> I'm giving my brother's family a new computer for christmas. > He'll buy it from a local (to him) 'white box' pc store and I'll > pay for it. I am a little concerned about performance because > the pc will probably be running GIMPS and I'd like to get my > money's worth. It's easy to request a P4 in the 2.0-2.5 range > and 256M-512M of memory but I've read of the bottleneck caused > by slow memory and the bus between memory and cpu and I don't > know what to specify or how to evaluate components in this area > or measure performance after the pc is built. > > Any comments or suggestions?
for P4 systems, from fastest (most $$) to slowest (cheapest) it goes, RDRAM, DDR SDRAM, regular PC133 SDRAM. I'd suggest getting the DDR SDRAM. The Intel i845PE chipsets support this. > I want them to have a fast machine but not on the bleeding > (expensive) edge. > > Other than GIMPS I'm sure my nephew will be the heaviest load > when he plays games on the new machine. > > I think I should also request the video card has all of it's own > memory, right? I don't want the video to share the main memory > for performance reasons, right? yeah, get a NVIDIA Geforce based graphics card... ATI might have won the latest round of benchmark wars, but NVIDIA has better driver stability. If you're going way cheap, get a GF3, more expensive get one of the slower steppings of the GF4 Ti (note that the budget GF4 MX is really a GF3 grade board, its kinda confusing). my shopping list for a reasonably priced high quality P4 right now is, with prices from my local cloneshop (not the cheapest place, but good service)... $213 Intel Retail P4-2.4"B" (these have the 533MHz bus) $133 Asus P4PE/L (i845pe chip, integrated ethernet and audio) $158 Samsung 512MB PC2700 DDR SDRAM $163 Asus V8420 GF4 Ti 4200, 128MB $113 Seagate Baracuda ATA IV 80GB disk (super quiet, very fast) $48 Toshiba 16X DVD-ROM $83 Teac CDW540E 40/12/48 cd-rw burner $8 Mitsumi floppy $78 Enlight mid-tower $23 Microsoft Intellimouse Optical OEM $9 Mitsumi generic 104 keyboard $1030 total for a 2.4Ghz 512MB machine with 80GB of disk, DVD-ROM and CD burner. This does NOT include the monitor, printer, or speakers, as those are all highly subjective. I also didn't include a modem, there's ethernet on the motherboard.. if these guys use dialup... now, if you need to trim corners, A) back off on the video card, get a GF4MX, B) back off to 256MB ram, thats enough, 512 is a luxury, if needed it could be added in. C) get a cheaper case. D) drop the DVD, you can always add one in later. _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
