Ot: Bloody missus and her PC

1 gig PC3200 ram 128 meg Gforce 6600GT, or a 256 meg Gforce 6600 PCI-E Decent PSU. I reckon about £400 all in, and should be just about useable for the next 3 years like the old one has been, and should have room for CPU/Memory/Graphics upgrades if needed. but no, £400 is too much, she won't pay that much. Bugger.

Dabs.com Gigabyte GeForce PCX6600 256MB PCI-E DVI-I VO Asustek A8N-E S939 nForce4 Ultra ATX AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 512KB Inc Fan Antec TRUEBLUE 480PGB total £304.16

Crucial.com/uk/ DDR PC3200 . CL=3 . UNBUFFERED . NON-ECC . DDR400 . 2.6V . 64Meg x 6

1GB kit (512MBx2) £77.54 inc. VAT

Total = 381.70

You could cut another £20 off that using a Dabs Value PSU, probably not the greatest thing but a PC built to this spec really isn't stressing the PSU too much anyway. If she's not using graphics intensive games then you could cut another £20 off using a Dabs Value 126mb 6600. Don't be put off by the "Dabs Value" brand, usually they are the same product they are selling from the same manufacturer, just check the reviews.

Just to be sure, check that the PSU is compatible with the MB. My new Asus MB needed a 24 pin supply rather than the old 20 pin ATX.

Jesus, you can get a Mac Mini for less.

With all the power of a mobile phone :)

My Sony Ericsson P910 to objection to that.

yeah but that's a pricey door stop!

So, she says she will pay, if I sort it out, and put it together. So Foxconn socket 939 mobo Athlon 64 3000

1 gig PC3200 ram 128 meg Gforce 6600GT, or a 256 meg Gforce 6600 PCI-E Decent PSU.

I reckon about £400 all in, and should be just about useable for the next 3 years like the old one has been, and should have room for CPU/Memory/Graphics upgrades if needed.

but no, £400 is too much, she won't pay that much. Bugger.

The whole series of comments about the Mini just prove how little people REALLY know about computers ;)

Mac Mini is a very rapid little box compared to any PC with a comparable form factor; think Nano ITX - which whilst it was announced three years ago nearly, has still failed to surface. Except the only NanoITX case/PSU currently available is much larger than the Mac Mini.

Bad idea to buy one right now, as they have been updated, making the flagship £499 Mini a 1.5GHz G4 with 64Mb VRAM, 8x dual-layer slot loading superdrive, 512Mb RAM, 54g WiFi and Bluetooth 2.0+EDR.

Some buyers are getting the new spec, others are getting the still-current 1.42s, and all the spec details are for the 1.42, so don't buy until the new spec is announced officially (probably 12th October).

Richard

I have a mini itx that will slide into a standard car head unit with 1ghz cpu, 512 meg ram and a slotload dvd/rw. Had it over a year, since well before the mac mini was launched.

My main PC is slightly bigger than your standard cube type PC yet has 10000 rpm hard drives, raid etc.

To be fair - I almost want to buy a mac mini as a media box (TV has DVI in currently served by the PC) but keep thinking to myself - why....

Mac OS X.

Though, if I were building a media machine to play AVIs and stuff on the TV, I'd use a PC as there appear to be more applications for it at the moment.

Richard

That's what I did - I experimented with a G3 upgraded PowerMac 7500 for a while, but the limitations of SCSI drives was a problem.... these days with affordable Firewire and USB2 external drives I'd probably have stuck with it.

However, I bought a Shuttle PC, which is quite nice for an x86 type box. I've just *cough*got hold of*cough* XP Media Center to try on it - but I'm reluctant to do that as it's based around XP Home, whereas I'd prefer to be using Pro if only for Terminal Services.

I just find VLC to be clumsy, and most Mystery Science Theater 3000 episodes are in some wierd AVI-wrapped format that Quicktime spits out even with all the codecs I can find dropped into it. It wouldn't be as bad, but compared to the pretty 'tv-centric' browsers people produce for Windows/Linux, the Mac is very neglected.

I still use Win2K on my PC. XP scares me; looks funny, acts funny.

Richard

Nah, you can turn off the Fisher Price stuff and make it behave like normal Windows.

That is part of what is pushing up the price. While I've always prefered decent PSUs (had an Enermax when they were import only), the 24 pin ones seem to have a price premium, especially those with multi 12v rails.

I know you don't compare Ghz to Ghz mac to pc, but I was looking at=20

128meg or 256 meg video, 1 gig ram and a 3 ghz processor.

Oh and on the subject of macs, have a look at CustomPC this month, there=20 is a short article and photos of someone running the leaked X86 build of=20 OSX (with the dock) on a generic windows PC, supposedly a 6gig torrent=20 download.

--=20 Carl Robson Car PC Build starts again.

Homepage:

Want to keep her happy for more than a few months Ron. I want hers sorted for a few years (apart from maybe HDDs). Then, I can do mine properly. SLI graphics cards, decent board, couple of gigs ram.

Once hers is done, she won't notice how much I spend on mine.

BTW, have you seen the AUDI channel on Sky? haven't watched it, but spotted it today while flicking through the EPG.

OK, so memory is a bit short as standard on a new Mac, but memory is also quite cheap to upgrade.

I don't worry about video RAM as Mac software is written around whatever is standard Mac video hardware.

Also worth taking into account is build quality and useful life. Macs win hands down for this - I have an original style iMac in the spare room that is still very happily running the latest OS and applications. (I think that's nearly 7 years old now.... I knw it came with OS8.6 when new, then I upgraded to 9.x.x and through all the incarnations of OSX so far)

Yup, developer versions will run on generic intel hardware - final releases will only run on Apple specific intel boxes.

Mate has an X box running media centre - very very neat.

don't have Sky :( only a digi box with topup TV