What computer is the best, in your opinion?

[[BlackDeath]]

I used to build my own computers, now I just buy Macs. They don't necessarily boot into OS X, but having a Mac is nice if you wanted to legally boot into OS X. I buy Macs mainly for the high quality case design, as in they look and feel expensive and run in virtual silence. Price never been an issue to me, I buy whatever suits me best. http://www.apple.com/macpro/design.html
Note:
RAM on the Mac Pro is a rip-off, there are better places to get high quality RAM from, that's what I do. $1500 for 8GB!! That and the 3.2 GHz Xeon isn't worth it. 2.8GHz suits me fine!

As Impressive as that is it still lacks. For that price you can make a better one i7 core with DDR3, and pump the graphics up with SLI/Crossfire GTX295 or 4870 X2. I would've done what I just said but I had budget limitations and had to deal with what I could. The case aslo resembles the ones made by Lian-Li (as far as Lian-Li go they make the highest quality custom cases).

Main reason I make my own is cause I find it relaxing and somewhat fun to do, I have a different attachement to a rig I make myself. I have been asked to make 2 PC's in the near future, one of them will be a high end machine so I will get to make the above (only if it were for me =[ ). Premade machines have limititations and/or make it extremely difficult to make customize with the companies warranty/policies issues and most of the time customer service there lacks.

But if you are looking to buy a premade machine than look no further than the Reactor, only fans inside are for radiator, liquid spills out and covers all hardware soaking them all in mineral oil.


This would be the cost if I build a Reactor to my specs, pure gaming power.

[Aizmov]

About a year ago i bought a dell laptop $4300.... The best in town but the price.... Well if you have money then you don't worry about brands or if its custom built.

That's a lot for a Dell!
I could get a Unibody Aluminum MacBook Pro for much less!

As Impressive as that is it still lacks. For that price you can make a better one i7 core with DDR3, and pump the graphics up with SLI/Crossfire GTX295 or 4870 X2. I would've done what I just said but I had budget limitations and had to deal with what I could. The case aslo resembles the ones made by Lian-Li (as far as Lian-Li go they make the highest quality custom cases).

Main reason I make my own is cause I find it relaxing and somewhat fun to do, I have a different attachement to a rig I make myself. I have been asked to make 2 PC's in the near future, one of them will be a high end machine so I will get to make the above (only if it were for me =[ ). Premade machines have limititations and/or make it extremely difficult to make customize with the companies warranty/policies issues and most of the time customer service there lacks.

But if you are looking to buy a premade machine than look no further than the Reactor, only fans inside are for radiator, liquid spills out and covers all hardware soaking them all in mineral oil.


This would be the cost if I build a Reactor to my specs, pure gaming power.

Too each his own. I personally not very good with tools, very clumsy, hate manual work and I can buy better built Macs than what I can build, or that how it seems to me. I love how the Mac Pro rearely requires a tool to expand. An extra Hard Disk is simply slide in. Spend some time and check the Design page of the Mac Pro.
http://www.apple.com/macpro/design.html
Spec a Mac Pro, you'll be impressed. Keep in mind the Mac Pro uses the Server-grade Xeon processor
http://store.apple.com/us_smb_78313/...A?mco=NzQ3Njkz
I'm gonna stop here, before someone calls me a rainbow Mactard.

[Eris]

This would be the cost if I build a Reactor to my specs, pure gaming power.

Those specs are not pure gaming power. They are wasted power. Like 99% of all games only speak 32 bit, which means they can only page 4 Gb of memory at any given time. And this includes video memory, virtual memory, etc.

The unfortunate paradox is that by the time games catch up with your computer, it will be pretty outdated. The computer will pull of most games, but a lot of it's power will go to waste since the games can't utilize it.

[Manhattan_Project_2000]

Probably cheaper and less stupid to build a gaming beowulf cluster out of old X-Boxes or PS3s.

Also, you'd get nerd points.

[Eris]

Probably cheaper and less stupid to build a gaming beowulf cluster out of old X-Boxes or PS3s.

Also, you'd get nerd points.

You'd be the game geek equivalent of a .

[kamaaina ^_^]

HP and Dell work fine for me. Apple Sucks. thats about it. i have no idea how to build a computer nor the desire to.

[Aizmov]

Probably cheaper and less stupid to build a gaming beowulf cluster out of old X-Boxes or PS3s.

Also, you'd get nerd points.

I did build a Beowulf cluster but from a combo of old PII, PIII and C2D PCs.
A PS3 and X360 cluster will be a pain in terms of software, especially that distributed as binary. Where am I supposed to find CELL, or PPC builds of some major proprietary software?

Just FYI, I'm not into PC gaming, not the slightest. The Mac Pro wins by being a Unix workstation (Cheaper than equivalent Sun SPARC and IBM POWER workstations), runs OS X, Darwin, Solaris, GNU+Linux, *BSD and others. OS X has the benefit of being a full-fledged Unix, with plenty of 3rd party hardware and software support. Running an x86 Unix, I'll lose a couple of nerd points, but I'll gain plenty of sanity, most evil (proprietary) software is x86-only.
I always wanted a NeXT Station, the Mac Pro is as close as I'll ever get. Same reason I bought a G4 Cube, I wanted a NeXT Cube.

Those specs are not pure gaming power. They are wasted power. Like 99% of all games only speak 32 bit, which means they can only page 4 Gb of memory at any given time. And this includes video memory, virtual memory, etc.

The unfortunate paradox is that by the time games catch up with your computer, it will be pretty outdated. The computer will pull of most games, but a lot of it's power will go to waste since the games can't utilize it.

Odd isn't it. 64-bit hasn't gone mainstream even though it is. Nintendo bragged in the 90s about the N64 being 64 bit. Digital had the Alpha which was a 64bit processor, Intel's Itanic came in the late 90s, and since at least 2004(?) all x86 processors were 64bit.

[Interpreter]

I use a sony vaio, lolz. But i shall choose hp since i am amateur in building and i hp is the best among all the choices.

[Manhattan_Project_2000]

I did build a Beowulf cluster but from a combo of old PII, PIII and C2D PCs.
A PS3 and X360 cluster will be a pain in terms of software, especially that distributed as binary. Where am I supposed to find CELL, or PPC builds of some major proprietary software?

Not sure how viable it would be to run a contemporary PC game through a Virtual Machine with the Beowulf Cluster (not very, I imagine), but it would be feasible to run current-gen console emulators if you compiled it yourself and had enough processing power. Not sure how much current-gen emulation software may or may not currently suck though.

If not, you could always play Zork on it and call yourself a performance artist.

[[BlackDeath]]

Those specs are not pure gaming power. They are wasted power. Like 99% of all games only speak 32 bit, which means they can only page 4 Gb of memory at any given time. And this includes video memory, virtual memory, etc.

The unfortunate paradox is that by the time games catch up with your computer, it will be pretty outdated. The computer will pull of most games, but a lot of it's power will go to waste since the games can't utilize it.

There are lots of people out there are enthusiasts and like the over power much like with cars adding excessive parts and upgrades doesn't change the fact it will still get from A to B they do things like that for enjoyment. But being able to play Crisis Warhead on a 1920x1200 on max keeping more than 50FPS average is quite an impressive feat in gaming but I what I found more impressive was that the Reactor machine managed to score a 28,000 on the 3DMark where as even high end machines only get around half that score at best. What is even worse though is if you are bottlenecked by a machine that lacks, I always think it's better to have more than needed than to not have enough given in this case it is more and then some.

64bit isn't very far off anyway soon it will become a standard, maybe even by the end of the year, the release of Windows7 is drawing near and by then I am willing to bet windows will then make 64bit apps more widespread and as the norm. By the time games catch up to my current rig I would've already upgraded to one with more power required than the best games, so constantly have that extra power.




But speaking on the clusters Sony had to restrict sales of the PS3 to a certain country because they were doing just that (can't remember the details but I know someone who does) using several PS3's as they were cheaper than using the regular means. Anyone know or confirm this?

[Eris]

64bit isn't very far off anyway soon it will become a standard, maybe even by the end of the year, the release of Windows7 is drawing near and by then I am willing to bet windows will then make 64bit apps more widespread and as the norm. By the time games catch up to my current rig I would've already upgraded to one with more power required than the best games, so constantly have that extra power.

64 is quite a bit into the future still. Nobody is willing to risk loosing their customers. And writing software that runs on both 32 bit and 64 bit systems is time-consuming and not something the companies are willing to spend time and money on.

I still don't see why you would consistently want to have way more power than you need. You're pissing away vast sums of money that could be spent on something you actually benefited from. Moore's law makes a state of the art computer one of the stupidest things to pour money into. You'll get twice as good a computer for the same price in 6 months.

[Manhattan_Project_2000]

But speaking on the clusters Sony had to restrict sales of the PS3 to a certain country because they were doing just that (can't remember the details but I know someone who does) using several PS3's as they were cheaper than using the regular means. Anyone know or confirm this?

I think you may have it confused a bit; the PS2 was illegal to export to some countries from Japan due to fear it could be used as a missile guidence system.

[Ashminigun]

Nothing best than put your labour and time to build your own from scratch. The plus side building your own are:

• Your computer is tailored to your needs and budget (Mine an average computer that play games on min-medium setting and do general stuff on $500 - $600 budget)
• You can recycle/salvage old usable parts from the old system
• You can troubleshoot and fix it on your own (Needs experiences and guts to do this)
• You can upgrade the hardware without worry of void the warranty
• Add sense of pride

The minus side:

• It involve a lot of trial and error
• Unless you have friend with similar platform, you're on your own when you're unsure the problem are
• Be ready to fork out large sum of money when you have a catastrophic hardware failure

One the side note, this dude rig up 16 PS3s to tackle the mystery of the black hole.

[Evockzi]

Toss up between Apple and Custom Built.... Both Cost around the same but your custom built aint gonna be as reliable....

Truely depends what your doing on it... I have been told though haven't tried my self that apples are much nicer to program on vs Windows.

[Aizmov]

Toss up between Apple and Custom Built.... Both Cost around the same but your custom built aint gonna be as reliable....

Truely depends what your doing on it... I have been told though haven't tried my self that apples are much nicer to program on vs Windows.

Quite true. Cocoa + Objective-C are the near-perfect combo. Not to mention all the goodies you get from Unix and GNU.

Arstechnica has an excellent article in 3 parts contrasting Windows development with Mac development.
Part 1:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...from-apple.ars

Part 2:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...m-apple-II.ars

Part 3:
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/20...-apple-III.ars

[Eris]

Quite true. Cocoa + Objective-C are the near-perfect combo. Not to mention all the goodies you get from Unix and GNU.

Objective-C is great in theory. In practice, it's a quite horrible language.

[Aizmov]

Objective-C is great in theory. In practice, it's a quite horrible language.

That could be so, but it sure beats C++. In Objective-C you could get away with using plain C and add OOP design elements sparingly, just enough so the management would OK the project.

In the work place the use of OOP is near mandatory, and for better or worse (mostly worse) Java and C# dominate.

[Eris]

That could be so, but it sure beats C++. In Objective-C you could get away with using plain C and add OOP design elements sparingly, just enough so the management would OK the project.

In the work place the use of OOP is near mandatory, and for better or worse (mostly worse) Java and C# dominate.

Pah, if you are working for someone that doesn't understand that the tools must be chosen to fit the task, you are better off quitting your job, growing a UNIX beard, and writing oddball open source manifestos on the dole.

[ambspock]

well im sort of new here..but i vote Mac(personally) because it saves space-well the IMacs do- and all you need for the IMac is a keyboard and mouse, while PC you need a mouse, keyboard and speakers plus a monitor and PC are bulky and big and waste space. another good thing about Mac's is that you can run Windows too as long as you have Parallel Desktop to do it(i guess thats the minor side). also with Mac's you dont have to worry about downloading malicious software or virus or junk like that. i have nothing against PC and PC's are generally cheapers now a days, i'll still take Mac's over PC

[hirokiaibalovex3]

Apple, ftw!
Most of my teachers and classmates own Apple computers, so it's definitely easier to send files to each other when we have the same programs. I own both an Apple and a PC, and so far, my Apple is holding up much better than my PC. I hate how my PC always freezes :/

[[U.S.N]Senkan_California]

Anything...!!!!!








EXCEPT MADE IN CHINA!

[Aizmov]

Anything...!!!!!








EXCEPT MADE IN CHINA!

EVERYTHING!





Is made in China.

Pah, if you are working for someone that doesn't understand that the tools must be chosen to fit the task, you are better off quitting your job, growing a UNIX beard, and writing oddball open source manifestos on the dole.

I've been a NEET for 4 months. Glad I finally found a job that pays very well. All the pain Java and C# development will cause is nothing compared with the awkward feeling of asking my parents for money.
During my interview, I mentioned how I did this and did that, and all they were concerned about is how familar am I with C# and Java. Lucky for me, undergrad CS courses somehow became unofficial C# and Java certification programs.

you can run Windows too as long as you have Parallel Desktop to do it

There are plenty of VM options. Sun xVM and VMWare Fusion come to mind. You can also use Bootcamp, which is best if you need native performance.
There are solutions like Wine and CrossOver, that help you run _some_ Windows programs without the need for Windows, keep in mind they are _not_ 100% compatible with all Windows programs.

[TheAsterisk!]

Well, given the choice I'd custom build, but I'm usually low on cash, so I buy refurbished computers, usually online if I can find a seller that doesn't creep me out. HP, Compaq, and MicronPC towers have all worked well for me, and I've only owned IBM laptops so I can't say too much else there. I do still have an IBM desktop from the late 80's that runs well enough on PC-DOS, but it's mostly just a curiosity hidden in a corner of the basement.
eMachines computers, I can say with certainty, are atrocious, hideous monsters. The last one I inherited, a T2482 I think, actually had a knock-off of the AMD processor. I didn't know until I'd retired it to be used for parts. The logo was reversed and it looked like it had been through a fire. I would still take one for free, but I'd only use it for parts after careful inspection.
Even though I don't custom build, I often scavenge old parts nobody else wants. They're never impressive finds, but I do it for the amusement. If the hardware is simply too old to use, I'll disassemble it for the novelty. I find it fun to get computers running on as little hardware as possible just to see if it can be done. When that's out of my system, I just load a lightweight Linux onto the HDD and go from there. Puppy Linux is my preferred OS, but I keep one XP Pro tower running for some Autodesk cheap-o-CAD software I use.

It has no reasonable basis in fact or experience, but I hate Apple. I hate everything they've ever made, and I only accept QuickTime grudgingly. It might have something to do with being forced to use old crappy Apples in grade school to learn arithmetic and grammar, or maybe the obnoxious ad campaign, but I don't know. I won't buy Apples.

Anyway, I'd prefer to custom build given enough disposable money.

[*~Anime Angel~*]

Mac all the way...its just so much better than xp im my personal opinion. especialy for school and what not even though im not yet in colage its still verry handy in regular school.

[MomijiTMO]

Pretty easy question. Just build it yourself to get what you want. Of course the downside is if you have a DOA item and it's your only pc then finding which part is faulty is an epic task.