Did you purchase your computer or build it from scratch?
Title says it all. I've been looking at LFS rigs, and it seems to me that the vast majority of racers are playing on computers they built themselves. So, I'm wondering what percentage it actually is.
Bought a Dell, but it's not stock anymore. Just recently bought and installed a 500W power supply and an ATI x800gto vid card, and an extra gig of ram.
You could just update your video and sound cards... if your'e not sure how then you can just google it and you will get step-by-step instructions on how to do it.
I've always built computers for friends and stuff, but never for myself. I actually end up buying a really expensive Dell every so often. Dells are actually quite good systems if you max all the options out and choose the highest model... doing so makes them last a long time until you need to upgrade. About 4 years ago I ordered this full spec laptop and bought it all with my own cash, was around $2,700 :doh: Was a great laptop back then, but the reason I did it was because I was always going to LAN parties and I was mobile a lot. I got tired of moving my desktop and my big big monitor around, it was a pain. So I got the laptop, and I am still using it right now. But now gaming is becoming more intense, and I need to get a new system. I no longer 'lan' or move around a lot, so this time around I wont be buying a system from a company, I will build one.... probably this summer. It won't cost as much as the laptop I bought at least (Crap I could've bought 2 systems with that kind of money!) But the laptop was worth it, and still is.
Me too... I have 2 dells, i did have one but it broke (BSOD!!!!!!!:jawdrop: )... After my parents bought a new one, i had decided to see what was wrong.
It turned out it was the HD, so i bought and fitted a new HD and wallah, i've got myself a computer to myself
I bought mine from novatech just cause i needed a half decent comp and no time to get all the parts and build it etc. So only basic one i bought will upgrade it etc over time so will eventually be a built one.
I do prefer to build my own though, my last was.
I built my first PC by scratch in around '94 (good ol' 486) and still build them all by scratch. If I would be rich I would propably go apeshit and buy a Alienware or something, but building by scratch saves money and "you get what you give".
A significant proportion of my life is spent sat at my computer, lets say 20% of every day. 20% of my life, at (lets say) 30 years old is 6 years. If 10% of my time is spent waiting on the computer to process something, or with the busy pointer, that's .6 of a year, over 6 months spent waiting for the computer. That is life wasted.
I never make compromises on my hardware, I buy the best that I can possibly afford. Manufacturers always make a compromise somewhere for cost - whether it's using RAM with a CAS timing of 5, or having a processor with a smaller L2 cache than I would use.
Right now i've got a system that's as high end as I could make it, I will be upgrading the processor at the end of this year or start of next, I already upgraded my screen and mouse since the last major upgrade a few months ago, and I will upgrade the keyboard shortly.
Compromise is waste of life. It should be illegal!
I rather invest some time selecting the parts and putting them together to get a system that is 100% what I need, instead of buying a package that "works" immediately but you find out two months later that some not so compatible parts cause stuttering in games and/or that the memory is shared with a low CAS and/or that the HD is a slow piece of junk and/or that the DVD drive has problems reading some of your favourite movies/games and has roughly the loudness of a helicopter start *gasp* and/or that the cooling is insufficient, causing the graphics card to overheat resulting in weird polygon glitches or causing the HD's to die early or causing the CPU to downstep itself, making the system run at half the performance it was intended to or.................
As you can see, I'll always build my PCs from scratch
Ok, let's see. My first PC was in 1995. Had no idea anything about them other than simple BASIC and FORTRAN programming classes in high school. It was a Compaq 75 MHz Pentium upgraded with a whopping 8 mb RAM and 2.1 gig hard drive. That was my first PC, and the only one I purchased up to this one I'm using now purchased in January. Between 1995 and 2004, I took home 4 throw-a-ways from work, 2 Penium 125's, a K2 233, and a K2 266. Had these PC's for years.
With the Compaq P-75, I found the original NFS. That was really cool! Bought myself a joystick and had some fun. Shortly later, a good friend and coworker bought Indycar Racing 2 and told me I NEEDED to get it. AWESOME! Bought my first wheel, a Thrustmaster T2 and ran it offline for 9 years or so running 8 full 100% race length 36 track seasons with track downloads.
Wife's Aunt called me up one day at the end of 2004 saying she was getting a new PC, would I like her old one? Sure! Don't know what it is, but I'll take it. Celeron 667 with WOW! 64 mb ram. Yanking all the ram I had laying around from the work PC's netted me 512 mb for this one with 64 left over to network 2 of them and create a file server out of the K2 266. The Celeron was good enough to roughly play Nascar Racing 2002 until I found LFS S1 demo. It ran S1 online Ok, didn't have the best framerate, but I didn't think I'd run it that long. S2 demo was released April of 2005. S2 was awesome compared to S1, but I found the Celeron 667 couldn't run it.
About a week after S2 demo came, someone at work told me he wanted rid of his old PC that was hit by a power surge. Insurance bought him a new one and he said the old one was mine to see if I could get it working. A P4 2.5 GHz with 512 mb ram and onboard gfx. I messed with it for a week, found the modem was fried, disabled, got windows booted and was back in business playing S2. It only had PCI, no AGP or new PCI-e, so I picked up a dirt cheap Radeon 9250 pci card. I finally tossed the P-75 and K2 PCs in the garbage after gutting them for some of the stuff that still sits in a drawer.
The P4 ran for 6 months until something finally fatally crashed either on the motherboard or the chip. I searched out my options of new MB and chip, as well as figuring out building a complete PC from scratch (the better option). I saw an add in Best Buy for an Athalon 64 3500 with 1 gig RAM for $500. Being as poor as I am and having a nice chunk of the income tax return left, I couldn't touch that price with building from scratch with that CPU, so I picked it up and that's what I'm using now. All it needs now is a cheap but decent graphics card and broadband and I'm happy!
Never bought a PC in my life, it's cheaper (used to be loads cheaper, now there's not a lot in it), more fun, and you can specifiy exactly what you want.
I've rarely go out and build one from scratch either though (unless it's for a client), my own one just evolves over time, every now and then you realise you've replaced everything.
Same here, Bob. I've been building my own computers since I was 13, right around the time the K6-2 came out.
As a matter of fact, my father has only ever bought 1 pre-built computer: Gateway with a Pentium 100, 16 MB of RAM, and a 1GB hard drive. That was back in December of 1994, and was top of the line at the time. He ended up paying a ton of money for it and decided never again. Like me, he's built them himself ever since.
built from scratch ... and ive gone a bit mad with the specs but after all i built it to rund simulations on and depending on what topic im going to do my diploma thesis on it might come in handy
Purchased it almost new and it was outdated already back then, several years ago. Thankfully it got damaged in airfreight from Finland to the UK so I had a good excuse to rebuild it myself. It's still outdated
built it totally by myself with np help and hardly andy prior knowledge (okay, exchanged some parts, cards, power supply, drives.) even if i was a bit sceptical whether it would all work out, i have now got a PC that was a lot cheaper (well, it wasn't actually, because i put the money in quality and fast parts instead of someone too assemble it) than those i had before and even more importantly one that is a lot more stable...
I bought a dell. My dad has worked for X years at the factory, and he got a cheque to buy a computer at Dell, too bad we weren't alowed to lay more money on. So I just configured the computer that was durable, high performance, and I just saved on things like CRT monitor, simple keyboard (I had a better one already), no support, no special sound stuff... You get the idea, and they gave me a 3 in 1 printer, that one went to my sister, and we bought an extra scanner for me.
What special parts? I have a different 3d card in it, put some extra ram in it, and installed an old cd writer into it... Untill now not very much problems with "special" parts... I don't really know what you're talking about,maybe there are upgrades I don't think of buying.
Dell have a tendancy to use back to front parts, or they used to. Thier power supplies were specifically designed for their motherboards as the connections were reversed on the 20 pin connector. I used to read a lot of people eplacing thier Dell motherboard and wondering why their new one fried, because they didnt know Dells PSUs were back to front. Dont know whether its still the case.
My PC is totally built by myself, and always will be as its cheaper and a PC is relatively simple to set up, and its a lot cheaper. I cant help but laugh when i walk into PC World and the guy says than an X400 GFX card will run any game on full settings, show the Crysis and they will retract that statement
My PCs:
-486, bought for £80 from my mams work
-AMD K6-2 550MHz, built by my dad as i was about 14 at the time
-AMD 2000, 512mb 2100 RAM, GeForce 4 MX420 GFX, built by me, my first PC i ever built
-AMD XP 2400, 1GB 3200 RAM, GeForce 4 Ti4200 128mb Done by me
-AMD 2800 Sempron, 6800, 1GB 3200 RAM, my 2400 fried and this was the only readily available chip
-AMD A64 3200 Venice, 1GB 3200, 6800 GFX Card, current rig, probably get a new GFX card when i start uni in Sept.
