hardware question

[warped]

simple question

I am in the market for a new machine, i only reaslly browse the web and burn dvds, no gaming etc so am not looking at anything too flase with a budget of around £300 (dont need monitor)

My question is, in order to get the encryption time down should i be investing in more ram or a bigger chip or is it just a combination of the two?

thanks in advance for the help guys

ps - im considering dell so if anyone has any better suggestions then send them my way

[warped]

forgot to mention, i currently use an amd 600 or something like that so anything would be better lol

[fazzaz31]

Here in the States, Dell offers the following package:

Inspiron 530s (XP)
Intel® Core™2 Duo Processor E4500 (2MB L2 Cache, 2.20GHz, 800 FSB)
Genuine Windows® XP Home Edition
19 inch SE198WFP Widescreen Flat Panel Monitor
16X DVD+/-RW Drive
1GB1 Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 667MHz- 2DIMMs
320GB2 Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/DataBurst Cache™
Integrated Intel Graphics Media Accelerator 3100
Integrated 7.1 Channel Audio

Price: $649 (with "instant savings") Deduct the included monitor and it comes into your price range.

By comparison, my Dell GX260 P4 (1.8 MHz) w/2 GB RAM easily handles anything I can throw at it. Both VLC and MPlayer Classic show movies in full screen mode flawlessly, while all manner of operations are running in the background, as I am a heavy multi-tasker. Burning full DVDs w/ImgBurn takes about 7 minutes with my LiteOn 20H DVDRW. A dual core would probably knock off about a minute of burning time - maybe. I also run PhotoShop CS3 without any hiccups w/image files up to 250 Mb (!).

As for RAM, any encoding operation will eat any and all RAM available, but encoding to DVD is a several hour (overnight) operation regardless of the amount of RAM.

IMHO, any amount over 2 GB is probably overkill unless you're rendering 3D drawings with a program like Poser or some such, or cutting video with Premier, etc, in which case, too much is not enough.

Don't forget to budget for a video card of at least 128 MB - about $60-80 - for extra video control of gamma, color, etc.

Have fun shopping!

[mr soft]

PC world always has a few refurbished cheapies sitting around .

Check out this link for a few cheap barebones .

http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/barebones.html

The PC market is saturated with these kind of offers,

Have you thought about building your own? With the money you have set aside you can build a very nice custom machine.

[sidewinder711]

The question is how often you are going for converting and what are your "speed requirements".

- If it isn't a lot, then you should go with a processor like the before mentioned Intel E4500... other possibilities are Intel E4300/4400. The difference isn't so big.

- If you want to encode a lot and/or in a faster way the actual best choice for a Dual Core processor is the Intel E8400, which has the best price/power relationship atm. A few months ago it was the Intel E6750, which is still a very good choice. If prices will allow there is even the possibility to go with a quad core (eg Q6600). If you want to do some ("safe") overclocking, the E6750 or the E8400 are among the best choices on the market.

RAM isn't expensive atm... it's even at a multi year low. Therefore you should go at least for 2GB; I prefer and recommend to have 4GB.

I don' want to argue against the quality of Dell machines... certainly a safe bet. But I do have some problems with them, because often you can't really change the hardware in these machines due to specific constructions, sometimes even some changes in the BIOS aren't possible, because there are restrictions.

Mr.soft mentioned the possibility to build one on your own. I had no real idea about it 1.5 years ago, but I got a lot of information on the web that I built up two machines by myself in the meantime. You can establish the machine like you want... and at the end it might be cheaper than buying a complete machine.


Greetz

[Ranguvar]

www.newegg.com

Happy shopping :p :)

Personally, I'd save a little more and get something better. I built this PC, not including monitor, speakers, or keyboard/mouse, for less than $800 (516 euros)... the specs listed in my sig, plus a 500GB SATA-300 hard drive, highest speed possible Lite-On DVD burner, good case, and solid motherboard. Encoding FLIES. Definitely try for a low-end quad core if you can. The G0 Q6600 overclocks like mad, and when using things like x264, performance scales extremely close to linearly with each additional core. As in, a quad core at the same other specs as a dual core will be 1.999x as fast.