I'm sorry but this review is extremely biased by a (more or less) experienced Ubuntu user. Some criticism is spot on (like the PSU efficiency remark) but some criticism is a bit far fetched. It lacks in documentation, sure but to cover the last 20% it probably requires 80% more time which would make the PC easily $300 instead of $200, not to mention that the writer apparently thinks that all PC's should be capable of understanding any piece of hardware you push into it.
This PC just does what it's supposed to do, it runs with the preinstalled hardware and that's it. Want to customise it? Fine, you pay the extra price for it.
I think $200 for a complete PC (excluding monitor) is actually pretty cheap. Don't forget that $200 is a price you could easily spend on a half-decent CPU alone and now you get a complete working PC for it. Sure it might lack a bit on this and that's but if you consider that a problem you probably bought the wrong PC.
You just answered your own question.. congratulations. The lag appears because most of today's lcd's have a too high response time. Therefore it takes about 20ms (on an average lcd display) to let a pixel change from one color to another, therefore if you move your mouse up for example it would take 20ms for the blue windows desktop pixel to become black (border of the mouse). and than another 20ms to become white. So there is no need to store the data, it just takes 20ms to change from one color to another. This causes the so called lag.
If you don't notice anything when playing fps games then you just have bad eyes imho.
I'm currently the owner of an nvidia geforce4 ti4400 and i bought it around may 2002 and it can still run today's games quite decent. The only hickup are happening with doom3 now and than, but this is actually the first game that i had to put on low settings to get a decent 40-60 fps. All other games never gave a hickup at medium or high quality/resolution settings. The only thing that might lack is some good AA.
The card i had before this was a geforce 1 sdr. It just got a bit cheaper at the date of purchase because the ddr version was released. I had this card for at least 2 years as well.
In this period most of my friends have gone through several more "midrange" cards, like a tnt2, gf2mx, ati radeon 8500, radeon 9600. So in the end they come up spending just as much money as me if not more. So it doesn't really matter that much what your strategy is. Either you buy an expensive card which might last longer, or you buy a midrange card every 8 months or so.
But be serious, you play a game because you like the gameplay, and not because it looks funky. I still have a lot of fun with quake3 and all settings set to 16bit and such. It looks ridiculous, but plays like a charm.
I even have more fun playing wacky wheels in dosbox than playing certain games that look marvelous.
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I'm sorry but this review is extremely biased by a (more or less) experienced Ubuntu user. Some criticism is spot on (like the PSU efficiency remark) but some criticism is a bit far fetched. It lacks in documentation, sure but to cover the last 20% it probably requires 80% more time which would make the PC easily $300 instead of $200, not to mention that the writer apparently thinks that all PC's should be capable of understanding any piece of hardware you push into it. This PC just does what it's supposed to do, it runs with the preinstalled hardware and that's it. Want to customise it? Fine, you pay the extra price for it. I think $200 for a complete PC (excluding monitor) is actually pretty cheap. Don't forget that $200 is a price you could easily spend on a half-decent CPU alone and now you get a complete working PC for it. Sure it might lack a bit on this and that's but if you consider that a problem you probably bought the wrong PC.
Isn't divx itself in someway illegal too considering it was actually a hack of the ms mpeg4 format or something?
You just answered your own question.. congratulations. The lag appears because most of today's lcd's have a too high response time. Therefore it takes about 20ms (on an average lcd display) to let a pixel change from one color to another, therefore if you move your mouse up for example it would take 20ms for the blue windows desktop pixel to become black (border of the mouse). and than another 20ms to become white. So there is no need to store the data, it just takes 20ms to change from one color to another. This causes the so called lag.
If you don't notice anything when playing fps games then you just have bad eyes imho.
I'm currently the owner of an nvidia geforce4 ti4400 and i bought it around may 2002 and it can still run today's games quite decent. The only hickup are happening with doom3 now and than, but this is actually the first game that i had to put on low settings to get a decent 40-60 fps. All other games never gave a hickup at medium or high quality/resolution settings. The only thing that might lack is some good AA. The card i had before this was a geforce 1 sdr. It just got a bit cheaper at the date of purchase because the ddr version was released. I had this card for at least 2 years as well. In this period most of my friends have gone through several more "midrange" cards, like a tnt2, gf2mx, ati radeon 8500, radeon 9600. So in the end they come up spending just as much money as me if not more. So it doesn't really matter that much what your strategy is. Either you buy an expensive card which might last longer, or you buy a midrange card every 8 months or so. But be serious, you play a game because you like the gameplay, and not because it looks funky. I still have a lot of fun with quake3 and all settings set to 16bit and such. It looks ridiculous, but plays like a charm. I even have more fun playing wacky wheels in dosbox than playing certain games that look marvelous.