"Gary" == Gary Hanley <gary@hanley.net> writes:
Gary> On Mon, 10 Aug 2009, Franklin Moody wrote:
(Though again, the performance of the onboard components, even though somewhat dated, is usually pretty decent for regular home use.)
Gary> Very true. When I build a PC for a friend or family member I usually Gary> go integrated as they only want the PC for Internet stuff. Hear hear! Alot of the newer boards with integrated everything really are quite nice. And power efficient and cool. Key things to think about. If it wasn't for wanting room for disks, a Shuttle style box would be a nice idea, and I keep thinking it might make my desktop... Gary> For me I buy discrete devices. And the funny thing is that these Gary> days it's hard to find a motherboard without integrated video, Gary> sound, NIC, etc. So what OS are you running, and what applications are you running with uses all this GPU power? Now I admit my last system, a Asus M2N-SLI Deluxe has a discrete GPU, but I got a Radeon X1250 (in Feb 2008) because it was just one slot and a passive cooler. It's a big performance jump over my old Matrox G450 AGP card for sure! Anyway, I've found that the onboard sound/network to be just fine, dual Gigabit works nicely, and overpowers anything else on the network at this time. Now, back to the core initial question, which was about the vast variety of of components out there to choose from. It's really terribly confusing, and for only a 5-15% difference in performance, you can spend a ton of money. I personally like Newegg.com for ease of comparing systems. I also like the arstechnica.com system guides. They do quite a decent job, esp on the low end. Their god box is silly. They really need to be thinking of a god desktop, and a good server box instead. Also, for a home system, I think it makes alot of sense to build a nice home server, which sits in a corner and serves files, does backups, hosts a development web server, etc. Then having a desktop which you can play with, muck around with and rebuild at will, all without losing your files or home directory stuff is nice. John