Remove all of the fans and you should be good to go on the noise. It's free and will get 100% noise reduction. People who spend tons of money on "quiet" fans are just silly.
I did almost that, actually. I have mostly passive coolers, a single case fan and a single fan in my PSU. I don't really dare to get rid of those last two. They're both pretty quiet, and not terribly expensive. (Yeah, my PC isn't completely dead quiet, but it needs to be really quiet before you hear the soft breeze coming from the back. Most other appliances in my home make more noise.)
It is still advisable to get a high-end PSU with more power than you actually need since they are manufactured better.
The PSU is the unit to fail most often in my experience (and most spectacularly). I don't buy cheap ones anymore.
It's not 800W PSUs that are manufactured better, it's PSUs from quality brands that are manufactured better. Even a high-specced PSU can fail if it's made out of crap.
Another reason not to get an oversized PSU is energy usage. A PSU generally runs at peak efficiency at 50%. So if you have a machine drawing 150W, it will draw more power from the socket if it has an 800W PSU than if it has a 300W PSU. (And if the 800W PSU is so badly manufactured that it's really only a 500W PSU, don't count on that improving the efficiency any.)
And of course wasted energy doesn't mean just a higher electricity bill and higher sea levels, it also means more heat in your PSU, a need for more cooling, and therefore more noise.
So which are the quality brands that you need to get? I know SeaSonic is very good. Corsair too, I think. But from Antec I heard a bit too much bad stuff. I don't know much about the others though. Look for 80+ certification. PSUs that have it are more efficient and probably better manufactured, but there, lying happens too: they only have 80+ efficiency under optimal conditions that never happen in a real PC.
There's a point where $20 can get you quite a bit more punch, and then there's a point where you need to pay $100 more to get a significant boost. I like my CPUs (and GPUs) between those points: at the top of the mid-range or the bottom of the high-end.
But you're right. The vast majority of people don't even need that.
A quad-core isn't necessarily more future-proof than a dual-core. A quad-core is only really better than a dual core when your most CPU-intensive application is multithreaded. Although chances are that the future will bring us a lot more multithreaded applications.
For servers it's easier. There, more cores is practically always going to be better.
But not terribly GPU heavy by current standards. Oblivion was a very heavy game when it came out, but nowadays any $100 GPU should be able to display it at the highest detail without any problems whatsoever.
The question is: what kind of games will he want to play after he finishes Oblivion? Will it be high-end shooters like Crysis, or will it be CRPGs which tend to be quite a bit milder with their graphics requirements?
But if you're looking at the long term, wouldn't it make even more sense to buy a processor at the optimal price point rather than a high-end one? In a couple of months, there'll be cheaper processors that are just as fast as the i7-860.
It's quite easy, select your brand (intel/AMD or different) and choose according how hard you'll need your raw cpupower. Don't take your selection lightly; because you'll have a second vacuum cleaner in the house (core 2 duo vs dual core). Gamer machines/video and audio production stations need more raw cpupower than a PC being used for wordprocessing and Internet.
True, but at the same time, word processing and internet requires very little power nowadays. PCs could do that 15 years ago. Your phone has enough power to do all of that (it just lacks a decent interface). Heavy 3D gaming requires a lot more power, but still nowhere near as much as some people would make you believe. A single $100-$150 graphics card and a regular above-average dual core CPU is probably more than enough for most games.
People also tell a lot of bullshit about the power requirements for PCs. Those 800W power supplies are only for people who have 4 power guzzling graphics cards in their PC. Most PCs rarely use more than 200W. I'm using a 380W power supply, and it's more than enough. I can easily do heavy 3D gaming without hiccups while having 50 websites open in a browser.
The problem is humans are not good at coping with decissions that involve more than three different factors. So in the end the best is to boil it down to the three things that are most important to you and rate the choices on those items. Or you can just ask for a fast one.
This is very true. First think about what's really important to you. Is it excessive amounts of raw power? Is it cost? Is it noise? (It was for me.) Is it low power usage? How important is compatibility with future components really? (Most likely you'll just buy a completely new PC again, right?)
What are you going to use it for? Web + mail? Programming? Some gaming? Heavy, state-of-the-art 3D gaming?
Most likely, you'll want a healthy balance of these things. People who assemble PCs for a living will probably know what you want, because they've sold the same PC to thousands of others already. If you have unusual wishes (noise is too often ignored IMO), then it's wise to do some research into that specific area.
Just find a reputable computer seller and order a machine that fits your budget. It'll probably run whatever you need it to run. If Oblivion is the heaviest game you're going to run, you can be done for about $500 probably.
If you don't want the same boring standard machine that everybody else has, then you'll have to do some research. I did that 2 years ago. My main resource was Silent PC Review because I was tired of my old jet-engine-soundalike. AnandTech is also a good source, as is Tweakers, if you happen to be Dutch. Lots of articles on those sites will refer to Tom's Hardware, which does benchmark graphs, but really, just get what everybody's recommending.
Two years ago, I went with:
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 (brand new at the time, very fast, very low power usage, therefore little heat) with a passive Scythe Ninja cooler,
ATI HD3850 (new, powerful, not overly expensive, good for all games expect Crysis, low power usage when not doing 3D stuff) from Peak (cheaper than other HD3850s because they had a badly fitted cooler which I was going to replace anyway) with passive Accelero S1 cooler (very effective passive cooler, and very cheap).
Seasonic S12II-380 power supply (SeaSonic has the quietest PSUs, and 380 W is more than enough for a modern PC that doesn't try to waste as much power as possible),
Antec Solo case (Antec makes the quietest cases, but stay away from their power supplies)
Some new Samsung harddisk that everybody else was using too.
Some Gigabyte motherboard with P35 chipset, which was what you needed two years ago
All of this cost me about EUR 1000. Very happy with it. Dead quiet, too. Mind you, this is from 2 years ago. There's probably better, cheaper, quieter, faster stuff around now, but I'm not keeping up.
As for the dual core/quad core stuff: how many heavy CPU-using applications will you be running at the same time? Will your heaviest applications be able to make efficient use of multiple cores? If you don't know, go with dual core. One for the main app, one for everything else. No need to have to extra cores that are only idling all the time.
What is it about IE6's interface that you like so much? The lack of tabs? The bizarre rendering?
Incidentally, I recently needed IE6 to test a website for a customer that's somewhat stuck in the past. So I install VMWare Fusion, Win XP, and discover this particular copy of WinXP already comes with IE8. After a bit of googling I find a couple of ways to uninstall IE8, and one of those seemed to work. Unlike promised, however, it didn't free up a hidden IE6. Instead, I had no IE at all. So I got the IE6 installer from MS' download page. Apparently, despite its widely publicised death, IE6 is still being distributed by MS, but this time I was happy about it. Or would have been, if the installer worked. It didn't. It complained I had a more recent version already installed.
So, next step: take regedit en remove IE8 from the registry. Install again, but again the installer refused, because it claimed not to have an internet connection to download something it needed. Of course it had an internet connection, it just didn't have a browser. I reinstalled IE8, but that didn't seem to work. Looks like I managed to create a Windows installation that had no version of IE at all, and unwilling to accept the installation of one. I got IEtester instead, and that works fine.
And Eclipse is pretty bad as Java applications go. It's known to eat tons of memory and CPU for doing very little. But I don't think that's a Java issue. There are some very bad design decisions at the root of Eclipse.
Unfortunately, Java is a backwards language with zero interesting features whatsoever.
Other than the JVM, that is. Java sucks, but the JVM is the coolest thing ever, and it supports Scala, Groovy, JRuby, Jython, etc.
Java was great when all we knew was C++, but nowadays we have much better choices available. And we get to keep the one good thing that Java ever gave us.
You mean Windows? you can't possibly mean Nokia - which, although Maemoblin is very very new, should do well given Nokia's business-friendly sales and general market dominance.
At the moment, Maemo is only available on a single modern handset, which doesn't receive a lot of support in marketing, app stores or hype. Yes, the N900 is pretty amazing, but it's a bad platform choice if you want to reach lots of users.
the nokia n900 + maemo allows multiple languages and frameworks (x11 gtk qt sdl gles and whatever else you can throw at it) to peacefully coexist together:)
don't take my word for it though, i'm biased
I'm not. I didn't buy an n900 because I expected a lot more support for Android (and because a Milestone just looks so much better), but Maemo is definitely the ultimate geek smartphone OS. And you're really the owner of your own system: you're root, unlike on Android or the iPhone.
I have owned 3 android phones. I have also used an iPhone for a non-trivial amount of time (I borrowed one for a month). While I agree that the first 2 (a G1, and a hacked HTC Tyan II) were no where near the experience of the iPhone, the Droid that I have now is to the point that I'd say it's better. It's every bit as fluid (in some cases more so) as the iPhone. Sure, the settings screens and music app leave something to be desired, but the whole UI is definitely ahead of the iPhone. Not because of ease of use (I don't think it's easier). Not because of the sexy factor (The iPhone is more sexy). But because of the extensibility factor.
I got a Milestone (GSM Droid) because it was the first phone that really surpassed the iPhone on pretty much all fronts. All? Well, the UI is actually not quite as smooth as the iPhone, and can be a bit erratic at times, and it's very minor. Maybe it was just a matter of getting used to it, because I don't seem to have the problems that I had when I just got it.
Definitely better s the email app. Or email apps, because there are several. But I really, really like those a lot. To the point that I often read email on my Milestone even when I'm behind a computer.
The standard SMS app sucks, but here's where the superior Android app policy matters: there are several better SMS apps that you can install, and you can remove the original one. I can't replace the sucky iPhone email app with a more powerful one.
My Milestone is not perfect, however. I don't have root access, and I can't easily replace the OS itself with a superior version (does Cyanogen have a 2.0 version already?). I need to root it, and that just shouldn't be necessary. But most people wouldn't need that anyway.
This especially. Say what you like, but the iPod's UI was way better than that of any other music player at the time. Same with the iPhone that did way with navigating through crappy menus just to do something basic.
There's tons of stuff wrong with Apple, and I'm glad I switched from iPhone to Android, but Apple does know better than anyone else how to make accessible and usable interfaces.
Would my poker experience help to shine some light on this discussion? On a company outing we recently had a poker workshop: Texas Hold'em, of course. Some people there had poker experience, a few had even played in tournaments. It was my first time ever playing poker, but I won, defeating about 30 people.
Of course I don't have the experience to say how common something like this is, but my impression is that luck has quite a big impact on the game. (Though not being completely stupid helps too, I suppose.)
As sentimental as that is, for the last five years I've heard nothing but complaints about the color scheme.
Not from me, but I wasn't a terribly big fan of the old colour scheme either. The new one is definitely better, but still lacking in comparison to the looks of OS X and that recent black Windows theme I see all over the place lately.
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I have a quad core box here that had huge stability problems with a 400W psu, but works fine with a different one (Also rate for 400W)
Which brands? Using a quality PSU is much more important than having a high Watt rating.
Remove all of the fans and you should be good to go on the noise. It's free and will get 100% noise reduction. People who spend tons of money on "quiet" fans are just silly.
I did almost that, actually. I have mostly passive coolers, a single case fan and a single fan in my PSU. I don't really dare to get rid of those last two. They're both pretty quiet, and not terribly expensive. (Yeah, my PC isn't completely dead quiet, but it needs to be really quiet before you hear the soft breeze coming from the back. Most other appliances in my home make more noise.)
It is still advisable to get a high-end PSU with more power than you actually need since they are manufactured better.
The PSU is the unit to fail most often in my experience (and most spectacularly). I don't buy cheap ones anymore.
It's not 800W PSUs that are manufactured better, it's PSUs from quality brands that are manufactured better. Even a high-specced PSU can fail if it's made out of crap.
Another reason not to get an oversized PSU is energy usage. A PSU generally runs at peak efficiency at 50%. So if you have a machine drawing 150W, it will draw more power from the socket if it has an 800W PSU than if it has a 300W PSU. (And if the 800W PSU is so badly manufactured that it's really only a 500W PSU, don't count on that improving the efficiency any.)
And of course wasted energy doesn't mean just a higher electricity bill and higher sea levels, it also means more heat in your PSU, a need for more cooling, and therefore more noise.
So which are the quality brands that you need to get? I know SeaSonic is very good. Corsair too, I think. But from Antec I heard a bit too much bad stuff. I don't know much about the others though. Look for 80+ certification. PSUs that have it are more efficient and probably better manufactured, but there, lying happens too: they only have 80+ efficiency under optimal conditions that never happen in a real PC.
There's a point where $20 can get you quite a bit more punch, and then there's a point where you need to pay $100 more to get a significant boost. I like my CPUs (and GPUs) between those points: at the top of the mid-range or the bottom of the high-end.
But you're right. The vast majority of people don't even need that.
If you're playing hot new games, a hot CPU is handy. So is a hot video card.
Not true. You need a better cooler.
A quad-core isn't necessarily more future-proof than a dual-core. A quad-core is only really better than a dual core when your most CPU-intensive application is multithreaded. Although chances are that the future will bring us a lot more multithreaded applications.
For servers it's easier. There, more cores is practically always going to be better.
What exactly is the power draw of an average website?
That depends on the efficiency of the CPU, motherboard, etc that are handling it.
But not terribly GPU heavy by current standards. Oblivion was a very heavy game when it came out, but nowadays any $100 GPU should be able to display it at the highest detail without any problems whatsoever.
The question is: what kind of games will he want to play after he finishes Oblivion? Will it be high-end shooters like Crysis, or will it be CRPGs which tend to be quite a bit milder with their graphics requirements?
But if you're looking at the long term, wouldn't it make even more sense to buy a processor at the optimal price point rather than a high-end one? In a couple of months, there'll be cheaper processors that are just as fast as the i7-860.
It's quite easy, select your brand (intel/AMD or different) and choose according how hard you'll need your raw cpupower. Don't take your selection lightly; because you'll have a second vacuum cleaner in the house (core 2 duo vs dual core). Gamer machines/video and audio production stations need more raw cpupower than a PC being used for wordprocessing and Internet.
True, but at the same time, word processing and internet requires very little power nowadays. PCs could do that 15 years ago. Your phone has enough power to do all of that (it just lacks a decent interface). Heavy 3D gaming requires a lot more power, but still nowhere near as much as some people would make you believe. A single $100-$150 graphics card and a regular above-average dual core CPU is probably more than enough for most games.
People also tell a lot of bullshit about the power requirements for PCs. Those 800W power supplies are only for people who have 4 power guzzling graphics cards in their PC. Most PCs rarely use more than 200W. I'm using a 380W power supply, and it's more than enough. I can easily do heavy 3D gaming without hiccups while having 50 websites open in a browser.
The problem is humans are not good at coping with decissions that involve more than three different factors. So in the end the best is to boil it down to the three things that are most important to you and rate the choices on those items. Or you can just ask for a fast one.
This is very true. First think about what's really important to you. Is it excessive amounts of raw power? Is it cost? Is it noise? (It was for me.) Is it low power usage? How important is compatibility with future components really? (Most likely you'll just buy a completely new PC again, right?)
What are you going to use it for? Web + mail? Programming? Some gaming? Heavy, state-of-the-art 3D gaming?
Most likely, you'll want a healthy balance of these things. People who assemble PCs for a living will probably know what you want, because they've sold the same PC to thousands of others already. If you have unusual wishes (noise is too often ignored IMO), then it's wise to do some research into that specific area.
The Core i5-750 is only $200. If you're not willing to spend $200 on your CPU, you have no business building a PC instead of buying one.
$200 is too much for a CPU. Unless you're eager to waste money to get more power than you can possibly use, $100 gets you everything you need.
Just find a reputable computer seller and order a machine that fits your budget. It'll probably run whatever you need it to run. If Oblivion is the heaviest game you're going to run, you can be done for about $500 probably.
If you don't want the same boring standard machine that everybody else has, then you'll have to do some research. I did that 2 years ago. My main resource was Silent PC Review because I was tired of my old jet-engine-soundalike. AnandTech is also a good source, as is Tweakers, if you happen to be Dutch. Lots of articles on those sites will refer to Tom's Hardware, which does benchmark graphs, but really, just get what everybody's recommending.
Two years ago, I went with:
All of this cost me about EUR 1000. Very happy with it. Dead quiet, too. Mind you, this is from 2 years ago. There's probably better, cheaper, quieter, faster stuff around now, but I'm not keeping up.
As for the dual core/quad core stuff: how many heavy CPU-using applications will you be running at the same time? Will your heaviest applications be able to make efficient use of multiple cores? If you don't know, go with dual core. One for the main app, one for everything else. No need to have to extra cores that are only idling all the time.
They're going to use the Webkit renderer.
What is it about IE6's interface that you like so much? The lack of tabs? The bizarre rendering?
Incidentally, I recently needed IE6 to test a website for a customer that's somewhat stuck in the past. So I install VMWare Fusion, Win XP, and discover this particular copy of WinXP already comes with IE8. After a bit of googling I find a couple of ways to uninstall IE8, and one of those seemed to work. Unlike promised, however, it didn't free up a hidden IE6. Instead, I had no IE at all. So I got the IE6 installer from MS' download page. Apparently, despite its widely publicised death, IE6 is still being distributed by MS, but this time I was happy about it. Or would have been, if the installer worked. It didn't. It complained I had a more recent version already installed.
So, next step: take regedit en remove IE8 from the registry. Install again, but again the installer refused, because it claimed not to have an internet connection to download something it needed. Of course it had an internet connection, it just didn't have a browser. I reinstalled IE8, but that didn't seem to work. Looks like I managed to create a Windows installation that had no version of IE at all, and unwilling to accept the installation of one. I got IEtester instead, and that works fine.
And Eclipse is pretty bad as Java applications go. It's known to eat tons of memory and CPU for doing very little. But I don't think that's a Java issue. There are some very bad design decisions at the root of Eclipse.
Unfortunately, Java is a backwards language with zero interesting features whatsoever.
Other than the JVM, that is. Java sucks, but the JVM is the coolest thing ever, and it supports Scala, Groovy, JRuby, Jython, etc.
Java was great when all we knew was C++, but nowadays we have much better choices available. And we get to keep the one good thing that Java ever gave us.
You mean Windows? you can't possibly mean Nokia - which, although Maemoblin is very very new, should do well given Nokia's business-friendly sales and general market dominance.
At the moment, Maemo is only available on a single modern handset, which doesn't receive a lot of support in marketing, app stores or hype. Yes, the N900 is pretty amazing, but it's a bad platform choice if you want to reach lots of users.
the nokia n900 + maemo allows multiple languages and frameworks (x11 gtk qt sdl gles and whatever else you can throw at it) to peacefully coexist together :)
don't take my word for it though, i'm biased
I'm not. I didn't buy an n900 because I expected a lot more support for Android (and because a Milestone just looks so much better), but Maemo is definitely the ultimate geek smartphone OS. And you're really the owner of your own system: you're root, unlike on Android or the iPhone.
Actually my HTC Hero is pretty good at non sucking, every aspect except the 3d games performance is way superior to the iPhone...
Smaller screen. Less resolution too, I think.
I have owned 3 android phones. I have also used an iPhone for a non-trivial amount of time (I borrowed one for a month). While I agree that the first 2 (a G1, and a hacked HTC Tyan II) were no where near the experience of the iPhone, the Droid that I have now is to the point that I'd say it's better. It's every bit as fluid (in some cases more so) as the iPhone. Sure, the settings screens and music app leave something to be desired, but the whole UI is definitely ahead of the iPhone. Not because of ease of use (I don't think it's easier). Not because of the sexy factor (The iPhone is more sexy). But because of the extensibility factor.
I got a Milestone (GSM Droid) because it was the first phone that really surpassed the iPhone on pretty much all fronts. All? Well, the UI is actually not quite as smooth as the iPhone, and can be a bit erratic at times, and it's very minor. Maybe it was just a matter of getting used to it, because I don't seem to have the problems that I had when I just got it.
Definitely better s the email app. Or email apps, because there are several. But I really, really like those a lot. To the point that I often read email on my Milestone even when I'm behind a computer.
The standard SMS app sucks, but here's where the superior Android app policy matters: there are several better SMS apps that you can install, and you can remove the original one. I can't replace the sucky iPhone email app with a more powerful one.
My Milestone is not perfect, however. I don't have root access, and I can't easily replace the OS itself with a superior version (does Cyanogen have a 2.0 version already?). I need to root it, and that just shouldn't be necessary. But most people wouldn't need that anyway.
that it's easier to use
This especially. Say what you like, but the iPod's UI was way better than that of any other music player at the time. Same with the iPhone that did way with navigating through crappy menus just to do something basic.
There's tons of stuff wrong with Apple, and I'm glad I switched from iPhone to Android, but Apple does know better than anyone else how to make accessible and usable interfaces.
Would my poker experience help to shine some light on this discussion? On a company outing we recently had a poker workshop: Texas Hold'em, of course. Some people there had poker experience, a few had even played in tournaments. It was my first time ever playing poker, but I won, defeating about 30 people.
Of course I don't have the experience to say how common something like this is, but my impression is that luck has quite a big impact on the game. (Though not being completely stupid helps too, I suppose.)
I think of bubble gum when I see that awful XP theme. Worst colour scheme ever.
As sentimental as that is, for the last five years I've heard nothing but complaints about the color scheme.
Not from me, but I wasn't a terribly big fan of the old colour scheme either. The new one is definitely better, but still lacking in comparison to the looks of OS X and that recent black Windows theme I see all over the place lately.