Coming up to uni holidays now, I'm trying to piece together pricing for a new computer to replace my aging (2001 :roll: ) faithful desktop. The speed's fine for most stuff but it's falling behind in features and stuff, and gaming sucks. Working inside a microATX case sucks as well, I want full ATX!
So I'm trying to work out what I need. First question: does Intel or AMD have the better dual-core upgrade path? I was thinking of going Socket 939 with a cheapie say, A64 3000+ for now so I can upgrade to an X2 in a few months when they come down to reasonable prices. But I just read in another forum they're moving to a new socket soon? M2, when they move to DDR2? In which case, I'd be better off getting LGA775 with the better chipset. Which would be best for longterm upgradability?
Secondly, storage. RAIDing - what's the benefit, seriously? Is there any significant performance benefit with striping, and what benefit is mirroring when I've never had a hard drive fail on me? I've already just bought a 200GB PATA Seagate that can migrate, so is there any benefit of getting 2 SATA drives to RAID, or just one good one?
Video cards - are ATI All-In-Wonders any good, or should I go dedicated capture cards and GPUs? I've long been planning 6600GT, how do they compare to X800s, now that they've come down? I just want to play games like HL2 and other relatively new games at reasonable (1280 x 1024) framerates at good quality. Not at all interested in SLI/Crossfire or any monolith two-slotter cards.
Remember that this is still pipedream stuff, not gonna happens for a few months yet.
EDIT: On a side-note, since my parents don't really give a rat's about upgrading and they're fine - any laptops capable of decent HL2 framerates?
So I'm trying to work out what I need. First question: does Intel or AMD have the better dual-core upgrade path? I was thinking of going Socket 939 with a cheapie say, A64 3000+ for now so I can upgrade to an X2 in a few months when they come down to reasonable prices. But I just read in another forum they're moving to a new socket soon? M2, when they move to DDR2? In which case, I'd be better off getting LGA775 with the better chipset. Which would be best for longterm upgradability?
Secondly, storage. RAIDing - what's the benefit, seriously? Is there any significant performance benefit with striping, and what benefit is mirroring when I've never had a hard drive fail on me? I've already just bought a 200GB PATA Seagate that can migrate, so is there any benefit of getting 2 SATA drives to RAID, or just one good one?
Video cards - are ATI All-In-Wonders any good, or should I go dedicated capture cards and GPUs? I've long been planning 6600GT, how do they compare to X800s, now that they've come down? I just want to play games like HL2 and other relatively new games at reasonable (1280 x 1024) framerates at good quality. Not at all interested in SLI/Crossfire or any monolith two-slotter cards.
Remember that this is still pipedream stuff, not gonna happens for a few months yet.
EDIT: On a side-note, since my parents don't really give a rat's about upgrading and they're fine - any laptops capable of decent HL2 framerates?
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