DELL Help please

[BottlesOf]

I plan on posting a more extensive buying question later on, but for now I am trying to decide which Desktop I'm gonna buy.

I think I'm deciding between the 4700C (price seems right and I like the slim look) and the 8400. I don't think I need the power of the 8400, but it seems that there are more graphics card options with the 8400. For like $150 you can upgrade to a graphics card with dual dvi output. I plan on having 2 monitors sometime in 2005, and want this capability in my new computer. Since the 4700c doesn't offer this card, I'm thinking it may not be able to support such a card?

Does anyone know if this is the case? Can i get a 4700C and somehow add the card myself without voiding a warranty or overloading the computer?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

JBB

[PokerMaster]

try alienware, its great! i work for them, its absolutely great, expensive though

[BusterStacks]

Holy crap, if anyone ever buys that overpriced crap they deserve to be shot. [censored] Alienware, I could build the same computer for half the price. Service sucks, and I don't even think they look cool.

[edtost]

adding a dual dvi video card wouldn't even come close to breaking the limits of any decent comp. also, unless dell's warranty is rediculously draconian, adding a card is really easy to do, and shouldn't void anything. if there's a spare slot, you could even just add a second single dvi out card and run both cards at once.

[mikeyvegas]

[ QUOTE ]
Holy crap, if anyone ever buys that overpriced crap they deserve to be shot. [censored] Alienware, I could build the same computer for half the price. Service sucks, and I don't even think they look cool.

[/ QUOTE ]

I completely agree with this. You're paying such a high price to have a cool looking case. That's it.

[EliteNinja]

Take a little bit of time and do some research and build your own computer. It's much cheaper than buying a pre-made system and on top of that you will be getting the perfect machine for your OWN personal needs.

[mikeyvegas]

[ QUOTE ]
Does anyone know if this is the case? Can i get a 4700C and somehow add the card myself without voiding a warranty or overloading the computer?

Any other suggestions?

Thanks,

JBB

[/ QUOTE ]

So I got bored and decided to check out the differences between the 2 sytems. Looks like the 4700 supportts up to a 3.4 p4 and the 8400 handles and 3.6. The memory on the 4700 can handle upto 4 gig of ddr 2 400mhz while the 8400 can hanlde 4 gig of 400 and 533mhz. They both use PCIe video slots and both have 2 Sata ports. The 4700 has 2 free PCI slots and the 8400 has 3. The 4700 has an intregrated 10/100 card and the 8400 has a 1000 card.

I'm glad i checked this out cause I was just going to go with an 8400 but now I think I'm going with the 4700 cause I see no advantage. The only thing that troubles me with the 4700 is the one less pci slot.

With all that said, to go in and upgrade the Video card will not void any warrenty. Any reason for the getting the 4700c over the 4700? You will have one less 5.25 bay, 2 less memory slots, 0 pci slots, 1 less usb port and 1 half-height PCIe(which I'm not sure what that means). It is kind of cool looking though. Hope that helps

[Blarg]

The 4700 and 4600 are machines with PCI slots and an AGP slot for the video card.

The market in both motherboards and video cards is changing to PCI Express(like in the 8400) and dropping the AGP slot. If you want to upgrade down the line, particularly video cards, it will be much easier in a machine like the 8400 that has PCI Express slots.

You may still be able to get AGP cards for quite a while, but you won't need to upgrade for quite a while, either. And you can get a perfectly good AGP-based video card now that will last you for years unless you really intend to stress your system with the latest and greatest games -- and even those play pretty well on the better AGP cards out today, like the ATI 9800's. At any rate, by the time you decide to upgrade your video card(usually the most necessary reason to upgrade a home system), AGP cards may not be around as widely, and it may be harder to do. Furthermore, they probably will not be much better than the cards you are going to buy today.

Worse, though, is the matter of drivers. It's very common for manufacturers to do a pretty miserable job on upgrading their drivers, whether it's for new operating systems, new versions of DirectX, whatever. Even stuff that's brand new on the shelves can have drivers that are many months old. This is reciprocated by Microsoft's often not recognizing and working properly with old drivers and hardware when they do upgrades of DirectX or various aspects of their operating systems. New operating systems are expected out from Microsoft in the next year or two, also. On both sides of the "Who is going to support my hardware?" question, it adds up to trouble and shifting the blame, or just painfully slow updates that make your equipment work properly. I doubt manufacturers will put much effort into working on adapting their drivers to models of video cards they no longer make or make in quantity.

So on the software and hardware side, there are strong reasons to stay away from AGP systems and get into PCI Express systems instead. The latter systems as a whole are not really notably faster yet, unfortunately, so what you're buying is mostly future proofing.

The argument for staying with AGP is that those systems are often cheaper, occasionally much cheaper. Another argument is that by the time you outgrow what you've got, you'll just buy new again instead of upgrading, and the couple or few hundred dollars you save now are not illusory savings at all when you have no intention of ever upgrading anyway.

That's probably not the most cost-efficient way to go about things, but to each their own; there's plenty of merit to that argument if upgrading components one by one is not your thing or if you have money to burn and just buy new systems instead.

[mikeyvegas]

[ QUOTE ]
The 4700 and 4600 are machines with PCI slots and an AGP slot for the video card.

[/ QUOTE ]

That's funny, cause i thought the same thing untill i checked the specs on the 4700. With the new model they moved to a PCIe slot for video cards, which makes getting the 8400 kind of silly.

Dell 4700 (http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/features.aspx/featured_dp_desktop2_1?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs)

[astroglide]

nvidia and ati support years worth of cards with their unified drivers. nvidia does all of the geforce series, agp and pci-e. ati does all of the radeon series, agp and pci-e. unified graphics drivers are seen as a huge, now standard feature and i don't think that is at all likely to change. and longhorn is at microsoft's most optimistic due out in the third quarter of 2006. if somebody wants to save a few bucks i don't think they're giving up a whole lot by skipping pci-e.

[Blarg]

[ QUOTE ]
That's funny, cause i thought the same thing untill i checked the specs on the 4700. With the new model they moved to a PCIe slot for video cards, which makes getting the 8400 kind of silly.

[/ QUOTE ]

You're right. I remember reading about that and checking up on it just a little while ago, then forgot all about it. A couple of months back, they changed to PCI-Express. My bad.

[Blarg]

Unified drivers definitely are a great thing now; I just remember ATI's terrible reputation from a while back for non-support. They were sort of legendary for it. It's probably less of an issue for the foreseeable future, but I retain my paranoia to a certain extent.

But there are still problems with some software supporting only a certain number of versions of DirectX, and requiring you to upgrade your video card if your video card does not support those features. I experienced that with Everquest; many people had to buy new video cards or whole new machines when the game engine was reworked to work only with DirectX 9 and up. Maybe those problems will never come up, but they're a real pisser when they do. Anytime you put yourself very far behind the curve, you risk having things not only not work well, but flat out not work anymore.

And I remember how bad Creative and Microsoft were on a very nice new DVD drive (with hardware support for showing the DVD picture(back when software DVD engines were not very good) I bought that had JUST come out that month. I installed it on my Windows ME machine and it worked fine, then bought an upgrade version of Windows XP. Windows XP refused to recognize the drivers on a number of pieces in my computer, all of which were new, and had sometimes either no substitutes or poor ones. Creative, for their part, did nothing on the driver front for months, leaving me with only minimal functionality on my DVD drive, and I finally gave up trying. Similar things have happened with other pieces of equipment I've had.

The end of 2006 is only a couple years away, well within the lifespan of a computer for the average user.

Sometimes these things become problems, sometimes they don't. I've seen problems a number of times, so I keep it in mind. It's not being alarmist.

I agree that you're probably not giving up much of anything in the present by getting or not getting PCI-E, and the future is just very speculative. It will come around one day, though, so it's just something to keep in mind. I tend to keep my computers for quite a while, so upgrading becomes an issue with me.

[astroglide]

directx(version) support is hardware dependent, so an upgrade issue with that isn't going to be exclusively related to software. creative has always been abysmal with driver support. when talking exclusively about video cards here, i think your position is alarmist. software shouldn't be a problem. other stuff can be a nightmare.