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Stairway to bargain!

© Dan Caines

DECISION THREE: GRAPHICS CARDS. This one is a bit of a minefield right about now. First of all you have to note that there is a distinction between who makes the graphics card and then what chip their card is based on. To illustrate, as of now Hercules and Guillemot are two graphics cards manufacturers but their cards are very similar as they are both based on nVidia chipsets. You can pretty much ignore who manufactures the card and focus on the chipset. There are really only two chipsets worth buying into at the moment: the Radeon by Ati and the various Nvidia chips flying around. The Radeon is a good card – and is normally available at a reasonably low price – and is bundled with some systems. But the undisputed big daddy of the graphics card world at the moment has to be Nvidia, who have two ranges out both of which are selling really well. If you can get it for a reasonable price (although it has been retailing at around $350 which is a fair chunk of our budget go for the GeForce 3 chipset – hugely powerful and very future-proof – but if that just pushes your system over that ever-present price limit then go for the still excellent GeForce 2 (although try and steer away from the Mx version if possible – it is quite a small price cut for quite a large performance hit). Look for cards which have at least 32 megabytes of onboard memory and if a 64mb version is available for a decent price then snap it up. Same for the Radeon – 32mb good, 64mb better.

DECISION FOUR: MEMORY AND STOREAGE. This is where a lot of the cheaper companies cut corners to save money with their systems and it can lead to significant loss of performance. First of all don’t be confused by different types of RAM memory. Basically they fall into three categories I) RDRAM or Rambus RAM. This you will normally find accompanying Intel chips as they have bought into this technology in a big way. It does offer a speed boost but if you buy the memory on its own it commands a pretty high premium. However, if you get it as part of a system (e.g. those from Dell) then this is less of a factor. II) SDRAM. This is the basic, vanilla RAM that most computers currently being used will have. It is fine, it is quick and it does pretty much everything you need for a reasonable price. If you see this have no worries III) DDRAM and other types of “cutting-edge” memory. If you see this available (and I find this quite unlikely) then think twice about the system you are looking at. There will be a price hit for these types of memory and they are still relatively unproven. You should get about 128mb of RAM within your price boundary – don’t accept less but don’t expect more! In terms of hard drive space anything between 8 and 15 gigabytes crop up on these systems. Aim for 10 but if your otherwise perfect system only has 8 then go for it. You will probably not use all that anyway – I know I don’t).

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