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Intel Viiv vs. AMD LIVE!
Searching4Sasquatch writes "Hot Hardware has tested two nearly identical HP systems in an effort to determine the best solution between Intel's Viiv and AMD's LIVE! campaigns. Priced around $999, these general purpose systems are tested straight out of the box with no tweaking or refinement to illustrate how "Joe Consumer" would fare in using one of these platforms."
It has been quite a while since you have been able to piece together a system for cheaper than a prebuilt one.
"When life gives you lemons, don't make lemonade. Make life take the lemons back!" -- Cave Johnson
Works for me.
Perhaps it is because of refcontrol.
When information is power, privacy is freedom.
The AMD system was cheaper, performed better overall and had a more complex set of qualifications in order to receive the "AMD Live" certification. Yawn, this really was not a very interesting comparison. Anyway CableCards, DRM, and cheap cable company DVR's that have room to grow are going to be the death of HTPC's so I wouldn't go spending a bucket load of cash on one right now.
If you wanna get rich, you know that payback is a bitch
Except they're both Dual Core systems. It's the AMD Athlon 64 X2.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The fact is the Intel platform exhibited rendering errors, and didn't even run some games. This is despite being on their recent G965 chipset. It also had poor image quality (although the nVidia chipset didn't do that much better, AMD do have the ATI chipsets which get very good scores in HQV) and Intel really should be chastised for selling a media brand with such abysmal performance. It was also $100 cheaper - you can get a fairly decent graphics card for that money, or a CPU upgrade to make up for the slightly faster C2D.
Both systems were using dual core chips.
It is a shame that they didn't use a noise meter at any time, or discuss power consumption, or mention the fact that their requirements for LIVE! had "Vista" whilst the HP system ran XP MCE.
I don't think anyone would want that computer near their home cinema system either.
That depends on what kind of components you want. If you want a machine for home office use, the kind of thing with integrated graphics and audio, for example, sure. The companies that build them get big discounts on the lower-range parts they buy in bulk, and they take very small margins. The cost of assembly, plus the profit they take, frequently is less than the discounts they received on the parts. If I was in the market for an office-use kind of machine, I would certainly consider something like the Dell Dimension series. (Well, maybe not Dell, I'd probably personally pick a smaller company, but it's a good example.)
However, for higher-end machines, that's just not the case at all. Take a look at the Dell XPS series. Go ahead and customize one, and look at how certain changes affect the price. There's the CPU, where switching from a 6300 to a 6400 costs an extra $50, but on Newegg there's only a $30 difference. Adding an extra GB of DDR2 667 RAM costs $130, when on Newegg you can get faster memory for $100. ven the cost of the DVD burner is questionable. From what I've seen, this is pretty representative of other builders, though I do know of at least a few that are much better than Dell. You get a deal on relatively low-quality components, sure. But if you want to, say, play modern games...you'd be ripping yourself off.