How much did your computer cost?

Waiting on my new toys to arrive and thinking I really HAVE spent too much this time. My boss, pointed out that if I'd spent $PRICE_WITHELD_FOR_NOW in the local moron from cash separation emporium, I'd have got an adding machine that could go beep at a push, and with vista welded onto it too.

So, I was wondering, since there are a few, but only a few geeks here, and since the rest of yous must have bought or built a machine, what did it cost?

I'll 'fess up later, I don't think it's excessive, but it's just, you may recall I built a megaweapon exactly a year ago.

But, I fucked up, I bought a set-up that was end-of-era, and could never add a properly working quad core, or DDR3. Plus, I discovered that my current linux box chokes on full res HD tv (it chokes in windows too, I checked). So the beast I made last year becomes the new liunx box, and the old linux box gets a new case, have a scary video card shoved in from the TARDIS parts bin, and will be presented as a birthday pressie to me best girl.

Actually, this thread MIGHT just be a troll to take the piss out of mac heads.

"oooh mine's 300MHz and only cost £27,000"

Ally wrote: Can't remember really because I went through about two or three motherboards before true stability made an appearance.

Probably 600 or 700 quid all in... each component was picked to maximise power as a proper gaming rig. Still doing very well a year on aside from the occasionally dodgy onboard NIC.

I enjoy building machines but will probably just get an Alienware next time.

Yes, they say you can live a normal life with just the one kidney. Silly money, nice machines tho. The motherboard that will arrive shortly is £300 quid's worth of Asus formula extreme. There were only 3 on offer that took DDR3, one was Abit, who I know little of, and the other was xvga, who make fuckin videocards, so no thanks.

fook me. Well I started with a top of the line Dell, well it was then. I got a Seagate replacement drive, so now I'm up to $2500. Well at least Mint was free.

Ally wrote:

Probably 600 or 700 quid all in... each component was picked to maximise power as a proper gaming rig.

Ditto. Every time I buy a new machine I find my knowledge is utterly out of date and have to spend ages looking at the likes of Tom's Hardware to figure out the optimum components again. One thing with the most recent one was I made sure to get a decent, expensive, psu, as I'm pretty sure scrimping on that is what's screwed up previous machines.

But my gripe is that each successive machine has been noisier and more power-hungry than the previous one, and now its got to the point where I daren't turn the thing on after midnight for fear of disturbing the neighbours with the ferocious whiring sounds. I think its mostly the damn video card fan that's to blame, case fans are 12cm and not that noisy.

Next time I'm going to think about noise rather than sheer computing power for the buck.

Might I suggest a fan controller?

My Antec 900 cases have 3 120mm's and a 200mm "helicopter rotor" on top, no controller would be too hard to deal with.

New box is built, I'm gashed and bruised but it's staying up. Only thing is, Dos XP won't install (I'm now trying to bluff my old windows onto it should be "interesting").

Also, the cpu fan (a tuniq tower) is too big to allow any work with the machine in the case.......and guess who can't now connect 2 of Asus's flummies (in fairness, no other machine has them so I never thought, a grounding strip for the MU-metalized backplate, and an "LCD poster", basically a little lcd display that replaces the old "morse code of doom" bios-fail beeps.

It's also too hot for my liking. Looks like I'll be building it all over again tomorrow. sigh.

What's the crack with AVG 8.0 then? It's telling me i'll have to pay for it (£39.99) whereas i've never paid for AVG previously...

i have a compaq presario. it wasn't that expensive--maybe $1000 or so. still, it does what i need it to do, although it is getting a bit slow.

Bought my last laptop with a $1150 tag. Talked the salesman down to $1050, and there was a $100 rebate. Stuff goes out of date so fast, its pointless to spend loads (at least for what I do with it).

johnny wrote: What's the crack with AVG 8.0 then? It's telling me i'll have to pay for it (£39.99) whereas i've never paid for AVG previously...

no free version of 8 yet.

Gettin misel a lappytoppy soon sony vaio for bout £550,half the price they were a year ago. am i missing summat?

NOTHING-my son bought it for me.£1 for 3 dusters and £3=99p(robbing bastards) for a SCREEN cleaner.It WORKS-i DON'T!

US $ 1000

£5.32 a week

Well, I said I would confess.........

Asus Striker II Extreme Motherboard=£280 Intel Core2-Quad Q6600 (2.4GHz with an overclockers.co.uk guarantee of hitting 3.3GHz)=£200 Corsair DDR3 PC3-1600Mhz 2x1GB RAM=£200 Antec900 case=£70 OCZ 780W PSU=£100 Fan Controllers, one for this machine, one for last year's effort, now to become the new HAL9000 Linux workhorse (ie, my TV, Hi-FI, net, etc etc etc).=£50 NVidia 8600GT to get picture on screen of aforementioned new Linux box.=£40

all in all, came to £1006.

BUT, from last year's machine came..... NVidia8800 GTX (BFG, OC2 model)=£300 2xHitachi 500GB SATA-II drives-£120 M-audio Delta=£free from mac-seduced mate

And, added in or still to come..... Fucking HUUUUUUGE CPU cooler (which has severely injured me, mind and body), a Tuniq Tower...=£50 Another Hitachi 500GB drive (I need a fresh one for reasons I will detail below)=£60. oh and twenty bill's worth of fan adaptors to plug the huge molex case fans into the 3-pin sockets on the fan controllers.

Clearly out of my gourd.

Should have bought a fuckin alienware, it'd have been about £500 more and hurt a load less (not only slashed and stabbed by the huge fan and the mobo, not only slit up a treat by the case edges, but those poison pills have left me with the physique of an 80yr old, and all that crawling on the hard kitchen floor at 4am, well, I've felt better after a day walking up and down mountains).

Why do I need a new Hard drive?

Wellllllllll

The two that went into the new machine, when they were in the old one, were configured as a RAID0 array...two drives, appearing as one, and every file "shuffled" onto both, to get twice the speed (ie, it writes part one of a file to drive one, and then while drive one is getting it's shit together to accept another task, it writes part two of the file to drive two, then part 3 to drive one and so on.)

It ran like greased weasel shite :D

BUT no fucker told me that windows chckdsk, has no fucking idea what RAID is. SO when I ran it, after nasty freeze during a defrag (yeah, good timing), it duly seen every single fucking file as "corrupt" (because it could only see alternate slices of each file), and proceeded to "fix" them.

So 3 days re-installing shit on the now not-a-raid-array-anymore discs (if I can't look after it I ain't using it), and I begin to realise something's up...... still more corruption, real corruption this time, I can only conclude that because the drives went from bare, unformatted discs, straight to RAID0, that somehow, the drive geometry is fucked up, and no matter how often I reformat and repartion them, until they've been low-level formatted (a tedious task usually involving writing something (hopefully the word "ringpiece") about 200 billion times accross the face of the platter with no rhyme or reason), they'll keep acting up.

So another drive as a scratchpad, a £60 post-it note. Still, it can go in the new Linux box and I can retire two or 3 clapped out small IDE drives before they retire themselves.

i bought an Aspire M1100 FOR £300 just before christmas with vista home basic.i just added 2GB memory ran for £20 notes,and just not long downloaded the service pack 1,it has a 19 inch monitor, 160gb internal hardrive and a 500gb external hardrive,AMD 64 Athlon, ATI Radeon, CPU 4000+. All i need for now....

On my AMD, Vista32 runs "well", no crashes (mainly cos nothing runs), and aside from it being slow as shit, it's OK. However, I tried Vista 64, thinking I'd get some performance outta it. Oh dear....May as well have ripped out 90% of me RAM, installed a 486 and tossed a handful of copper swarf onto the motherboard.

The only 64 bit OS I've got is Linux, and it's been building 32bit libs in tandem just in case, sneaky bastard.

Reasons for Vista=Dx10 has some nice explosion and atmos fx.

Home built computer, recent upgrade, costing me around £450, though luckily, I have got extra hard drive, plus windows vista 64bit, which should be fun, old computer, relegated to running ubuntu, oh well, its seen its good days though I guess

DigiDiz wrote: Home built computer, recent upgrade, costing me around £450, though luckily, I have got extra hard drive, plus windows vista 64bit, which should be fun, old computer, relegated to running ubuntu, oh well, its seen its good days though I guess

Old Boxen Never Die, they just get Linux installed

works that way here too, too old and slow for windows? shove Gentoo on it and let it run hapily until it's motherboard fails (the way the last two who left us checked out).

The thing is, that this tradition is about to give me a Gentoo box, with a 3GHz AMD dual core and 4GB of shit-hot RAM, Linux being Linux, it'll probably soon work out how to cache the entirety of /usr /etc and /home into RAM and shut the discs down, which should pretty much create a supersonic penguin.

free, its the wifes dell laptop, it belongs to the school so no nasty stuff on it. music computer free nicked the motherboard, case, ram from a music shop i was working for gaphics card, hard drive, monitor, processor. surplus sony playstation stuff, someone that works there drove past my house with a lorry full and it fell off took a few weeks to get it running smoothly, took virtually everything unwanted os wise off and has been bullet proof(touch wood), basically a glorified multitrack, no vst instruments, effects are on dsp.

not very much.

Doctor, do you have a computer room or is the whole house given over to them?

I'd love to see all this kit.

Doctor, I didn't know YOU were the one who created the WOPR mainframe from "WarGames"!

For meself..

HP Pavillion dv6000 (first laptop ever, yaaay!) 2 GB RAM AMD Turion 64 X2 TL-60 2.00 GHz 250 GB HD DVD Burninator Vista Home Premium 32-bit Built in 802.11g (running ofF Linksys w/ dual 7 DB broadcast)

Total cost: $700 US (on sale from $850 )

Watching tasty pr0n while the g/f sleeps soundly next to you... Priceless.

That's a fucking good lapper, I paid about the same for my inspiron, 1.6Ghz celey-M 512MB RAM and 80GB drive, fuck all else.

This thread has not gone well for me. I was looking for comfort in one of you lot having given PCWorld £2500 for a ZX81 in a nice case, but either none of you have, or those that have are staying schtumm.

I've spent, it would appear, 30-40% of my entire income for the last 12 months on those two boxes of tricks. Plonker, eh? Best thing is, Rainbow6 Las Vegas STILL runs like total shite (Supreme Commander, Forged Alliance on the other hand....1680x1050x32bit, 16xanisotropic filtering, 16QxFullScreenAntiAliasing, all game video options cranked off the scale, 60 fucking frames a second, with 4000 units on an 80KM map, I belive the phrase "oh yeah" is apropriate.)

Useful info for yous, the low end 8600GT that only cost me a Colin (see what I did there?), with all the Anisotropy and FSAA shut off, performs scarily well compared to the £300 8800GTXoc2...switch the eye candy on and it dies a death, but still, if you don't play train sims (where the jaggy lines that antialiasing kills are SO annoying), you need not piss away a fortune next time you need a new video card.

Sad news is that my new order collection was primarily held on the drive that died in the move. Most of it is held elsewhere, but I think some bits are gone for good. I't s seized motor by the sounds of it (it does not spin up but instead, well, it plays a tune, a little 4 note riff, over and over), and the 3 partitions are formatted to Linux Ext3, so there's every chance of a recovery, BUT, £250 for rescue services, so I've a long think ahead of me.

EDIT: a happier thought just occurred to me when I hit submit......the money I spent is still less than I woulda spent going out and getting fucked up, had my body not called a moritorium on such pursuits, so I feel better now.

I love your FHM posters!

Dodjem wrote: I love your FHM posters!

Holiday snaps from London ;)

Above that one is a clangers "test card", there's also another HUGE dalek poster, a Jordan-F1 flag and some of my old gig posters. Half naked plastic photshopped chicks just aint my thing, if you want to perv, there's a whole net full of proper porn, so why bother?

Speaking of getting the PC-world anal, where did you get your machine and how much? It smells of big store, fast, but not really fast, and a billion stupid gadgets that don't work and hog resources, to bump the price up. Still, it's well built, which counts for something.

When i was VERY poor LAST year my son bought me this LAPTOP.Not as good a DANCER as me though.:D

Love the high-tech stand, Doc

To answer your question, I've got a HP laptop the same as Jem's with the swivel screen. I bought the display model on impulse from John Lewis for £600. It's got a TV tuner, remote control and all sorts of other crap that applies to your description. I've no doubt that one day when I try to reinstall windows on it I'll have all sorts of problems with proprietary nonsense like I did with Lisa's Dell last weekend.

My other one is a fine PC, built for me by the geeks in the computer shop over the road from my house. I specced it with advice from Ally and it does the jobs I want and no more. It’s got a 5.1 sound card so I should invest in some proper speakers rather than the crap ones I’ve got. Then I could use it as my main sound system rather than the useless one I do use. It cost less than £500 I think - can't honestly remember.

I bought another one at the same time for Littleinoil – a very basic PC so he can go on the net at his house. He’s quite computer savvy for a five-year-old, as those of you who’ve spoken to him on MSN will attest!

I've got two other Dell desktops at home that I was given by my old company. Cleaning them up, putting Windows on them and sending them to a good home is on my list of jobs. But will I ever get round to it? Who can tell! I need monitors for them both so I’ll probably get myself a good one and pass on the 15” one I have with my desktop.

Sorry that’s light on tech detail, but hopefully stoked your wank-bank with a bit of the information you crave.

Loving your cabinets – what’s the lights on the front. Do you ever have the urge to spray ‘Salford Rules’ on the front of them?

Never thought of that, maybe "guitar Nero"?

The lights are fan controllers, at full tilt those blue lighted fans (there's one on the back too), and the huge (200mm) rotorblade thing on the top of the cases, are fucking loud, but if you set them all to "low" with their internal switches, you can't increase the airflow without dropping the side off and going caving in the snakes nest that is the inside of a PC (both of them appear to be entirely full of power supply). So controllers are the answer. When idle, minimum and silent, when the linux box is compiling or the windows machine's gaming it's balls off, you can turn them up and bask in the breeze (really, the one on the right's been with me for a year, and during the depths of winter, the fans on full power causes a really uncomfortable draft!). The screens on them read out RPM for the four fans, but I've lashed up the big blue lighted ones, and they are only 2pin not 3 (no yellow lead), so they don't report RPM....it also shows temps, but I looked at the bundle of temp sensors, looked at all the wiring inside and thought "fuck it, if it gets too hot it'll shut down".

The little blue dibber on top of the windows machine (still FAC9000,BTW, and the one on the right is still calling itself HAL9000), is an "LCD poster".

You know the "morse code of death" that motherboards play when things like RAM or VGA fail during POST (that's Power On Self Test to the rest of yous), like beep beep beeeeeeep means your ram's fucked, or beep beep..beep beep means your CPU has added it's last 1's and 0's...well that little flummy actually reads throught the phases of POST, so if your motherboards shits itself, it freezes with the last thing being checked being shown....kinda like the old amiga guru's million colours thing it did on start.

I just went into Game Stop and said "sell me a game to fuck over my machine, it's life is too easy". He sold me Crysis, and it actually doesn't run at a flat 60fps like everything else, but it does still run well, and it looks BREATHTAKING. Almost tempted to inflict vista on this machine just to see Crysis in DirectX 10.

Doctor? wrote: This thread has not gone well for me. I was looking for comfort in one of you lot having given PCWorld £2500 for a ZX81 in a nice case, but either none of you have, or those that have are staying schtumm.

If it makes you feel any better, the following scenario has occurred several times.

Friend/acquaintance/landlord(on one occasion) asks for advice on getting a new PC. I spend time looking up stuff on the web, work out the precise spec suitable for their needs, and best bang-for-the-buck.

Next time I see them they mention, "oh I popped into PC world/Dixons/Currys to have a look and the nice man sold me a really good system for only [fill excessive amount of cash here]. I had to get it from them because its the first place someone actually came up and offered to help me choose. And it was on sale."

Course it turns out to be something with a hard drive half the capacity you'd expect for the price and couples an unnecessarily powerful/expensive top-of-the-range CPU with a crappy on-board graphics and slow RAM. And, in one case, a 14" CRT monitor with a strange green colour cast.

Still, at least it wasn't a Mac. :)

AND when it fails, who do they call (after PC world have thanked them for the warrantee money and explained how it covers, well, nothing). Bastards Windows is too good for em.

When macs was macs, with motorola CPU's, I loved em. Now they expect you to pay £2500 for a slow PC running FreeBSD (they can call it OSX all the want, but if it looks like BSD, smells like BSD and tastes like BSD (and has a whole pile of Berkely copyright messages in all the core system progs), then it's BSD.

Lemme see, a £1500 mac, is the equivalent usually of an £800 PC, so you're paying £700 for a nice case, and an OS that everyone else downloads for free (legally too).

About £1000.

Acer Aspire 5652wlmi laptop

1.66ghz dual core processor, 1gb RAM, 120GB HDD, bluetooth, infra red, wireless, dual layer DVD burner, 256mb nVidia Geforce Go 7600, freeview, analogue TV, multimedia card slots, etc...

Got it nearly 2 years ago, replacement would still be a similar price.

Mac Book-- over 1000 bucks

Doctor? wrote:

DigiDiz wrote: Home built computer, recent upgrade, costing me around £450, though luckily, I have got extra hard drive, plus windows vista 64bit, which should be fun, old computer, relegated to running ubuntu, oh well, its seen its good days though I guess

Old Boxen Never Die, they just get Linux installed

works that way here too, too old and slow for windows? shove Gentoo on it and let it run hapily until it's motherboard fails (the way the last two who left us checked out).

The thing is, that this tradition is about to give me a Gentoo box, with a 3GHz AMD dual core and 4GB of shit-hot RAM, Linux being Linux, it'll probably soon work out how to cache the entirety of /usr /etc and /home into RAM and shut the discs down, which should pretty much create a supersonic penguin.

I heard from someone that you can happily install linux on a flash drive, i mean install linux on it, not just copy the distro to flash drive....what i am going to do with my upgrade, is, that i am going to copy all of windows vista 64bit unto the said flash drive, and install it onto hard drive, heard it installs in a jiffy as well

Tis true, I have Knoppix installed on this........


goes nicely in me wallet.

The best thing is, every time you boot it, it has to analyse your motherboard, then inumerate and install drivers for all your hardware. Windows typically takes around 1-1.5 hours to do this, and still leaves you with no 3d graphics, limited sound and not much else. Knoppix sets your whole machine up and hands control back to you in under 2 mins.

A handy thing to have around. If your windows is playing up, you not only have an emergency way to get online, you can also verify that the machine itself is or is not knackered. Ie if it bombs in linux and windows both, it's defo a hardware thing.

If you can get Vista to do the same sort of thing, I will be stunned. I installed it last night in order to see Crysis running in Dx10. My GOD it took forever, obsessively checking files that were not it's business (including MS train sim directory with over half a million files in it...BASTARD!).

Sat down at 6pm, and wasn't finished until nearly 2am. There's a fair amount of anti-vista hostility here today ;)