What Brand of Desktop is best these days?

  • i wasn't much into FPS's until i played Call of Duty Black Ops in the last month

  • paul.knibbs (12/28/2010)Tom's Hardware actually did a review where they assessed how much of an impact anti-virus had on game performance. The answer was, pretty much none:

    http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/anti-virus-virus-scanner-performance,2777.html

    And it's not like it's impossible for your machine to get infected while you're gaming--it's fairly unlikely you'll respond to a Trojan in the middle of a COD blast-fest, obviously, but the more traditional "infect your machine without your intervention" virus could still land on your machine if you're not careful.

    Paul, thanks for the link to Tom's Hardware. I want to learn more about BIOS settings and hardware in general and this is a good site for that. BIOS, at least on this new PC of mine, is much more advanced than it used to be and I don't have a clue about a lot of the options there. I'll read enough to try to tweak it some, but no overclocking for me although that's in the BIOS now too.

    The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking

  • I need to upgrade my PC. In the past years I went to Pricewatch.com and looked for motherboard combos. That way I know the the MB, CPU and memory are compatible. I do not do any hard core gaming. I have been (slowly) converting some old VCR tapes to DVD. It takes more HD space than anything else.

    I have a 400W power supply in my case (tower). I believe it will handle most MB's. The one thing I am concerned about is my old HD. I figured I would move to SATA.

  • kevlray (1/6/2011)


    I need to upgrade my PC. In the past years I went to Pricewatch.com and looked for motherboard combos. That way I know the the MB, CPU and memory are compatible. I do not do any hard core gaming. I have been (slowly) converting some old VCR tapes to DVD. It takes more HD space than anything else.

    I have a 400W power supply in my case (tower). I believe it will handle most MB's. The one thing I am concerned about is my old HD. I figured I would move to SATA.

    I don't claim to be a hardware authority, so don't take my word for it alone, but yes, I would move to SATA since it looks like SSD is the way of the future unless you need terabytes or more of space. You may need more space than SSD has to offer in the near future too, so that may not matter much. But one of the latest SSD drives in the news sports a half a terabyte and supports SATA 3.0. No word yet on the price though. But SATA 3.0 looks impressive:

    ...the SATA 3.0 specification, which offers 6Gbit/sec. throughput, and the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) 2.1 specification, which provides sequential read speeds of up to 355MB/sec. and sequential write speeds of up to 215MB/sec.

    The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking

  • ...the SATA 3.0 specification, which offers 6Gbit/sec. throughput, and the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) 2.1 specification, which provides sequential read speeds of up to 355MB/sec. and sequential write speeds of up to 215MB/sec.

    SATA should be much better that what I have now (IDE). I have a 80 GB drive. I had a 160 GB drive, but it died a couple of weeks ago.

  • I mainly play Civilization and other strategy games and play them against "the computer" vs online. I could see the temptation to turn AV off while playing a graphics-intensive game online, but it sounds like you're disciplined and smart enough to know when you need to have your AV active.

    More than anything, I wanted to be able to take advantage of all the new tech: Windows 7, 64 bit, multi-core processors, SSD, 1 GB (RAM) video cards, etc.

    Speaking of gaming, I bought my last PC, a Dell Dimension 8400, so that it could handle playing Doom 3 and that turned out well for me since that PC's tech wasn't outdated very fast. The funny part is, as it runs out, I didn't even like to play Doom 3, with its blood-soaked walls and all - kind of creeped me out too much. :blink: 'Guess I'm done with 1st person shooters. But I was basically addicted to Doom 2 for a while there.

    He did his testing with the one anti-virus software that pretty much all gamers use that has a reputation for not interfering with system resources - AVG. I would love to see what his results are if he installed McAfee or lord-forbid Norton. Also, you should have more than just AVG on your machine anyway. I have seen a couple friends of mine that just relied on AVG and still got viruses.

    I don't have the -latest- version of McAfee, but I know from my own personal experience that you are going to see at least a 20-30% drop in framerate. I know that one version of McAfee actually scanned the file every time it was accessed by any process.

    Also, if you want to have your machine take about another 5 min to boot up, install any virus related software by Norton. I guess they figure that if you can't use your machine then it won't get a virus.

    If you are only running the game you are playing, and not browsing the internet, you can rest assured that you are not going to get a virus. In response to 'Trojan' problem, you would have already gotten the Trojan on your machine before you turned off the virus software for it to pop up a message in the background while you were playing.

    Bottom line - you want better performance ingame? Turn off the virus software while you play and turn it back on when you are done.


    Live to Throw
    Throw to Live
    Will Summers

  • kevlray (1/6/2011)


    ...the SATA 3.0 specification, which offers 6Gbit/sec. throughput, and the Open NAND Flash Interface (ONFI) 2.1 specification, which provides sequential read speeds of up to 355MB/sec. and sequential write speeds of up to 215MB/sec.

    SATA should be much better that what I have now (IDE). I have a 80 GB drive. I had a 160 GB drive, but it died a couple of weeks ago.

    If you want your machine to boot up in say, 20-30 seconds, get a SSD for your boot drive and then another drive for all your programs and games. I have this setup on my machine, my laptop and my wife's machine and all three run great. This setup makes windows run very very smoothly.

    I had originally set this up on my laptop since I shut it down and rebooted it frequently. I was so impressed by the performance that I setup my wife and I's desktops.

    Not all SSDs are created equal. My favorite is brand is OCZ. They seem to be the best bang for the buck out there and have the highest speeds for your dollar.

    Also, chances are you aren't going to outgrow a "SSD drive only used as a boot drive" as fast as you would a regular HDD since it will only house the operating system.


    Live to Throw
    Throw to Live
    Will Summers

  • if you haven't heard, Intel just announced a recall of almost all Sandy Bridge Intel chipsets

  • alen teplitsky (2/2/2011)


    if you haven't heard, Intel just announced a recall of almost all Sandy Bridge Intel chipsets

    Which makes me happy that I went with AMD this time! :w00t:

    By the way, in case you didn't know, even if you don't have a SSD, you can take advantage of the same technology to an extent if you have Vista or Windows 7 and a USB Flash Drive with at least 1GB of free space? It's Readyboost.

    The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking

  • had AMD for my last build, but the lack of 32nm is not making me happy. by the time AMD goes to 32nm Intel will be on Ivy Bridge and 22nm

  • ReadyBoost is more of a replacement for insufficient RAM than anything...if you have plenty of RAM you won't see much benefit from using it. Oh, and you need a decent USB stick as well, it won't allow you to use it with any old rubbish! 🙂

  • paul.knibbs (2/2/2011)


    ReadyBoost is more of a replacement for insufficient RAM than anything...if you have plenty of RAM you won't see much benefit from using it. Oh, and you need a decent USB stick as well, it won't allow you to use it with any old rubbish! 🙂

    That's right, I was hoping that I'd already qualified it enough, but that's also right. And if the stick goes bad, will it crash your system? I don't know that those flash drives are made for heavy I/O. So it may not be a terrific long term solution.

    As for AMD being a little behind Intel, this time it didn't matter to me, I didn't have to have a top-of-the-line machine, just a fast one. And it was cheaper, of course. :hehe:

    The greatest enemy of knowledge is not ignorance, it is the illusion of knowledge. - Stephen Hawking

  • Will1922 (8/12/2010)


    Build your own. Do the research and you can make a great machine that's exactly what you want. NewEgg is great because you can do side-by-side comparisons and view user reviews. You will be able to upgrade your machine later and not have to rebuy the machine every couple of years.

    DEFINITELY make your boot drive a SSD. It makes Win 7 really snappy. I actually turn my machine off now because it boots up in less that 15 seconds.

    Ummm I get those kinds of boot times with just straight HDs.

    Athlon Phenom II x4 running Win7 64bit

    The trick was putting the swap file on it's own 180 GB drive I had sitting around. The machine starts up in silly quick time.



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