Help me shop -- Take a look at these for me

[Mousey]

I'm hoping this link will work for the comparison chart... (Note! - I am not a shill for Newegg, they just happened to have all 3 of these so I could do the comparison chart LOL)

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Pick them apart for me please... good, bad, ugly.... and bear the following in mind.

I always keep my computers for years (usually around 5 years) before buying new.
I always buy 'up'... the most bang for my buck... as much power as I can afford.
I do NOT game online... but might sign up at steam with some games I bought at Amazon. No World of Warcraft or similar... I like the Tombraider type stuff.
I do use Paint Shop Pro... a LOT. NO, I don't want to 'upgrade to PhotoShop (to skew Saliere ... too many buttons).

If I upgrade either of those machines to Win7 pro or Ultimate, will I be able to sock in 32g of RAM (or more?) later on?
I'm really yearning for the Gateway UR10P as it has the 750w power supply.
I do not have the time or patience or knowledge of motherboards and chips to build my own.
I can (and have in past) added RAM, hard drives, media devices, cards, power supply, etc. myself.

Do these have one or two hot swap bays on front? I can't tell LOL Hot swap bay(s) for a hard drive is a requirement.

Thanks for any and all opinions.

 

[chayton]

I'm sure one of the techie folks will have some info for you, but I just wanted to comment - some friends of mine bought a Gateway computer and had constant problems with it. But that was a few years ago and maybe they've improved since then.

Oh and I found

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on the UR10P, it sounds like it's decent enough.

 

[LaHutti]

I would go for the UR10P, if you have the 150 bucks extra laying around.
The differences are not that huge, but better graphics and sound is always good, whether you game a lot, or not. Movies etc, = if you do a bit of graphics work...you know what I mean, and as you mentioned yourself...more power on the supply.

They all take a max of 16 GB, and UR10P is sold with 12GB, so ask them to throw in another 4 gigs at a good price ... I doubt they have any hotswap built in already...I think they would've mentioned it. It's easy to put one in yourself tho...if you can put a hd in, you can put a hotswap thingy in, and you should talk them into a good price on that as well
They're usually easier to make a deal with, if they think you might buy their stuff, if they grease you up a bit, so you might as well save a bit of money on the stuff you're gonna get later, anyways...I have no experience with the store you link to, so I don't know if it's possible to make a deal with this specific place...it's free to try tho

16 gigs of ram will take you a long way, unless you're doing heavy graphics work, and if that's the case, I would put my eyes on some Mac instead. If you feel you need more ram than the 16 gigs, you'll have to get a different motherboard, and that changes the price as well. It's always a matter of weighing and chosing for your specific needs.


my 2 cents

 

[universal4]

I too recommend a No to Gateway....

Dell (much better) or even (cough cough) HP are better choices.

All 3 of those machines do NOT support your maximum memory requirement and in fact none of them even support 16, one has a max capacity of 8 and the other two max out at 12.

I agree that you will likely never need that much ram, but if you want it, you will need to choose a different build than any of those.

The easy swap drive bays can be added later, and despite what MANY will say, hot swap in desktops does NOT work like it does in servers and I recommend strongly against even trying it unless your data is not that important to you. (Even though the servers I build and use support TRUE hot swap, it is recommended only to do so when a drive fails etc and you are replacing part of a raid stripe)

Rick

 

[Mousey]

LOL ... I forgot to mention... I'm a Gateway fan. They're not what they were before Acer bought them out, but the three we've got now are all great work horses - hubby's is 7 years old, mine here at home is 5 years old and so is the one I use at work. I've upgraded them all as far as I can go. Believe me, when I bought this dual core tower 5 years ago, I never thought I'd need to max out the RAM. Who would ever need more than 1g of RAM or more than a 250g hard drive? LOL

I've owned Gateways for 20 or more years and have never had one to crap out on me. That may not reflect the current quality of the systems now, though. My boss has our ancient Win95 Gateway at his house for his grandkids to play old games on.

I will not buy a Dell or an HP. Just about any other brand I'll consider.

And, I would be quite happy with a quad or 6 core AMD processor rather than the Intel i7. I can always pop in additional RAM if there's a slot, or replace all sticks to max out as needed.

The max RAM is what worries me about the motherboard on the systems I'm looking at... I know nothing about motherboards and I'd like something that can take more than 16 gig (after upgrading win7 to pro or ultimate).

Thank you all for having a look. I have looked at computers and specs 'till my eyes are glazed over and my brain is mush.

Oh! And P.S. (told you my brain is mush) ... I know the specs on these machines say max 16 gig RAM. So what is limiting the RAM? The Win7 or the motherboard? or both?

 

[LaHutti]

The motherboard limit them to 16 Gigs.
The 12 and 8 gigs the previous poster is referring to is not max limit, but what they're sold with.
There are 4 slots and each will take a 4 gig stick.
Thse machines where built for win7, hence the limit of ram. After all, what's the point in being able to stuff 192 GB ram in a motherboard, if the OS supports 16 GB ?

LOL ... I forgot to mention... I'm a Gateway fan. They're not what they were before Acer bought them out, but the three we've got now are all great work horses - hubby's is 7 years old, mine here at home is 5 years old and so is the one I use at work. I've upgraded them all as far as I can go. Believe me, when I bought this dual core tower 5 years ago, I never thought I'd need to max out the RAM. Who would ever need more than 1g of RAM or more than a 250g hard drive? LOL

I've owned Gateways for 20 or more years and have never had one to crap out on me. That may not reflect the current quality of the systems now, though. My boss has our ancient Win95 Gateway at his house for his grandkids to play old games on.

I will not buy a Dell or an HP. Just about any other brand I'll consider.

And, I would be quite happy with a quad or 6 core AMD processor rather than the Intel i7. I can always pop in additional RAM if there's a slot, or replace all sticks to max out as needed.

The max RAM is what worries me about the motherboard on the systems I'm looking at... I know nothing about motherboards and I'd like something that can take more than 16 gig (after upgrading win7 to pro or ultimate).

Thank you all for having a look. I have looked at computers and specs 'till my eyes are glazed over and my brain is mush.

Oh! And P.S. (told you my brain is mush) ... I know the specs on these machines say max 16 gig RAM. So what is limiting the RAM? The Win7 or the motherboard? or both?

 

[Mousey]

The motherboard limit them to 16 Gigs.
The 12 and 8 gigs the previous poster is referring to is not max limit, but what they're sold with.
There are 4 slots and each will take a 4 gig stick.
Thse machines where built for win7, hence the limit of ram. After all, what's the point in being able to stuff 192 GB ram in a motherboard, if the OS supports 16 GB ?

Yes, but a simple upgrade to win7 ultimate or pro would change that 16g OS limitation... *sigh* Anyway... I never find exactly what I want off the shelf, so I'll have to make compromises between my wants, my gotta haves and my wallet. LOL

And what about liquid cooled systems? Anything weird with them? Just saw an IBuyPower liquid cooled in the same price range...

 

[universal4]

Well I am an AMD fan since the early days so that I agree with you....(I remember joining their Premeir Partner's program back in the 90's)

I usually use Intel in the servers though, but for my home desktops I always build myself AMD's.

Water cooled are ok, but not usually necessary especially if you are buying a bix box brand, unless they build a model that way...and if so they are usually appealing to the gaming market when they do....

The nex rig I build for my desktop will likely have 16 if not 32 gigs of memory since I like to play with virtual installs of other os's...so I may go with the 64 bit for the main host os.

Rick

 

[skiny]

My last Intel CPU was a Pentium Pro back in the 90s. If I saw a list of AMD computers I'd have an opinion.

 

[Jinn]

The differences between those 3 computers is minimal, I think whichever one you buy will be equally satisfying - it's not like you'll get to a point in the future where you'd say "Oh I wish I'd bought option 2, that would have improved my computer experience".

I do use Paint Shop Pro... a LOT. NO, I don't want to 'upgrade to PhotoShop

I always used Paint Shop Pro but when I was looking to purchase the latest version to go with my new computer, I found a lot of dissatifaction on the PSP forums.

It really seems to have gone downhill over the last few versions, and at least last time I checked the forums there were still major reasons to not use PSP any more.

Also I believe you can't use older versions of PSP with Windows 7, there may be workarounds but lacking stability.

So I went looking for an alternative, I also don't like PhotoShop and I eventually chose PhotoPlus from Serif.

PhotoPlus is almost a clone of Paint Shop Pro, most of the buttons are in the same places, it mostly works the same way, but also there are many improvements. But it's not exactly the same, some things do work differently and it CAN take a little getting used to... but definitely worth the effort, I like it now a lot more than using PSP in the past.

The current version of PhotoPlus is X5 and costs around £70, but you can still buy the older X4 version from the official site and they've reduced the price to just £10, so it's worth getting it even just for testing it out. X5 does have a few nice new features but I'm still using X4 and it's great. Here's the 'secret' link for purchasing the older version - you can't find this link on the site, it's only for 'insiders'

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[skiny]

I'm running PSP 7 and Windows 7.

I upgraded to PSP 8 many years ago and didn't like how they tried to Photoshop it up so I just downgraded and have been using the same version ever since.

 

[Jinn]

I'm running PSP 7 and Windows 7.

Oh yeah, maybe if you go THAT far back... that version was last updated in 2002!

Yeah I meant the newer versions don't work with Windows 7, I was using one of the older 'X' series and it definitely doesn't work with Windows 7, only the very latest versions work with Win7 and those versions are the worst ever (according to what I've read).

 

[Mousey]

I have both PSP 7.04 -best version of PSP ever (IMHO)- and PSP10 installed on this Vista desktop. I have PSP12 or x2 or whatever Corel wants to call it installed on my win7 64 bit laptop. Still have PSP5 or 6 (I forget) on hubby's winxp for simple resizing, etc. I have PSP13 new in unopened box on a shelf here somewhere.

I hate each new version a little bit more from version 11 on. PSP gradually began turning to crap when Corel bought it from JASC and commenced to 'improve' it into a bloated, buggy, garish photo editor vs. the user friendly, un-fancy, graphics editor it once was. I told my hubby when they bought out JASC they were going to make it into a clone of Corel Photo Paint, which I had tried years before and positively hated. I still have Photo-Paint 8 on the shelf, along with its humongous manual.

Oh... and who said something about AMD? I have no clue what processor to look for as their numbers mean nothing to me. I'd like quad or even 6 core... i7 equivalent. I need to do more research (again) on AMD. I have an AMD in my laptop and in a computer at work, and have been quite happy with them.

I'm thinking pricing on computers will be better (I hope) as Xmas nears, but I want to be ready to jump on a deal if I find one by doing my research first. It takes me months to turn loose of $1k LOL. This computer is working fine (knock on wood) so I have time to make my mind up.

 

[skiny]

AMD has a pretty good history of being cheaper and just as fast and reliable. I have a 6 core AMD Zambezi but I assembled my system myself.

 

[universal4]

Psp8 runs fine on windows 7 as I keep it around to do buttons on a few sites I created years ago and it's easier then re-doiong all of them...

Rick