Value PC?
 

My eyes saw this nice ad:

For 549 Euros excl (654 Euros incl):

AMD Athlon 64 3500+
1GB DDR RAM
200GB S-ATA HDD
DVD-rewriter (+/- RW) DL
ATI Radeon X550 PCI-e
Cardreader 11-in-1 (pretty much irrelevant to me, althought not quite)
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition (I'm using Home edition for a while, it's fine with me and as long as it doesn't go bother me about installing it when I boot it, it's fine - which it is)
1 Year of Warranty and pick-up service

It seems like a pretty great deal to me. I have my own 19" LCD, I have my own keyboard, I have my own mouse, I have my own speakers. I could possibly insert my old Soundblaster Live! 5.1 card if the sound sucks on-board.

The thing seems awefully nice. The brand is Fujitsu-Siemens Scaleo P.

My current (notebook) sytem is:

AMD Athlon 64 3000+
512MB RAM
40GB HD (+ 250GB USB 2.0 External, but I'll plug that straight into my new PC if it gets here)
DVD-rewriter (+/-) SL
ATI Mobility 9700 64MB Shared
Cardreader liek-8-in-1-or-so
Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition SP2

The problem is that it tends to hang for a few seconds on quite a few games. Too annoying for me to handle.

My broken PC is even worse (because the AGP slot and video-card and broken):

AMD Athlon Sempron 3200+
512MB RAM
200+ GB HDD IDE
DVD-rewriter (+/-) SL (DL?)
(broken) ATI 9600 PRO 256MB
Microsoft Windows XP Pr0 Edition

And for the American people - 654 Euros equals 839 hard-cash American Dollars. Yeeeeeehaaaah! I just want to make sure if the thing would be good enough to handle mediocore games. I don't mind playing Doom 3 without shadows or WoW without AA set to 16x. Just make sure it runs WoW better than my notebook and I'm a happy camper.

You would save a few hundred if you built the machine yourself. Honestly it's not difficult, I just taught my youngest sibling this past week and it was no trouble at all. :) You can build a well capable system for $500 or less.

I know how to make my own system, but I'll get this system from a company that's only for accessible for companies and is significant cheaper than normal stores.

Also, that's not an answer to my question.

I think it'll work fine, WoW ran almost perfectly on the laptop I have that has somewhat worse specs. I'd say your getting a good deal. The Scaleo systems are also good though, I've had a desktop Scaleo 600 and its been great.

The X550 is bad. And by bad, I mean bad. So potentially it would be a fairly good system, except for the whole horrible video card thing.

Going from American prices, this is not a great deal. This might not be the case where you are (france?). In the states you could get a deal with a Nvidia 7600 and a dual-core A64-X2 for about the same $839.

If you think that it is a good deal compared to other comparable systems in your area, then go for it. But if you plan on gaming start looking into a video card now, because that one won't suit for gaming enjoyment.

I doubt the X550 can be worse than my current 9700.

Believe it will be VERY comparable, in fact nearly identical... Check the links

Mobility 9700
* Offering up to a 30% MHz boost over its predecessor
* Supports Microsoft® DirectX® 9.0
* Pixel and Vertex Shaders
* Quad rendering & dual vertex engines
* Full precision floating point with full performance
* 0.13 micron GPU featuring Low-K process technology
* Fastest 3D engine speed
* Low power operation
* Support for AGP 8X


Radeon X550
* 64-bit and 128-bit memory interface supporting 64MB or 128MB DDR1 memory configurations
* Four extreme parallel 3D rendering pixel pipelines
* Two programmable vertex shader pipelines
* PCI Express® x16 lane native support
* Full Microsoft® DirectX® 9 support

Note that they have the same amount of pixel pipes and vertex pipes. The 550 might be a touch faster in terms of on-board memory throughput, but you aren't going to notice that. It does have more "video" type optimizations, but again, very little you could notice.

The X550, though it sounds like it'd be a good card, is VERY far from being a decent graphics card. I'd recommend strongly that if you buy that system you at least upgrade to a Nvidia 7600 if you want to have a good gaming experience with current release games.

I don't know much about the Scaleo systems, though the design and specifications do look nicer than most of the stuff that you can buy in America. Since you don't really want to build your own system (I can't say that I blame you...), it seems like a pretty decent system. The specifications are pretty decent, but the video card isn't very fast, so I'll second the recommendation that you buy a GeForce 7600 to upgrade it.

If you don't want to buy a better video card, then there doesn't seem to be much reason to buy the whole system. The performance boost over your laptop will be pretty limited, so you'd probably be better off upgrading your laptop to a gigabyte of RAM.

However, AGP is limited to 8x, right? So how much difference does the PCI-e aspect make?

Barely any. The PCI-Express and AGP slots are both VERY fast. PCI-Expressx1 on par with AGP 8x speeds, while PCI-Expressx16 is, well, about 16x faster than AGP.

Though they have yet to make a card fast enough to be limited by either of the slots speeds. In other words, a exact replica of a X1800XT on AGP would be for all intents and purposes, just as fast. The reason PCI-Expressx16 is the new standard is because it will be a looooooooong standing standard. Like as long as IDE slots and PCI slots have been. PCI-E is made to be such a wide and fast bus, that you can't really have a fast enough card to max it out. I would imagine still using the PCI-Ex16 slot about 8 years from now, if not longer.

not to mention, pci-e is the wave of the future. that is to say some manufacturers still make some AGP cards here and there, but pci-e will net you a lot more choices in the long run. if and when you decide to upgrade the video card.

dayvon is correct - the radeon x550 is very similar to your mobility 9700, since they are both based off of the radeon 9600 (4 pipelines).. however, i'd think the x550 would be slightly faster since it doesn't have to share its ram.

however, i'd recommend at least an x800gto - one can be had here in the states for 89 dollars, and it's a 12-pipe card that can smoke a radeon 9800 any day.

also, if you want to spend just a little more, the 16-pipeline x850XT is 119 dollars here (at newegg.com). i don't know about online stores in europe, but if you can find them at similar prices, jump on them!

if you can't, an x1600pro or XT will probably do, though the 7600gt is most likely a beter deal.

x1600PRO/XT is around 130 to 140 dollars over here (didn't convert it, just guessing). That'd be a nice deal?