Another PC Spec Check

[ddvmor]

I'm about to fork out for a spanky new PC and before I part with my hard earned cash, I'd be grateful if you guys could take a quick look at the proposed specifications and just make sure I'm not missing anything obvious (I've left out the less relevant stuff from the list):

Specification for this HP M8180

Processor Type Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Clock-Speed 2.4GHz
Front Side BUS 1066MHz
Cache 8 MB
Operating-System Windows Vista Home Premium
RAM Memory 3072 MB
Hard Disk Capacity 500 Gb
Optical Drive 1 DL DVD-RW with Lightscribe
[...]
Graphics Memory 512 dedicated up to 1280 MB
Graphics Description nVidia GeForce 8600 GT
Sound Card Intel High Definition Audio 7.1
Media Card Reader 15-in-1
No of USB connections 6
No of PCI Slots 1
No. of Firewire Connections 2
[...]

I'm initially going to be editing standard definition video on it, but may upgrade to HD in the next year or so. I'm hoping that my second hand copy of Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 will run ok on it - I've seen it on a few lists of Vista compatible applications so I'm optimistic on that score.

Thanks for your help,

Regards,

Darren.

[rhubarbe]

Well, aside from the obvious comments that involve Vista and bargepoles, that's pretty much what I am using to edit HDV. If you are intending to edit AVCHD I can't comment except to say you'll probably be OK.

I may be an old stick-in-the-mud, but XP does me.

[mmace]

not sure about PPro 1.5 on Vista but 2.0 worked fine for me (now on PPro CS3)

as for everyone slagging off Vista, I use it all the time with some pretty intensive apps and have never had a single problem with it, it runs faster than XP did on my machine

[rhubarbe]

It was only me slagging off Vista, not everybody. My experience of it on my HTPC was a disaster, but if it works for you then great. I wish it worked for me. I still have my discs and as soon as the drivers I need are written for Vista, I'll give it another go.

[ddvmor]

Heh. I remember all the slagging that XP took when it first appeared. A million patches and a service pack later and we're all happy with it!

Thanks for the comments guys, I'm reasonably happy that this is what I need. I do have one question though, raised by one of my mates who admits that he's a bit out of touch with this stuff:

Originally Posted by ddvmor's mate

Quad doesn’t times it by 4 though – you are getting 4 chips all running at the same speed but the machine is capable of multitasking with them. So if you have Quad 2.4 then you can run 4 applications at 2.4 at once – you cant though run 1 at 9.6 – the fsb (front side bus) controls swapping speed between the chip and the motherboard and each other so that slows it all down – you want as fast a fsb as possible –

So the Front Side BUS is 1066MHz on this bit of kit. What we don't know is whether that's any good by today's standards!

[ddvmor]

In retrospect, my last post is probably more technical than is appropriate for this forum. Is there any chance of a Mod moving this to one of the PC forums?

[mmace]

Originally Posted by rhubarbe

It was only me slagging off Vista, not everybody. My experience of it on my HTPC was a disaster, but if it works for you then great. I wish it worked for me. I still have my discs and as soon as the drivers I need are written for Vista, I'll give it another go.

it's not just you m8, there's loads of people complaining in different forums on the net, and a LOT of them have never even used it or bothered finding out how to do something simple like turn off UAC

sorry for the way I posted, it wan't meant to be an attack on you, just had a few run-ins on forums today with people

[rhubarbe]

If you use a hyperthreading application, like Adobe Premiere Elements then Quad does indeed mean 9.6, or so i was informed by somebody far more geeky than I.

I was thinking of going Quad myself from E6600 for just that very reason.

- no prob, Maff

[ddvmor]

Hyperthreading? I have no idea what that means, but it sounds really, really cool!

[rhubarbe]

It's Intel marketing speak, no doubt the agency whose focus group came up with it were paid many many hundreds of thousands of $.

What does it mean? No idea.

[SGH42]

Originally Posted by ddvmor

I'm about to fork out for a spanky new PC and before I part with my hard earned cash, I'd be grateful if you guys could take a quick look at the proposed specifications and just make sure I'm not missing anything obvious (I've left out the less relevant stuff from the list):

Specification for this HP M8180

Processor Type Intel Core 2 Quad Q6600
Clock-Speed 2.4GHz
Front Side BUS 1066MHz
Cache 8 MB
Operating-System Windows Vista Home Premium
RAM Memory 3072 MB
Hard Disk Capacity 500 Gb
Optical Drive 1 DL DVD-RW with Lightscribe
[...]
Graphics Memory 512 dedicated up to 1280 MB
Graphics Description nVidia GeForce 8600 GT
Sound Card Intel High Definition Audio 7.1
Media Card Reader 15-in-1
No of USB connections 6
No of PCI Slots 1
No. of Firewire Connections 2
[...]

I'm initially going to be editing standard definition video on it, but may upgrade to HD in the next year or so. I'm hoping that my second hand copy of Adobe Premiere Pro 1.5 will run ok on it - I've seen it on a few lists of Vista compatible applications so I'm optimistic on that score.

Thanks for your help,

Regards,

Darren.

Did you end up buying this system ? If so, how do you find it performs. I'm looking at one of these & was also looking at a dell 9200 until it disappeared from there website !

Cheers
Steve