Help me choose my new computer, please!

[Kaesekopf]

No one needs an Apple.  If you can learn how to take care of a car you can do so with a computer.

Sent from my SAMSUNG-SM-G920A using Tapatalk

[james03]

One overlooked item is memory bus speed.  Spend your money there.  Memory speed is the bottleneck nowadays, not CPU.

I also like getting an extra hard drive onboard for backups.

[Southern Ascetic]

Been working in IT 14 years here. Memory bus speed is important if you have production servers or do a lot of encoding or gaming. Besides that, it's not that important, the DDR3 vs DDR4 for basic tasks like office, browsing the web, listening to music you won't notice a difference.

The single biggest performance notice you'll see is with an SSD vs a tradition spindle HDD.

Get an SSD.

[Gardener]

Been working in IT 14 years here. Memory bus speed is important if you have production servers or do a lot of encoding or gaming. Besides that, it's not that important, the DDR3 vs DDR4 for basic tasks like office, browsing the web, listening to music you won't notice a difference.

The single biggest performance notice you'll see is with an SSD vs a tradition spindle HDD.

Get an SSD.

First time I restarted with an SSD, I restarted 2x because I didn't think it was possible to restart so quickly and thought it had just logged off my account. Love, love, love SSD.

[james03]

The single biggest performance notice you'll see is with an SSD vs a tradition spindle HDD.

Get an SSD.

Absolutely correct, sorry for the misinformation.  A point and then a question:

1.  GIVEN you have an SSD, if your choice is more cores in your processor or higher speed memory,  you spend your money (you are budget limited) on memory amount and memory speed.  When I built my laptop, I went with an I-5 vs. an I-7, and spent the bucks on memory.  I probably went overboard on amount and rarely see 50% memory usage.

2.  Question: When I built my laptop, I went with an SSD and a standard HD.  I put my system on the SSD, and my home directory on the HD.  At the time SSDs would burn out, and HD's were more reliable. (I also back-up to a file server).  So I have fast boot and reliability of data.  That was years ago, so how do you rank reliability comparatively today?


One more point, spend some bucks on the graphics card if you are building a desktop.  There too you have to balance GPU(s) vs. memory if you are budget constrained.

Thanks.

[Jacob]

I went with buying from LAC.

Lenovo ThinkCentre M700 10GR
Core i3 (6th Gen) 6100
3.7 GHz dual core CPU
16 GB of DDR4-2133 RAM
500 GB 7200 rpm SATA-600 HDD
Nvidia GeForce GTX 1050 Ti

Thank you all for your comments.  It should be here via UPS tomorrow! Feel free to tell me if I erred horrifically.

Those of you who championed Apple, sorry, it will never happen.

[Scowler]

The simplest of machines for any user, the Mac.

My first computer was a TI99-4A... (stop grinning ) My first real computer was a MAC with 128k memory, no hard drives... When I switched from mainframe to PC computing, I was forced to use some IBM clone running DOS 3.1. About 7 years ago I retired from work, and I think I have a very solid foundation for the following little joke, which I fashioned a few ages ago:

MAC - Most Advanced Computer
IBM - Incredibly Barbaric Machine.

The only problem was that most games were never propagated unto the MAC platform. Too bad, so sad.