It is if he wants to play Starcraft II
Which the HD2400 won’t be able to run any more than the Intel 3000. If he wants to run that at more than 1024x768 he’ll want at least a HD2600+ or a GeForce 8600+. Probably.
( My Intel 3100 can run things like WoW at 1680x1050. )
Is there that big a difference between the two?
Also, I could inject a little more money into the whole thing and go for more memory and a different processor as well. Things are selected as they are primarily because I don’t know what the hell I’m doing. I figure it’d be fairly retarded if I went for the most expensive pieces and they weren’t worth spit 'cause I didn’t have enough memory for other things.
Edit: aaaannnndddd Nulani’s post addresses this as I typed it.
You won’t need more than 2GB RAM unless you’re planning to run Vista. It might be worth it to pick the E6420 ( or even the E6320 ) instead of the E4500.
Actually it looks like either of them can already run SC2. The minimum requirements for it are not too high.
I would personally recommend a Dell. I have a pretty new one that came with XP after Vista came out. So that would be my rec.
I kinda hate Vista, but my friends’ suffering is slowly coming to a close as their Vista is getting better. So perhaps its not so bad after all. Hm.
Many of the same business’ that complain now about Vista, complained about XP replacing their Win 9x (Win98 or even, erk, ME) as the manufacturers of many pieces of software blame microsoft rather than improve their own software. In other words, they take the Apple approach.
True, and i’m not saying that Vista as a program is bad. But I’m saying it’s a little ahead of standard stuff right now, and it still needs its patches and fixes like XP did. For now, I’m sticking with XP until Vista’s a little more comfortable. THat day is rapidly approaching, but as far as I can tell within the poor college community, it’s not here yet.
I think that your most recent configuration is pretty good. It’s good to choose a processor with a bigger L2 cache, as well as a faster RAM and hard drive, but it looks like you already covered that with your choices.
Its not ahead of its time. Its a piece of crap. It is what Windows ME was to Windows 98 before XP came out. I have friends that work in the computer industry and the concensus IS that Vista is crap and this is reinforced by the fact that few companies are honestly developing support and drivers for it. Apparently the real successor to XP is coming and that will make a difference, which again is reminescent of XP vs ME.
Unfortunately I had to scrap the Dell idea when it turned out the XPS didn’t have the right-sized expansion slots for a good video card in the future.