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Reason #1 I shut down for the night- no need to put that constant heat load on components.
Not to mention that constant running just lets the dust build and build.
Turns out I have some windoze issues too (havent formatted since college ...2003) And if I'm gonna go that far, Migfht as well upgrade... Currently a iwill mobo dual p3 933's a gig of ram.
I like the intel camp and have had Asus boards in the past. Anyone got any reccomendations?
Asus with an AMD 1.6ghz here, stable for five years now.
I'm looking towards upgrading too, I'm thinking of building another long-running machine but with a bit more punch.
I'm leaning towards a fanless power supply, liquid cooled cpu in the 3ghz range, 6-8gb ram, etc. Something that can run Vista without a bog or hiccup.
Can't recommend any particular Asus board but they still make excellent boards. I am running on a DFI Blood Iron myself though with a E6550 OC'd to just a hair under 3.0Ghz with no issue.
An excellent deal right now is that the Intel Q6600 is under $200. With the I7's on their way prices will continue to drop!
I have been running ASUS boards with Intel chips last 3 computers. Only had issues with the last one (found out it was a bad series, but ASUS upgraded mine under warranty) Mine is set up for both dual and quad core chips. Its a PK5-VM board.
My last computer took a shot from a power surge and fried just about everything. Luckily I was able to retrieve all info from HD before final failure.
What else do you use your computer for besides FTE ?
Do you want to build a desktop & how much do you want to spend?
There are some really nice laptops for less than $700. I use mine more than the desktop.
I built my desktop about a year and a half ago and I bought everything through Newegg. You can't go wrong with Asus boards because of all the options and support. The manual even had a section of known RAM that was compatible with the board, so I literally copy\pasted the part number from the manual PDF to Newegg and got the RAM that way. I am running an Intel Core 2 Duo.
I bought my first laptop last summer, and I love it. I don't know how I made it until now without one. They're very inexpensive these days. I got mine through Dell, and the process was really simple. You literally just click what you want, and they build it for you. I started out with a basic platform and selected some more RAM. Since my desktop is still pretty powerful, I got a somewhat low-end laptop, I think it is a Celeron. It was $650 or so. The only thing I didn't like was that it took about a month to get here because they have to take time to build it, but they manufacture so many that it's understandable.
I'm running an Asus motherboard and AMD Athlon XP 2600+ running at 2.08 GHZ with XP Home SP2 and have been with no problems for over 5 year also.
Best improvement I made was increasing ram to 1 gig and adding second 80 gig hard drive. Mine stays on constantly, only being shutdown during storms or if I go off on a trip for a few days.
Now I do shut it down every few months for a "cleaning" of all the dust from the tower, fans, heat sink etc..
No plans to upgrade just yet as this "home built" machine does everything I need it to do!
I'd recommend a quad core athlon. But that's me I like the AMD chips, they're less expensive and have better performance than a similar intel chip. I'm happy with my semperon 3000. The mobo could be better, but that's where I went cheap on this machine. A GOOD graphics card is a must for photoshop. You'll want an ATI hd4000 series with at least a gig of onboard vram.
A lot of photoshop, Always wanted to do some vid editing, but habvent got into it yet.
lots of spreadsheet stuff,
dont really do much gaming
OK, good info to work with. I am guessing that you don't want a laptop (or at least the one I linked) & that you want to build a desktop. Price is no problem for you, but I tend to go lower cost with medium to high performance.
What power supply did you buy, brand name & model?
Can you use the existing case or do you want a new one?
Do you need a new SATA DVD?
Do you need a new SATA hard disk?
What operating system do you plan to use & do you have the disk? (I hope you have the photoshop disks too.)
Would you consider AMD? Their CPU's are well below Intel in price & have excellent performance.