deanomagino Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 i may buy this tonight but before i do i need a crit on it please its £679 with 19" monitor Components XPS 420 Viiv Intel® Processor Q6600 Quad Core™ 2.40GHz, 1066Mhz FSB, 8MB cache Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium - English Base Warranty - 1 Year XPS Premium Hardware Support (incl. Gaming and On-Site Support) Dell™ 19" Silver Wide Flat Panel (SE198WFP) - UK/Irish 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024] 750GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA/100 Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst™ cache 256MB ATI® Radeon™ HD 2600 XT graphics card DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD) Dell™ Enhanced USB Multimedia Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY) Dell Optical Scroll Premium Mouse thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
mbowers Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 None of your links work. Please try again. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
CarlAhearne Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 What software are you going to be running on it? Are you a modeller; video production/editor? Looks like it'll handle most software out there; the specs are higher than my home computer, and I don't have much trouble running quite a bit of different software... Pretty good value for money especially considering you get a 19" monitor thrown in... My advice would be to get a matching monitor and run 2 identical ones. I have 2 Dell 19" monitors and it works like a dream for 3D work... Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Tommy L Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 If you can afford it, put in another 2g of ram. I would question the choice of graphics card as well, but thats because Im used to seeing people go with the Nvidia gaming cards or quadro's. Depends what you want to use it for as stated above. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
pyang Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 the only tweak if possible for a couple 100 more is try to get Vista 64 (i know that system dell doesn't want to install xp64)for a possible 8MB ram in future and change to 512 mb 8800gt. just my thought. i may buy this tonight but before i do i need a crit on it please its £679 with 19" monitor Components XPS 420 Viiv Intel® Processor Q6600 Quad Core™ 2.40GHz, 1066Mhz FSB, 8MB cache Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium - English Base Warranty - 1 Year XPS Premium Hardware Support (incl. Gaming and On-Site Support) Dell™ 19" Silver Wide Flat Panel (SE198WFP) - UK/Irish 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024] 750GB (7200rpm) Serial ATA/100 Hard Drive with 16MB DataBurst™ cache 256MB ATI® Radeon™ HD 2600 XT graphics card DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD) Dell™ Enhanced USB Multimedia Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY) Dell Optical Scroll Premium Mouse thanks Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanomagino Posted April 2, 2008 Author Share Posted April 2, 2008 thanks guys. they arent links dude just copy - paste needed for rendering.. max 9, vray, photoshop and may be a bit of after effects.. how about the radeon 256? does it compare well to the geforce? i have a firegl at work which isnt necessary. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 The problem with the Radeon cards is there are driver bugs they somehow never manage to kill. (Same is true for Geforce but it's not as bad.) These become problems when you're working in some 3D apps, like weird artifacts you get in Max. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanomagino Posted April 2, 2008 Author Share Posted April 2, 2008 so would you suggest a professional graphics card rather than a gaming one? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 Depends on your priorities and cost/benefit analysis. I have an 8800GTS at work and it's fine except for some Revit bugs. My home PC has a FireGL v5100 that I got cheap on Ebay when I was a student and it's not as fast, but I'll be damned if I can find any bugs at all (and that card is probably half as expensive as an 8800 now). Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
deanomagino Posted April 2, 2008 Author Share Posted April 2, 2008 another deal... larger screen + geforce £629 Components XPS 420 Viiv Intel® Processor Q6600 Quad Core™ 2.40GHz, 1066Mhz FSB, 8MB cache Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium - English Base Warranty - 1 Year Hardware Support, Next Business Day Dell™ 20" Black Wide Flat Panel (E207WFP) - UK/Irish 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024] 640GB Dual Hard Drive Raid 0 Stripe (2x320GB - 7200rpm) 256MB nVidia™ GeForce 8600GTS graphics card DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD) Dell™ Enhanced USB Multimedia Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY) Dell Optical Scroll Premium Mouse Accessories Integrated HDA 7.1 Dolby Digital Audio No Speakers 19-in-1 Bluetooth Media Card Reader No Modem Microsoft® Works 9 - English Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecton3d Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 another deal... larger screen + geforce £629 Components XPS 420 Viiv Intel® Processor Q6600 Quad Core™ 2.40GHz, 1066Mhz FSB, 8MB cache Genuine Windows Vista® Home Premium - English Base Warranty - 1 Year Hardware Support, Next Business Day Dell™ 20" Black Wide Flat Panel (E207WFP) - UK/Irish 2048MB 667MHz Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM [2x1024] 640GB Dual Hard Drive Raid 0 Stripe (2x320GB - 7200rpm) 256MB nVidia™ GeForce 8600GTS graphics card DVD +/- RW Drive (read/write CD & DVD) Dell™ Enhanced USB Multimedia Keyboard - UK/Irish (QWERTY) Dell Optical Scroll Premium Mouse Accessories Integrated HDA 7.1 Dolby Digital Audio No Speakers 19-in-1 Bluetooth Media Card Reader No Modem Microsoft® Works 9 - English a RAID 0 will not give you 640gb's of data - it takes two drives and writes to each providing faster performance but does not double capacity so you still have only 320 gb's of hd. that is a gross mis-representation on dell's part. You could however, since there are two physical drives, break the RAID and get 640gb's. Personally, storage is becoming cheaper by the day so i'd go with an 8800GT or more RAM, with a single 320gb hd and just upgrade your hard drives as needed since you can now get a 750gb hd for $140. cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 Actually, Dell was right - it's not 100% efficient, but it's close, and you add the drives together, when using RAID 0. I have one at home - 2x250GB drives, RAID (striped), looks to the OS like a ~500GB single drive. The disadvantage is that if one drive dies you lose everything. It's RAID mirroring that doesn't give you more capacity, but that also doesn't give you more speed - it keeps two identical drives in case one dies. RAID parity uses N+1 drives of capacity C to give you N*C total capacity with parity for recovering from a busted drive. Speed issues with that one are... complicated. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
F J Posted April 2, 2008 Share Posted April 2, 2008 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAID#Standard_levels nice resource when unsure of how things work Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
tecton3d Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 Actually, Dell was right - it's not 100% efficient, but it's close, and you add the drives together, when using RAID 0. I have one at home - 2x250GB drives, RAID (striped), looks to the OS like a ~500GB single drive. The disadvantage is that if one drive dies you lose everything. It's RAID mirroring that doesn't give you more capacity, but that also doesn't give you more speed - it keeps two identical drives in case one dies. RAID parity uses N+1 drives of capacity C to give you N*C total capacity with parity for recovering from a busted drive. Speed issues with that one are... complicated. I by no means know everything about hd's but i've never heard of a RAID 0 even partially honoring the combined capacity of both drives - irrelevant of the size of the drives. I wonder if that shown 500gb system can really hold 500gb's? RAID 0 was created to increase the performance of storage systems, not to enhance the amount of storage itself. That's why you hear of non-vital OS's, applications, and programs being installed on RAID 0 due to the fact that it's wicked fast for loading apps but no one (with good sense) keeps vital working files on a "0". basically, if you're arguing storage, the *best* would be to go with raid 5. it's a combination of RAID 0 and RAID 1 (commonly called 0+1) and can expand as much as your RAID card (or mobo) can handle. The way our IT guy explained it to me is that you must have identical drives and you loose the storage capacity of one of the drives when set at RAID5 ... say you have 4 - 100gb drives, from those 4 - 100gb drives, you only get 300gb's of total storage but have the advantage of increased performance (RAID 0) and redundancy (RAID 1) and a decent amount of overall space increase, provided of course that you consider this is much more useful than just having a bunch of hd's shown by your OS and havign to backup to each other via software. If one drive fails, you simply unplug it, plug in another and let the drive rebuild... all the data is there and all's good and fair in the world;) cheers Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ky Lane Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 I bought an XPS 720 recently, and am blindingly happy with it. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 No no no no no... RAID 0+1 is Stripe + Mirror. Not the same as RAID 5 which is Parity which is way more intense. This is too complicated for me to explain adequately here, but please follow the earlier suggestion and read this article or at least the part on Standard and Nested Levels. What you describe, with the 300GB, is RAID 5, you've lost one drive of capacity to parity and you've gained speed (but how much depends on how good the hardware is) and reliability. If it were RAID 0, the volume would be 400GB and it would be fast and dangerous; RAID 1 it would be 100GB and you'd feel very, very safe; RAID 0+1 would give you 200GB with good speed and as much safety as you can ask for in these crazy times. BTW my RAID 0 has 2x250GB disks and an OS reported capacity of 467GB. Since to go from hard drive manufacturer marketing speak capacity (where 1000=1000) to OS capacity (1000=1024) you divide by 1.0737, that's actually 500GB. Really, RAID 0 works like that - add the capacity of the drives, subtract a very small overhead and it's also somewhat faster (not double, but still a nice improvement) than single drives. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
Ky Lane Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 Well, while we're on the subject of RAID... When I bought my XPS720, was given the option of having 2x500GB for Raiding however I chose, or 1x160GB@10krpm and 1x500GB. I went the 1x16GB+1x500GB option to have the OS and Programs on the fast 10krpm drive, and all my data on the other. Think I made a wise choice? Otherwise, ive been considering getting 2x250GB for a Striping Raid array and another 500GB to Mirror that array - just incase. Comments? Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
AJLynn Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 Probably a wise choice. Probably more reliable and about as fast. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
alfienoakes Posted April 3, 2008 Share Posted April 3, 2008 I by no means know everything about hd's but i've never heard of a RAID 0 even partially honoring the combined capacity of both drives - irrelevant of the size of the drives. I wonder if that shown 500gb system can really hold 500gb's? RAID 0 was created to increase the performance of storage systems, not to enhance the amount of storage itself. That's why you hear of non-vital OS's, applications, and programs being installed on RAID 0 due to the fact that it's wicked fast for loading apps but no one (with good sense) keeps vital working files on a "0". RAID 0 is JUST a striped set.. Thats it. No fault tolerance at all. Its just a Performance increase, not a Storage increase. I too have RAID 0 of 2 x 320Gb HD's total 640Gb. RAID 5 would be for servers carrying critical data. As Andrew says.. Too much to go into here. Link to comment Share on other sites More sharing options...
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