Should I buy this system?

[Darkroomdanny]

I received a fantastic response to a previous enquiry in the upgrade forum but feel this is the right place to ask about an opportunity to buy a second hand pc.

I wondered if the more educated among you could cast your eye over the following stats for the pc my friend is selling off. I am considering a small loan to buy it but am technically challenged. These are the details he has emailed me. Any good?



Alienware Acoustic Dampening with AlienIce 2.0 Video Cooling

Windows XP Pro SP/2 with Restore Disk

ASUS P5ND2-SLI Deluxe motherboard 1066MHz FSB!

Intel Pentium 4 HT 660 3.6 ghz

*Speed Step/EM64T

148GB WESTERN DIGITAL HD (2 74GB Raptors Raid 0)

(10,000 rpms each!)

2GB DDR2 Crucial PC5300 667mhz

PC Power and Cooling 510 watt (max 650 watts)

Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS

Zalman CNPS 9500 CPU Cooler

34 C idle/46 C Heavy Load

NEC Dual-Layer DVD/RW 16X

Lite-On CD/RW 52X

Alienware/Microsoft Keyboard & Mouse

Instructions, XP & Mobo CDs

Nero OEM

FARCRY

System Power Cord

Keys to the System

Alienware Respawn DVD

ATI Radeon X800 XL 256MB DDR Video Card

Thanks.

Dan



Thread is old and locked - MidiMoto

[Loz]

Hi there in my book that is a very nice pc with some good specs. The major questions here are what do you want it for? What is you main aim do you want it to be future proof for a few years? And the most important how much does he want you to pay for it? Now we will see if he's a friend or not with the price. Alienware make reasonable pc's but they are inherently expensive but usually quite fast and powerful.

[syphus]

I've had the pleasure of reviewing several Alienware PCs. They’re quite well built, but can be unintelligently assembled. Once system I looked at had the hard drives connected to an off-chip controller, which is a really basic mistake.

The ASUS P5ND2-SLI had a shakey launch, with problems that included S/PDIF hardware pass-through issues, instability with SLI, very slow POST etc. I’m not sure if all of these issues were corrected with BIOS updates or a new revision of the board was produced. The last I heard, these issues were described as “known problems�, I’ve ever since recommended people avoid the board on the dual principal that a) it was a rushed product. B) SLI for Intel is a market expansion part, not a technically advisable part; SLI is for gaming and Pentium 4 isn’t. Note that the "1066 MHz FSB!" is only available in conjunction with a Pentium 4 Extreme Edition 3.46 Ghz or 3.73 Ghz. You’d be using plain old 800 Mhz. Equally, using DDRII 667 is questionable, unless you plan to do some serious overclocking.

As I mentioned before, the only reason one would want to use the P5ND2-SLI is for SLI [with Intel]; ie, two NVIDIA graphics cards. Being equipped with a medium-high end ATI graphics card already, this option financially unviable. Alternative Intel chipsets would be better over all. If the system instead had ASUS P5AD2 or ASUS P5WD2, I would highly recommend it.

I cannot recommend anyone using Pentium 4 3.6 GHz and above. The heat output of these things is astronomic. You cannot be sure that the 46 degree high load temperature is not due to thermal throttling – running at 2.8 GHz.

But having said all that, if the price is very attractive, it’s a fairly powerful system, even if it's technically unimpressive.