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You Bretheren. What up with thee? Got an LCD vs CRT question.

F

FishTankX

Platinum Member
Okay, i've got a hard choice to make. I'm designing a rig for my friend's girlfriend (strictly professional style) on dell.com and i've got 2 options

19 inch CRT
18 inch refurbed Dell FP1800 (Er, their refurbed 18'' LCD, dont know if I got the model number right)

The difference, as I can tell, is about 220$....
This rig will be primarily used for every day tasks.. with the breakdown going something like

45% webbrowsing/normal tasks
35% graphical design
20% gaming

Which one would you reccomend?

And what do you think of the rest of the rig specs?

P4 2.6
Radeon 9800
120 gig SATA 7200RPM
512MB DCDDR
(Dell's soundcard option)
DVD burner (+R+RW 4X)
 
no way is that worth $1900, with a coupon code you can get a base dell with LCD for around $1000, then add the other stuff buying from hot deals (big HDD, Extra RAM, .....)

I would get the 1800FP but not a refurb.
 
um...does she really need a radeon 9800, or a dvd burner, or a sata hard drive?

What's her budget?

Is graphic design her line of study or work? If so, she should have some thoughts on the color matching of LCD vs CRT. I'd definetly go with a gig of ram over the 9800, dvd burner, or sata hard drive
 
She is a frequent gamer (thus, the 9800) and does graphics design in her spare time. I assume she'll want to back stuff up, thus the DVD burner. These, again, are suggestions to her. I doubt she knew that a gig of RAM (Versus 512) is 200$ (She origonally wanted a gig. but at that price, it's absolutley absurd)

The SATA harddrive, as I understand it, has little to no premium over a standard IDE variant. I told her she could save 60$ and pick the normal ATA based 80 gig harddrive.

Any other comments, or replies to my comments?
 
P4 2.6
Radeon 9800
120 gig SATA 7200RPM
512MB DCDDR
(Dell's soundcard option)
DVD burner (+R+RW 4X)
Click to expand...

Me personally, I'd ditch the sata and get a basic drive, ditch the 512mb ddr and get bare minimum, i'd do the same for the dvd+r/+rw drive and video card, also the lcd.

Then go on the hot deals forum or newegg and purchase whatever amount of memory you want, the video card, a dvd burner that handles -R/-RW/+R/+RW cuz +R/+RW media is high $ wise in comparison.

Dell rips you off so bad when you go from a basic system to a more highend one doing upgrades. Be smart with your money, unless you're buying a 3-4yr warranty then what does it matter if you get the parts from them? Cuz it will run out in a year anyway. Also, if you are purchasing a 3-4yr warranty then why are you? The monitor is covered for 3yrs anyway, so there is no need for that. As for the other stuff, well that's up to you. I recommend the warranty on notebooks cuz lcds crack easily and are expensive to replace, so the complete care is a must.

Anyway, that's my advice.
 
P4 2.6
Radeon 9800
120 gig SATA 7200RPM
512MB DCDDR
(Dell's soundcard option)
DVD burner (+R+RW 4X)
Click to expand...

They are all good choices, I don't think you did anything wrong. What exactly IS Dell's soundcard option? If it is something fairly old or onboard, you might want to consider a different sound card in she is a gamer. I have an Audigy2 and I recommend it. However a Fortissimo III or Santa Cruz would be just fine. I understand you are intending to configure this on Dell's site and while prices ARE cheaper on Newegg, there is nothing wrong with doing that if you have the money.

However I agree with the others that the SATA hard drive isn't very useful. I would get a 120Gig ATA 7200rpm, and since she does graphic design, maybe a Western Digital Special Edition drive. Another good choice would be Maxtor's 8meg cache, but I understand the WD to be more reliable. The main reason I agree is because, if I remember correctly, a lot of SATA drives aren't actually faster than ATA drives right now and is it all of them go on the PCI bus or some of them? I am not sure on that, and i'm sure someone could elaborate for me. A dvd burner is a good choice if. . .she's intending to back up gigabytes upon gigabytes of data, that is 🙂. If she does Graphic Design I would suggest a CRT. I know many graphic design labs that still use CRTs, most notably Trinitrons/DiamondTrons (the ones at school here use 19" NEC FP912SB screens). I recommend getting the CRT, but I have also used that LCD monitor and that is an EXCELLENT choice as well...just don't buy a refurb monitor like that one guy said.

Well, thats my advice and I hope I was marginally helpful🙂
 
Eh, I told her to pick the Audigy 2. it's an Extra 80$.

The weird thing is that there is no 120 gig ATA harddrive edition. It's 40 ATA 80 ATA 120 SATA 250 SATA 120 RAID 1 240 RAID0. Weird stuff, eh?

Oh, update. She decided to drop any and all form of monitor. I spec'd out this computer assuming she didn't have a monitor, then realizing that she had a 20" monitor! :Q
 
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