Get new computer now or wait for next gen?

[Shinova]

Should I try to get a cutting edge computer now, or should I wait till next year when the extreme versions of Intel's 32nm processors could hit the market along with whatever new video cards are out at that time?

[General Zod]

"Cutting edge" is just another term for "early adopter". Read: Sucker.

If you really need a new computer there's plenty of midrange systems that will play virtually every game under the sun for less than half of what a brand new top of the line system will run you. Though personally I'd wait until October or so when Windows 7 hits the retail market.

[Stark]

Are there even any high-end PC games coming out in the future? I'm not sure I'll ever bother upgrading my PC again. Ooooh, Total War bugfests and simulationist nonsense like Arma! RTSs are still uglier than WiC so no danger there.

[Starglider]

should I wait till next year when the extreme versions of Intel's 32nm processors could hit the market along with whatever new video cards are out at that time?

Basically all of that stuff is a refinement, not a generational change. The 6-core i7 processors in particular are going to be useless for virtually all games and consumer apps before 2011. Assuming you're not waiting for a cheap i5 integrated graphics solution, and aren't an obsessive overclocker, the main benefit will be the price drops on the existing i7 range.

I still want an overclocked 12/16-core Skulltrail-2 system, but that's because I run crazy AI stuff that sucks up all the CPU power it can get and still takes several minutes to run a problem sequence.

[Genii Lodus]

ATi should be having their DirectX11 hardware out shortly after Windows 7 launches - but there's going to be bugger all games that use it for the foreseeable future so there's no sense in waiting. After all by the time games come out which actually use DX11 there'll be better graphics cards for your money as well.

[Shinova]

Any idea when NVidia are launching their GTX 380 or whatever it'll be called? I see regular mentions of summer this year but nothing clearer than that. Any worth waiting for those as well?

[MKSheppard]

Right now my upgrade plans call for:

1.) Windows 7 (2~ months after release -- problems WILL be found)

2.) SSD (i'm still not sure on this upgrade; may want to wait a bit to see how Windows 7 actual Release handles SSDs; does it always keep thrashing the disk when nothing is going on, like with Windows XP?)

3.) Blu Ray Burner (They're dropping to about $200~; which is actually affordable) for backup purposes.

Other than that; not much is really on the horizon; I project my quad core Q6600 and Geforce 8800 GTS will continue to work for several years down the road -- which was my intention when I put together the system a year or so back. Sure; it was hideously overpowered; but the less I muck about with my system's innards; the less chance of soemthing going bad.

[Starglider]

2.) SSD (i'm still not sure on this upgrade; may want to wait a bit to see how Windows 7 actual Release handles SSDs; does it always keep thrashing the disk when nothing is going on, like with Windows XP?)

Probably. I've heard that the precaching and anticipatory paging algorithms have been turned up another notch for Windows 7, gotta make use of all that spare RAM after all. However it does have support for the TRIM filesystem operation, which makes SSD utilisation more efficient.

Blu Ray Burner (They're dropping to about $200~; which is actually affordable) for backup purposes.

You could get two 64 GB flash sticks for that. How much stuff are you backing up? For 100 gigs or less, the flash drives are more convenient, probably faster and have a lot more rewrite cycles. For much more than 100 gigs, you're probably better off with a second/external hard drive, since swapping through a stack of 50 gb blu-rays (that's assuming you get a dual-layer burner) is going to get tedious fast.

[MKSheppard]

Probably. I've heard that the precaching and anticipatory paging algorithms have been turned up another notch for Windows 7, gotta make use of all that spare RAM after all.

Damn, thanks for reminding me. Gotta also upgrade my system memory from 2GB to like 8GB (remember anything more than 2GB really isn't used by XP; despite "workarounds".)

How much stuff are you backing up?

My military folder(s) for example are 16 GB. If I wanted to back them up, I'd have to put them onto four DVDs; while with a Blu Ray Single Layer, I can put them onto a single disc and have space left over for growth.

It's been my experience that double layer discs are more trouble than they're worth, with slow copy times and problems with reliabily writing to them.

Anyway; you can get:

3 x 25 GB Blu Ray Disks by Verbatim at Best Buy for $28 (4x recording) - $0.47 cents per GB
50 x 4 GB DVDs by memorex at BB for $32 (16x recording) - $0.16 cents per GB
50 x 700 MB CDs by Memorex at BB for $13 (52x recording) - $0.37 cents per GB

PNY 2 GB Flash at BB for $14 - $7.00 per GB
PNY 8 GB Flash at BB for $42 - $5.25 per GB
PNY 32 GB Flash at BB for $130 - $4.06 per GB

Right now, Blu Rays are still in the high end of optical recordables; (remember, they used to cost like $400 for a drive a year or two ago); but probably by Q4 09 the price will have come down some; or perhaps by Q1 10, for both the drives and the recordable media...

[CaptHawkeye]

Are there even any high-end PC games coming out in the future? I'm not sure I'll ever bother upgrading my PC again. Ooooh, Total War bugfests and simulationist nonsense like Arma! RTSs are still uglier than WiC so no danger there.

Uglier than WiC and don't even play as good as it does. WiC is such a detailed, good looking game and the frames it pulls are wonderful. Despite featuring deformable terrain and over a hundred on screen units at any time.

Plenty of games don't look as good as it does, and they get insultingly poor FPS and texture resolution. It's almost as if games were made by their marketing campaigns and not by their content these days.

[phongn]

It's been my experience that double layer discs are more trouble than they're worth, with slow copy times and problems with reliabily writing to them.

Be wary of long-term backups with optical media. Most discs won't survive very long (Taiyo Yuden is more stable, and Mitsui makes some archival-grade discs). One company is actually working on a burner that engraves pits into the media, which may interest you if it ever comes out.

[dragon]

Well the problem is that you can never really buy cutting edge cause by time they make it and get it ship to you there's a good chance that a better one is on the market already.

[Darth Wong]

Damn, thanks for reminding me. Gotta also upgrade my system memory from 2GB to like 8GB (remember anything more than 2GB really isn't used by XP; despite "workarounds".)

It's a good thing RAM is so absurdly cheap nowadays.

My military folder(s) for example are 16 GB. If I wanted to back them up, I'd have to put them onto four DVDs; while with a Blu Ray Single Layer, I can put them onto a single disc and have space left over for growth.

It's been my experience that double layer discs are more trouble than they're worth, with slow copy times and problems with reliabily writing to them.

How do we know Blu-Ray burners won't be just as finicky as DL DVD burners, if not worse?

I actually use a drive dock for backup. I stick a 1.5TB hard drive into it, rsync it with several key directories on my server and desktop for backup, and then pop it out and put it on the shelf. Mind you, I'm backing up something like 1TB of data, so any kind of optical solution just doesn't work.

Anyway; you can get:

3 x 25 GB Blu Ray Disks by Verbatim at Best Buy for $28 (4x recording) - $0.47 cents per GB
50 x 4 GB DVDs by memorex at BB for $32 (16x recording) - $0.16 cents per GB
50 x 700 MB CDs by Memorex at BB for $13 (52x recording) - $0.37 cents per GB

PNY 2 GB Flash at BB for $14 - $7.00 per GB
PNY 8 GB Flash at BB for $42 - $5.25 per GB
PNY 32 GB Flash at BB for $130 - $4.06 per GB

Right now, Blu Rays are still in the high end of optical recordables; (remember, they used to cost like $400 for a drive a year or two ago); but probably by Q4 09 the price will have come down some; or perhaps by Q1 10, for both the drives and the recordable media...

As Starglider notes above, writable optical media is surprisingly unreliable. Older discs just spontaneously become unreadable with frightening randomness. Of course, a hard drive can quite easily fail as well, but it's so easy to back up such vast amounts of data with one. If I wanted to back up 1TB of documents, web material, and pornography with writable optical media, it would take me all day, shuffling discs and labeling them. With my hard drive dock solution, I just start up rsync and then walk away.

[General Zod]

On the backup front, I use external hard drives. Fuck blu-ray recorders. For the price of a blu-ray you can get two 1tb external hard drives and have enough room to cover virtually everything you need, without the stupidly insane cost of blu-ray media.

[Wing Commander MAD]

Shinova, I'd recommend getting what you want/can afford now. There's always in general going to be something on the horizon that will be better than what you currently have, so playing the waiting game is rather pointless. Now if you are waiting for something in particular that is a different story. Really the only thing to wait for is Windows 7 and DirectX 11 tech. The thing is that DX11 is pretty much not worth it to wait now, as the main thing is tessalation. From what I've heard DX10 to DX11 is more akin to the transition from DX8 to DX9 rather than DX9 to DX10. There probably won't be any games that use DX11 until late 2010 or early 2011 at the earliest. Also keep in mind there are few if any games that even take full advantage of DX10 now as most are still coded to run on DX9 as lots of non DX10 hardware is still out there, with some DX10 enhancements that for those who have it. Windows 7 might be something worth waiting for, but honestly I'd simply wait and get the version you want either retail or from MS than have to deal with OEM versions and upgrades. This is particularly true if they go a similar route they did with Vista where you get a license for both 32 and 64 bit varieties, which is nice if you find your apps don't play well with 64bit OSs (I would recommend 64 bit personally). Windows is incredibly easy to install (tweaking settings might not be if you don't know what your doing, but ask on the net) and shouldn't pose a major problem in my experience.

[The Kernel]

It really depends on your budget, and you might want to upgrade a few pieces at a time if that is possible.

If I were to be in the market for a PC today, I would consider the CPU, Motherboard, RAM and SSD safe buys. The Core i7 920 is a great deal and will still compete favorably with the new Lynnfield processors due out soon (Core i5) so if you can spend $600 on the Mobo/CPU/RAM combo you should be fine buying now.

I also definitely recommend the new Intel SSD drives for a boot drive, either in 80GB or 160GB flavors. These drives just got a new revision with a killer price and new performance as well as a promised TRIM upgrade, so if you can wait until the new G2 drives hit the market they look like a solid buy. If you are partial to non-SSD drives, you can also pick them up cheap right now with nothing serious on the horizon.

As far as video cards though, I would wait for another quarter and see the new product releases. If you need to buy now, try to get a cheap yet punchy card in the $150-$200 range from either nVidia or AMD such as the 4850, 4870, GTX260, etc.

[Shinova]

Update, my first sdn post from my new computer!! Wheeeeee!!!

I had to replace everything that is or inside the computer case cause everything's either two to six year old hardware.

I got a Core i7 950, 6 gigs of OCZ DDR3 1600 ram, an EVGA motherboard, two xfx Radeon HD 4890s, an HT Omega Claro Halo, 750 watt corsair psu (I needed this one cause the others I checked didn't have enough PCI-e power cables for dual 4890s), two SATA hard drives (SSD is still too expensive for just a hard drive, and my new config loads everything I have blazingly fast already), a regular sony DVD burner (not bluray), and everything inside an Antec 1200 full tower case (this thing shats platinum bricks all over my previous case, and is soooooooo good).

I got all of this for a little under $2,000. Very hefty price, but I feel it warranted after six years of nearly nothing. And those 4890s were each $194, and the two combined plus one of those ultra-high quality configs eat Crysis for breakfast. I'm not kidding, I'm seeing more prettiness in a game than I've ever personally seen and there hasn't been a single slowdown in-game. Not once. It's ludicrous for a combined setup that is about half the price of a GTX 295 and is faster (Ha! Take that NVidia!)


PS: All bless SATA!! I just can't stand IDE again now that I've tasted the goodness that is Serial ATA.

[Vympel]

I got my new PC in October 2006 and bar a video card upgrade last year (I can't even remember when exactly) it's perfectly capable of running every single game I have without a problem and with the highest possible settings (for the most part). My previous PC had a four year run from 2002. I see no point in upgrading before the end of 2010/ start of 2011, at the earliest. By then Windows 7 should be well-established.

I am considering getting a backup hardrive though for data storage, what with the total death of my C:/ back in March.

I had no idea optical media sucked but then I've never used them for storage - how old do the discs have to be before they start failing?

[phongn]

I had no idea optical media sucked but then I've never used them for storage - how old do the discs have to be before they start failing?

It's a function of age, temperature, humidity, dye stability, manufacture quality control, recording speed and probably some other factors. As a basic rule, discs that say "Made in Japan" or "Made in Singapore" (e.g. Taiyo Yuden/Mitsui and certain Verbatim discs, respectively) are probably going to be better made than those that say "Made in Taiwan" or "Made in China". Various manufacturers have tried accelerated aging techniques and extrapolated how long your data should last but nobody really knows how accurate said extrapolation is.

The best bet would be gold archival-grade discs burned at low speed and kept in a cool, dry and dark place. Said discs are around $2 USD each in bulk.

[Xon]

Wong, you want to be careful leaving harddrives in an unpowered state as literially nothing is documented on how well the harddrive will retain data over a prolonged period of time without power. The magnetic domains in the harddisk do naturally drift, and the act of reading or writing them is used to keep things working correctly. Also, the disk can send warning status if anything starts to go wrong while it is running. It just fails silently when off

Another thing, is with large harddrives the uncorrectable error rate is the same now as it was ten years ago. Which for multi-terabytes of data means you are practically garrientied to get bit-errors. With larger disks this is a major problem, as conventional thinking is if a disk returns a bad bit the entire disk must be bad.

Checksumming data and redundant backups is about your only solution. Checksums to actually detect when an error occurs, and the redundant backup to repair the error.

[phongn]

Checksumming data and redundant backups is about your only solution. Checksums to actually detect when an error occurs, and the redundant backup to repair the error.

Checksum'ed RAID6 devices (RAID-Z2, RAID-6 with btrfs, etc.) can properly reconstruct data as well, but that requires a minimum of four drives.

[Xon]

Checksum'ed RAID6 devices (RAID-Z2, RAID-6 with btrfs, etc.) can properly reconstruct data as well, but that requires a minimum of four drives.

This is what anoys me about RAID5 or RAID6, and even RAID1 suffers from it. No checksum'ing so you can't determine which bit of data is correct in your redundant set!

Mirrored RAID1 with zfs will do checksuming and RAID1, which is the least disk wasteful for a 2 disk set while providing good redundancy.