E: WSL Targa PC at Lidl, £799. this is a MONSTER!!

Liquid_Stool

yes, good all round machine for the price

how much???? I'm sure the graphics are fantastic (they should be at that price!), but who the hell would want to spend £600+ on a graphics card? I know graphics are a main concern to some people but still....as long as i can see red, green & blue i'm happy - and that's an improvement over the old green and black!

512mb :eek: the cooling fan must be the size of helicopter rotors , still makes the £799 price tag of this machine seem even better value! :j

Cardinal-Red

I've checked the spec (and may be missing something!) but can anybody tell me what motherboard this comes with?

Good components can be let down with a poor motherboard... ask Time / Tiny customers!

But if it's one of the ASUS range for 64 Bit processors.... drool!

GDB2222

I'm more into office PCs than high end ones, but I am looking for a bit more now, both to play games and for dictating onto the PC. The dictation is the killer app for me, and I want it to run as well as it possibly can. Could someone answer two questions for me, please:-

a) Is this PC about as good as it gets for dictation?

b) I am quite happy to build my own. If I did would I be paying more or less for the components for the same spec machine?

Geoff

Liquid_Stool

yes, good all round machine for the price

Hi geoff

You will always be able to build a better machine more cheaply, but even that said, the consencus here is that for the money, this IS an excellent machine, and like was pointed out, when longhorn comes out, you'll be getting a true 64bit experience. No doubt this machine will have some redundant bits, you may not use DVB television, or Bluetooth, but just it's being there shows that the manufacturer has gone to the trouble to make this as futureproof as possible, and it still comes with that 3 year warranty!

As to your point about dictation, i take it you mean Via Voice or something similiar? This PC is so powerful, it wouldn't bat an eyelid - True multi-tasking at an excellent price.

one last point, it has been mentioned somewhere about the warranty being dubious. All i can tell you is that i've bought several 3 year warranty items from Lidl's and have always been extremely pleased with the service and terms of claiming. I recently took back a dvd player with 3 days left to run and was promptly given a full refund as there were none in store.

JPS

yes, good all round machine for the price

That looks like a quality computer!!! I wouldn't say no....

zabbyh

yes, good all round machine for the price

To be honest it is a good computer, but I'm just saying I've seen better specs.

To redeem myself...

Problem with having 2x 512mb is that if you want to upgrade you are going to have one less memory slot available, and I had to upgrade - I've got 1.5gb ram and it still seems like it needs more. the thing with the hard drive is that it is just one. It should have been 2x 200gb hard drives. This way you could use one as a backup for your documents, you could partition the 300gb one, but who can be bothered. And the graphics card thing, all games coming out are going to require high spec graphics cards to run so the 128mb will become useless.

BUT is you want a general good pc its ok. If you want a gaming machine, it isn't

amancalledchip

theres no doubt they will have to put cheap parts in somewhere, and the fact theres no mention of the make of motherboard leads you to believe that may be one area.

PCchips maybe or ECS ?

persoanally i use on gigabyte boards.
Not the best for overclocking if you into that ( im not)

But the are probably the only board maker with a Non 0871 number and its in the UK

I had a chipset fan go noisey once, rang them, they bunged 1 in the post.

I agree , 2 drives are better than 1.
A 128mb card is ok for games as long as its the right card.
a 128 ati 9800pro is a stonking card.Better than many of the same price with 265mb.Its been proved it tests , the memory makes little difference to the quality of the gaming.its the quality of the card thats important.Some 128mb cards dont do directx9, some do.

heres a good article to show you what cards are better
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20041004/vga_charts-06.html

from the list you will see, a radeon 9800pro does 42fps,whilst a radeon 9500 does just 18fps.Both are 128mb

davet_3

yes, good all round machine for the price

Wrong once again dude. This IS a gaming PC and will play pretty much everything you chuck at it..... at the moment. Sure in a years time there may be a couple of top-end games that this will struggle to play in full res but even then it will still play them well.
With regards to memory if you're going to upgrade you'd be best to install 2 more dimms running dual channel again so you're not going to be stuck as this mboard has 4 x dimm slots so effectively you could have 3gb of ram without touching the 2 x 512's installed and adding 2 more 1GB dimms.

Also what's the point apart from data loss of backing up your data to another drive inside the machine? You're much better off picking up an external USB2 SATA drive as are advertised on here quite often and backing up to that with something like Norton Ghost then keeping it round a mates/parents house in case of a disaster, that's what I do.

Here's the specs and a review of the motherboard anyway:

http://www.gamepc.com/labs/view_content.asp?id=gbnf44x&page=1&cookie%5Ftest=1

davet_3

yes, good all round machine for the price

Oh and it's this motherboard :

Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9-SI (Targa Edition)
nForce4 Chipset PCI Express

amancalledchip

if it is indeed that board then i can vouch
for it

I have a K8NXP-sli board and a 4000+

stonking pairing, although i use the Ati x850 xtpe for a video card, not utilising the sli, but im an Ati man.