Will this Compaq office-style PC be ok ?

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Fri Mar 08, 2002 7:30 am

I can get an extremely good deal on a corporate-style PC: a Compaq EVO P4 1.7GHz i845. What do you think ? It seems pretty good but I'm a bit concerned about a few things on its "feature" list:

_ Integrated AC97 Audio with Internal Speaker
_ NVIDIA Vanta 16-MB 4X AGP
_ Integrated Intel PRO/100 VM Network Connection

Do you think this will be suitable for a DAW ?

thanks for any thoughts...

subhuman · Post by **subhuman** » Fri Mar 08, 2002 10:35 am

The first thing you will probably have to do is wipe the drive, most new 'corporate' machines come loaded with a bunch of 'extra software' that will only hinder DAW performance.

The i845 chipset is probably combined with SDRAM. This is going to strangle any future upgrade path as higher clocked P4 processors really eat memory bandwidth up.

I would suggest you stick with i845-DDR chipset, or i850 if going P4, Intel chipsets with higher memory bandwidth...

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Sat Mar 09, 2002 2:29 am

Yes, it does take SDRAM, but they advertise that it'll accept up to 3 x 1Gb SDRAM (when released). I also have many stick of SDRAM already....

So is that a tentaive "yes" or a "probably best not to" ?

thanks

w_ellis · Post by **w_ellis** » Sun Mar 10, 2002 8:03 am

I've noticed you've gone off this idea anyway, but I thought I'd mention that Compaq gear tends to need proprietary memory, which can be a bit more difficult to get (and expensive).

On the other hand, we use Compaq at work and it seems to be pretty stable, but not sure about using it for music.

Spirit · Post by **Spirit** » Sun Mar 10, 2002 8:09 am

Yeah, I can get the deal through a company which is buying several hundred, but it seems that for about the same price I can get something that fits Pulsar a bit better.

I also just like "name" brands in electronics I suppose...