Modern PC upgrades----
Paul asks about new stuff, and whether it's worth it.
"What the heck does Pentium II give me (besides a $400 premium...)." Somewhat faster, but probably not worth the price. I'd suggest that you want the second fastest Pemtium cpu you can buy, as there always seems to be a premium on the fastest one from people who have to have to upgrade every other month. "over the equivalent MHz MMX capable Prentium Pro" I've seen some benchmarks that show the Pentium Pro to be slower than the equivalent Pentium for some 16 bit applications. I'll look around. You may not want to pay too much extra for the MMX instruction set, since they are not going to be used by many of the programs you run.
"Would like to get 1600x1280...," I love the 20 inch Sony monitor on my desk at work, and run it in 1600x1200 mode, which is great for looking at several things at once! The prices are killer, though... I manage with a 15 inch monitor at home for the moment, although my wife would like me to have a 17 inch one, at least. No comments about relative size are needed.... she get's to use a 24 incher at her job, so she can see about 1/2 of one page of her newspaper, and still read the text.
"as far as the graphics cards...." This is tougher. You probably want a PCI card, which will be faster. Beyond that, there's a lot of choices. I suggest that you look at something from DIMD, which needs the business in graphics to make up for their failing modem line. But someone else may be able to point to some drawing speed benchmarks...?
"SCSI-whatever-the-newest-rev...." Modern motherboards usually have dual IDE controllers, so that you'll find it easy to have 3 IDE drives plus an IDE CD-Rom. It's true that there are huge SCSI drives available, and there are somewhat faster units, too, but you can get pretty good in IDE, and the price premium isn't worth it for most desktop users. I just switched desktop machines at work, from an older SCSI to a newer IDE; the newer unit is noticably faster on disk access.
Just my opinion... no doubt there will be others.
Dick |
