GPU, which means most mainstream games had to lower the system reqs if they wanted to release on consoles as well. I'm using an HD4650 I got for a grand total of $36 after MIR and it plays everything I throw at it, just got done with a little Bioshock 2 before getting on here.

And finally I would point out that PCs have a MUCH longer life and can be re-purposed after they are no longer your main rig. The Celeron 3.06Ghz I gamed on in 03 and the 3.6Ghz P4 I gamed on in 05 are both being used by my two nephews to play MMORPGs and do that job quit well as well as helping them do homework, and my 1997 733Mhz P3 is now my mom's Internet box. If you build it yourself you'd be surprised how long they'll last. PC gaming is very cheap, not only cheap on the PC itself but with places like good old games I can get the games I missed often for less than $5. You can't get cheaper than that.

If you're interested:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/searchtools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=5586709&SRCCODE=GOOGLEBASE&cm_mmc_o=VRqCjC7BBTkwCjCECjCE

Better search for "external floppy", e.g. Sabrent 1.44MB External USB 2X Floppy Disk Drive $19.99 on Tigerdirect:

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1489134&CatId=287

Instead I would place the computer in one room (not their bedrooms) so you can control it, secondly I would only buy one computer, as it is not cheap these days, and I would buy one of these thin client units...from tigerdirect...
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=15398&sku=N316-1014
which allows you to set up as many people (up to 4 per unit) per one computer.

Thirdly, I would hire a geek squad dude (or put an add in the paper saying you need an admin to help quickly set up accounts on a machine for 40$) to come to my house and configure the 3 kid accounts and do all the AV install etc...
for usually about 30 or 40$ per hour, as this is child's play for a learned admin, he will set up limited accounts, and tell you how to use your system....also keep his number handy. What he will do in 15 minutes will take you all day to figure out....also
he may even be able to set up the rest of the kids consoles (if you have a wireless router) such as playstation xbox etc...
to allow your kids to access internet from their other consoles....keeping the pc time to a minimum....unless they have no consoles.

Make sure to also ask for a backup of the router configs, in case he has to come in afterwards to reset it, as it is very easy to do from a backup when someone fiddled by accident or on purpose with your router. Also backup of the pc would be nice too, into
a separate drive or partition that way if you ever get a virus and need to reinstall, you dont lose personal files because everyone KNOWS to keep their personal stuff in their personal folders on tat separate driver or partition.

Well the problem is he didn't give us any clue as to his price range. since that is a big factor when shopping for CPUs/GPUs it would kinda help. Just to give him a couple off the bat there is this AMD Athlon x4 based kit with a HD4670 for $469, should be more than enough for Oblivion, just add burner and whatever Windows he likes, if he needs cheaper he could go with this Athlon dual with a 4350, again just add burner and Windows, or if he wants Intel here is a Core i5 kit complete with windows 7 HP, just add a decent Radeon GPU, which higher numbers are better and GDDR 5 RAM is what you want.

But expecting us to explain the ENTIRE numbering scheme for BOTH CPUs and GPUs, especially when Intel has a seriously fucked up naming scheme ATM, is just silly. If he wants to know AMD/ATI that one is simple, Phenom is better than Athlon and Athlon is better than Sempron, the higher numbers are better and on the ATI side the higher numbers in the same series are better, such as 47xx-49xx are better than the 43xx-46xx, same with the 57xx-59xx compared to 53xx-56xx, and the higher the number of GDDR the better, as 1Gb of GDDR2 will get stomped by 512Mb of GDDR5.

But if one is gonna ask /. a little more info than "I'm gonna be shopping for some stuff" would be nice. Does he care about speed more than $$$, or the other way around? does it have to be a monster out of the gate, or can it grow with him? Inquiring minds want to know.

Well the problem is he didn't give us any clue as to his price range. since that is a big factor when shopping for CPUs/GPUs it would kinda help. Just to give him a couple off the bat there is this AMD Athlon x4 based kit with a HD4670 for $469, should be more than enough for Oblivion, just add burner and whatever Windows he likes, if he needs cheaper he could go with this Athlon dual with a 4350, again just add burner and Windows, or if he wants Intel here is a Core i5 kit complete with windows 7 HP, just add a decent Radeon GPU, which higher numbers are better and GDDR 5 RAM is what you want.

But expecting us to explain the ENTIRE numbering scheme for BOTH CPUs and GPUs, especially when Intel has a seriously fucked up naming scheme ATM, is just silly. If he wants to know AMD/ATI that one is simple, Phenom is better than Athlon and Athlon is better than Sempron, the higher numbers are better and on the ATI side the higher numbers in the same series are better, such as 47xx-49xx are better than the 43xx-46xx, same with the 57xx-59xx compared to 53xx-56xx, and the higher the number of GDDR the better, as 1Gb of GDDR2 will get stomped by 512Mb of GDDR5.

But if one is gonna ask /. a little more info than "I'm gonna be shopping for some stuff" would be nice. Does he care about speed more than $$$, or the other way around? does it have to be a monster out of the gate, or can it grow with him? Inquiring minds want to know.

Well the problem is he didn't give us any clue as to his price range. since that is a big factor when shopping for CPUs/GPUs it would kinda help. Just to give him a couple off the bat there is this AMD Athlon x4 based kit with a HD4670 for $469, should be more than enough for Oblivion, just add burner and whatever Windows he likes, if he needs cheaper he could go with this Athlon dual with a 4350, again just add burner and Windows, or if he wants Intel here is a Core i5 kit complete with windows 7 HP, just add a decent Radeon GPU, which higher numbers are better and GDDR 5 RAM is what you want.

But expecting us to explain the ENTIRE numbering scheme for BOTH CPUs and GPUs, especially when Intel has a seriously fucked up naming scheme ATM, is just silly. If he wants to know AMD/ATI that one is simple, Phenom is better than Athlon and Athlon is better than Sempron, the higher numbers are better and on the ATI side the higher numbers in the same series are better, such as 47xx-49xx are better than the 43xx-46xx, same with the 57xx-59xx compared to 53xx-56xx, and the higher the number of GDDR the better, as 1Gb of GDDR2 will get stomped by 512Mb of GDDR5.

But if one is gonna ask /. a little more info than "I'm gonna be shopping for some stuff" would be nice. Does he care about speed more than $$$, or the other way around? does it have to be a monster out of the gate, or can it grow with him? Inquiring minds want to know.

$105 Win 7 Home Premium 64bit (I hope 105 is close enough for you, but just in case.)

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2552182&CatId=306

$90 Win XP sp3

reading a tech manual is equivalent to reading Latin.

Tech manuals are frequently wrong. Believe me, I've written tech manuals and read Latin. Latin is nothing compared to some tech manuals.

I ran across one just a few weeks ago. The latest Panasonic televisions run embedded Linux, and connect to the internet to download programming information. They have an ethernet jack. The tech manual calls this a "PC Connection". It says that, in order to use a wireless network, you need a "Wireless Repeater".

My Pioneer DVD player doesn't play h.264. Neither does any other DVD player, except perhaps those that cost four figures (I haven't looked into that).

h.264 might be incredible, but I have no way of playing it on my TV.

Got an Xbox 360 or a PS3? Problem solved.

Otherwise, $80 will get you a Blu-ray player that handles h.264 and upscales DVDs to 1080p.

Or there's AppleTV. Or Popcorn Hour. Or MviX boxes. Or various $90 media players that access any USB hard drive you have hanging around. (That one even supports ext3.)

I mean, yeah, I have a DVD player that supports DivX that I used a few years ago. But frankly, it's a hell of a lot more convenient to pull stuff across my network or stick it on a hard drive than to mess with burning DVDs, even ignoring the h.264 issue. Spend the $100, you'll thank yourself.

My Pioneer DVD player doesn't play h.264. Neither does any other DVD player, except perhaps those that cost four figures (I haven't looked into that).

h.264 might be incredible, but I have no way of playing it on my TV.

Got an Xbox 360 or a PS3? Problem solved.

Otherwise, $80 will get you a Blu-ray player that handles h.264 and upscales DVDs to 1080p.

Or there's AppleTV. Or Popcorn Hour. Or MviX boxes. Or various $90 media players that access any USB hard drive you have hanging around. (That one even supports ext3.)

I mean, yeah, I have a DVD player that supports DivX that I used a few years ago. But frankly, it's a hell of a lot more convenient to pull stuff across my network or stick it on a hard drive than to mess with burning DVDs, even ignoring the h.264 issue. Spend the $100, you'll thank yourself.

Maybe it's about time that the standard consumer camcorder takes video in full HD for a decent price? I'd like to see that first.

Your wish is my command. So how was this last year you spent in a cave?

Tigerdirect has that first model on sale for $500. That seems to me to be a pretty decent price... unless you're one of those "Let me know when I can get [product X] with [feature Q], [feature R], and two [feature S] for $99".

Have you looked at the cheap 4xxx cards to maybe give you a little more bang until you can get around to getting a new PSU/Case? I have the Gigabyte 4650HD, with 1Gb of RAM, and I ran it for nearly 4 months on a 350w PSU until I had more SATA drives than I had slots on the PSU. Games like Bioshock, HL2, the latest MoH, Swat 4, all ran cranked up and as smooth as butter, and having hardware acceleration for all the popular formats as well as hardware transcoding is a nice bonus.

But I have to agree that the "bang for the buck" on both the AMD CPUs and ATI GPUs is just nuts right now. For less than $700 after rebates I got an AMD quad with 8Gb of RAM (max 32Gb), a 4650 1Gb, dual 500Gb HDDs, and Win7 HP x64 along with dual burners. I mean you can get a fully loaded quad for less than $600! I like having the biggest ePeen in benchmarks but at that price? The amount of horsepower you get is just nuts.

Sorry to reply to myself but I just checked my email and it looks like tigerdirect has them even cheaper than the wally world: An AMD 1.6GHz CPU, 2Gb of RAM, Windows 7 HP, and a Radeon 3200 with 256Mb of dedicated RAM, all for $389.

Yeah I can see Intel shitting kittens right about now. Hell that puppy will do everything the average laptop user wants to do and THEN some all for less than $400! it is gonna be hard to keep those atom restrictions in place or get folks to shell out of pocket for those big margin cores with prices THAT cheap. I honestly think Intel didn't realize what kind of Pandora's box they were opening when they released Atom. Now we have AMD, ARM, and I wouldn't doubt if Via and Nvidia cook up something really nice with ion, and all for uber cheap. Not the smartest move Intel has ever made there and it looks like the days of the $1500 laptop are pretty much toast.

BTW you don't actually have to spend anywhere near $600 to game anymore. That $750 PC I was talking about in my other post? It started out as a Tigerdirect $229 AMD special, with a 7550 dual, 4Gb of RAM, a 200Gb SATA II, and a built in Radeon HD3200, which I played Bioshock and other games on for nearly two months before I got around to spending a whole $39 on an HD4650 1Gb.

You see what I have found is that ATM the AMD "bang for the buck" is just crazy insane right now, and since AM3 is backward compatible with AM2+ it is really easy to start dirt cheap, and just buy a part here and a part there when they are on sale or have killer rebates. I used an old OEM of XP X64 I had sitting in a drawer until the Newegg $50 pre-order of Windows 7 came in, used the dual until I ran across a 925 for $140, which you can actually get Propus quads now for $99 bucks, and used the built in for gaming until like I said I found a cheapo PCIe with plenty of RAM for $39 after $20 MIR.

So if you want to have a long and happy PC gaming experience for dirt cheap, just go here, pick you out a dirt cheap that has good upgrade potential (I would recommend AMD, but they have a nice Intel Dual for $199 that with a $20 RAM stick and a cheap PCIe card would make a nice game machine) and just do it a little bit at a time.

I just got the final piece for mine today as a matter of fact, an 8Gb flash drive for Readyboost that I got at Walgreen's of all places on sale for $14. It took me about a year to finally get her decked out the way I wanted, but I was able to use her the entire time and by waiting for sales and MIRs I probably shaved a good $250-$325 off the cost just by staying patient and waiting for the deals to come. 4Gb of DDR 2 800Mhz RAM for $40 here, a 500Gb drive for $45 there (you can get crazy steals by getting open box or refurb on Newegg) and before you know it you have a PC you can really be proud to show for for very little $$$.

And of course the nicest thing is not only did I get to use it while I built it up, but like my previous machines I'm looking forward to a good decade or more of service out of her. My GF is gonna come down next week while on break and pick up the 2001 era PC I used to game on so she will have a spare to do her Facebook and check her emails on while I work on hers. With just a little thought and TLC you'd be amazed how long a PC can last. In fact my FIRST 3D gaming rig, a P100Mhz with a Voodoo 1 is STILL being used 5 days a week by a local lumber mill to run a C&C lathe making custom columns using an old ISA card and running DOS 3! I'd love to see a console still be useful and work that hard after all those years.

BTW you don't actually have to spend anywhere near $600 to game anymore. That $750 PC I was talking about in my other post? It started out as a Tigerdirect $229 AMD special, with a 7550 dual, 4Gb of RAM, a 200Gb SATA II, and a built in Radeon HD3200, which I played Bioshock and other games on for nearly two months before I got around to spending a whole $39 on an HD4650 1Gb.

You see what I have found is that ATM the AMD "bang for the buck" is just crazy insane right now, and since AM3 is backward compatible with AM2+ it is really easy to start dirt cheap, and just buy a part here and a part there when they are on sale or have killer rebates. I used an old OEM of XP X64 I had sitting in a drawer until the Newegg $50 pre-order of Windows 7 came in, used the dual until I ran across a 925 for $140, which you can actually get Propus quads now for $99 bucks, and used the built in for gaming until like I said I found a cheapo PCIe with plenty of RAM for $39 after $20 MIR.

So if you want to have a long and happy PC gaming experience for dirt cheap, just go here, pick you out a dirt cheap that has good upgrade potential (I would recommend AMD, but they have a nice Intel Dual for $199 that with a $20 RAM stick and a cheap PCIe card would make a nice game machine) and just do it a little bit at a time.

I just got the final piece for mine today as a matter of fact, an 8Gb flash drive for Readyboost that I got at Walgreen's of all places on sale for $14. It took me about a year to finally get her decked out the way I wanted, but I was able to use her the entire time and by waiting for sales and MIRs I probably shaved a good $250-$325 off the cost just by staying patient and waiting for the deals to come. 4Gb of DDR 2 800Mhz RAM for $40 here, a 500Gb drive for $45 there (you can get crazy steals by getting open box or refurb on Newegg) and before you know it you have a PC you can really be proud to show for for very little $$$.

And of course the nicest thing is not only did I get to use it while I built it up, but like my previous machines I'm looking forward to a good decade or more of service out of her. My GF is gonna come down next week while on break and pick up the 2001 era PC I used to game on so she will have a spare to do her Facebook and check her emails on while I work on hers. With just a little thought and TLC you'd be amazed how long a PC can last. In fact my FIRST 3D gaming rig, a P100Mhz with a Voodoo 1 is STILL being used 5 days a week by a local lumber mill to run a C&C lathe making custom columns using an old ISA card and running DOS 3! I'd love to see a console still be useful and work that hard after all those years.

Here's another.

I'm sure the people who can afford a fullHD tv@120Hz and a new player to see shrek 3D will rush to buy it. All 20 of them.

TigerDirect will gladly sell you a brand-new 46" Sony BRAVIA LCD and Sony Blu-Ray player for $1300. 1080p. 120 Hz Refresh.

Both set and player have Ethernet connectivity and together will deliver pretty much every widget and streaming media service you could name.

Sony KDL46W5150 BRAVIA W Series 46" LCD HDTV and Sony Blu-Ray Disc Player Bundle(FREE SHIPPING)

The 120 Hz set is easy to find, if not quite yet entry level. The Blu-Ray disk had a very successful Black Friday.

When the ugrade bug bites, it bites hard.
When my sister's family made the move up to big screen HD their PS3 video game purchases doubled and re-doubled.

The basic cable box was replaced by the HD digital recorder. Blu-Ray and Netflix and WiFi home networking were woven into the mix not long after.

You can get a Konica color laser at Tigerdirect for $119 so they have finally come down enough that it is stupid to buy the el cheapo printers anymore.

The point is I shouldn't have to be looking that stuff up. With AMD if it ain't a Sempron it has VT, or whatever AMD calls theirs, and the "bang for the buck" on the new duals and quads means I can give my customers more RAM and bigger HDDs, which I have found for a good 99.95% of the average folks out there matters more than having the fastest CPU out there.

I actually "ate my own dogfood" and used the profits from a couple of builds six months ago to build myself a new 7550 dual, and so far I haven't found a thing it won't run quite well, especially since I paired it up with a cheap 4650 GPU. With XP x64 and 9Gb of RAM (8 on the CPU and 1Gb on the GPU) everything is smooth as butter and for the whole smash with nearly 1Tb of HDD space and a nice pretty case to hold it all I think all told it was $650, closers to $550 after rebates.

So yeah, while the new Intel chips has some impressive stats, for most if not all my customers they are frankly way overkill. I just delivered a nice AMD quad and a 22 inch widescreen to a customer for less than $750, and frankly he was so impressed he had to call his family in just to show off his new baby. The new AMD rigs are cheap, quiet, fast, and frankly have more power than my customers will ever really need. And with a new quad starting at just $100 you really can't beat the bang for the buck. My customers are happy, I'm happy, it's a win/win.

what are you talking about?

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=1219598&CatId=76

In fact, there sin';t any format used in the last 17 years that I can't get at.

As much as people on /. like to think technology progress and changes at a phenomenal rate, that's not really true. What happens is core technology gets faster and bigger, but the core technology is still around. Or someone makes a tool to link modern technology with fading technology.

DVD in 17 years will still be usable, from a technology standpoint. from an aging standpoint, maybe not. Unless it is sealed well.

You can't order a real Bengal from TigerDirect.

Not unless you have $10.99 plus shipping. Looks real, although I'd have to look at it in person to better judge if it is fake.