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Mismatched Components (Reply to this comment)
by vicwang
Arthur.Rubin makes some good points, as does thepanther in this editorial, but regarding Arthur.Rubin's comment that:
"You usually don't have the option of having significantly mismatched internal components unless you buy the components yourself, or special-order the components to be assembled, so it's not appropriate in the category"
Sure it's possible to have horribly mismatched components in your system. I'd even say it occurs on a fairly regular basis.
Just last December was perhaps the classic case of this, when Dell released their first Pentium 4-based systems. In their default configuration, with no customization whatsoever, their "top-of-the-line" 1.5 ghz P4 included the TNT2 Vanta graphics card--i.e. the BUDGET version of a card released almost two years earlier. Why any company would combine the latest CPU technology with a graphics card that's almost two generations behind is beyond me. (ironically, Dell was bundling Geforce cards with their PIII systems for several months... who knows why they suddenly decided to go "backwards")
To make matters even worse, Dell's P4's came with PC600 RDRAM (the slowest RDRAM available), not the PC800 that has been the standard for some time. Again, a horrible example of mismatched components, especially when the P4's 400 mhz bus is begging for the fastest RAM possible, not the slowest.
Anyway, the fact that this happened with the default configuration, and from a company with the best reputation in the industry (however undeserved), just goes to show how easily this problem can occur. I can only imagine how often it happens when you throw 2nd-rate PC companies, and buyers who try "customizing" their system but don't know what they're doing, into the mix.
-vicwang
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Apr 25 '01
7:19 pm PDT
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Re: I+was+torn.... (Reply to this comment)
by thepanther
Fair points, But I searched for a topic for this review and this was the best I could find for it
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Apr 24 '01
2:39 pm PDT
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I was torn.... (Reply to this comment)
by Arthur.Rubin
between giving this a Helpful and a Somewhat Helpful.
I disagree with you on many points, some of them verifiable. (Sorry, by that I mean that you're wrong, and it is a question of fact, rather than an opinion.)
General comments:
This should be in How to Build a Computer (I don't recall the exact topic), rather than How to Choose a Computer for Beginners. You usually don't have the option of having significantly mismatched internal components unless you buy the components yourself, or special-order the components to be assembled, so it's not appropriate in the category. (The monitor and printer, of course can be mismatched.)
Even so, disk drives are almost always slower than the CPU/memory/backplane, and printers ARE always slower, so there's no real reason to "balance " those.
Specific comments, even if it were in the right section (your text in italics):
For example If you have bought a brand spanking new CPU and it’s the most expensive one around and then you went to get a Graphics card. To do the CPU any justice you will have to a graphics card that is also at the top of its price range.
I don't "buy " it. You may need fast graphics, but you don't necessarily need a graphics card or a monitor that will support 1600 x 1280 resolution at 24-bit pixels.
Furthermore, for graphics and sound, there's the question: What do you want to use the computer for?. There are a few people who want the computer for it's computing capacity, for which you need a high-speed CPU, matched memory (and a lot of it), and high-speed high-capacity disk drives; an adequate monitor and graphics card, and not necessarily ANY sound card.
Magazines and websites can say things such as meets year 2001 specifications or something similar.
Never heard of it, myself. Perhaps some magazines do say such things, but there's no standard meaning.
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Apr 24 '01
9:51 am PDT
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