At 10:18 AM 8/28/99 , Chan Fan Chong wrote:
>hell lists,
>
>I have a client running a architect and interior design firm, require a
>new pc with 'autocad 2000', 'photoshop' , ms office and win 98. I
>propose the list shown below :
>
>cpu - intel P III 450
>mobo - asus p3b-f
>ram - 128 MB
>HDD - 8.4 GB
>Vga - any type with 32MB ram
>CD-RW drive for backup purpose
>Monitor - 19 inch
>
>I hope everyone out there kindly give me some tips/suggestion regarding
>the specification shown above.


Understanding the the price range you intend for this system, this should
be an excellent system, you can save you customer a few dollars by going
with a regular CD writer drive instead of a re-writable drive.  The media
for a standard CD writer is only 10% of the cost of re-writable disks.

Considering your client intends to run AutoCad, this system could use
some thought to the data transfer on the hard drives.  This system will
have the standard UDMA 33mhz ATA interface with the ASUS board.  You
might want to consider offering some alternatives to increase data transfer,
which will in turn speed up Autocad.

I would offer the ABIT BE6 motherboard with UDMA66 ATA interface and
UDMA66 EIDE hard drive.  The speed increase will be at least 25% or
more.

Another alternative, though it will cost probably at least $500 US more,
would be to go with SCSI2.  You can either use a SCSI2 motherboard or
the Adaptec 2940UW card.  Then I highly recommend the Seagate
Cheetah 9.1gig SCSI2 drive.  These drives are the fastest on the market
and the speed increase when using some applications maybe as much
as 35% or more over a standard UDMA33 EIDE drive and interface.

It is great to have processor speed and lots of ram, but if you cannot
move the data across the bus to the hard drive for swapping and such,
the computer will bottleneck and be slower than you expect.

In the case of your video card, I would go with a brand name high end
32mg card, instead of a generic.  Matrox makes good cards, though they
tend to be slower, STB makes very fast cards and ATI has the RAGE 128
card, (the one I use), that is also very fast.

Finally, in working with AutoCad, your client will probably be far more
pleased with more ram than just 128mgs.  If it were me, I would be talking
to them about 192mgs or 256mgs.  Be sure to use Windows98SE on the
system instead of Windows98, as it seems to deal better with more than
128mgs of ram...  I cannot prove it, but I have run both and I "seem" to have
better use of my ram in Windows98SE.  At least Win98SE is less buggy...

One of these days I intend to load my Windows2000 RC1 or the Windows
Millenium beta...   but, then again I do not always have time for the fun
stuff, like lots of system crashes...  *grin*

I hope that helps...

                 Bob Wright
        The NOSPIN Group, Inc
http://nospin.com - http://nospin.org

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