Recommend new PC?

[Morty]

OK PC experts, what should I buy??

Its about time i went virtual as I use lots of different software (for example .NET for development work).

I'm thinking of getting a 2nd hand HP Z800, it looks like the cheaper ones can only handle the older 5500 zeon processors rather than the newer 6 core ones

I also want to do some design work so want to some nice graphics cards in but again older ones (FX1800 x 2 for example) to keep the price down. So really a "dream" setup if it was 5 years ago

Anyone have any knowledge of this model?

Does this sound like a good choice or should I be looking at a newer machine? Just aware that sometimes a newer model although cheaper actually beats a top spec machine from a few years earlier.. then again this looks a very good quality machine

Anyone got something like this for sale/trade?

 

[guddler]

I don't know anything about those HP-Z800's but given the prime life expectancy of a PC is generally considered to be on a 3 year refresh cycle in most places, I'd certainly not be looking at something that was kick-ass 5 years ago!

What makes you think you want to go Virtual? I've got what was a mid to high end PC and just have a number of disks in the system. One for OS X, one Windows 8 for gaming rig and (did have before it died), one Windows 8 for development so I could keep the gaming disk relatively clean. Switch between them using Chameleon boot loader.

That doesn't mean you can't use VMs as well if you wish, when my development disk died I took the image of what was left of it and now run that from parallels within OS X.

And on that note, if you're going Intel Core iX, then you want core i7, not core i5 in case you do decide to go virtual at any point.

Total cost of my setup when it was new was around £600 but I have added to it over the years with SSDs and a newer GPU (GTX670). It's now a little over 4 years old and will likely be replaced by a £2k iMac later in the year.

 

[Morty]

I think the thing that attracted me to that model was the quality of it, lets face it businesses swap out plenty of kit that is still very high spec

As far as virtual is concerned its just an option, sometimes a machine just has "too much" software etc installed, especially a development machine and you just want a separate instance that you can call up, been using a lot of virtual machines at work so got used to it

Trouble is today there is just too much choice!

 

[guddler]

Unfortunately like I say, I can't comment on that particular model as I'd never heard of it before now - though I'll admit it looks very nice. Trouble with HP is, they're very much a mixed bag. I own two HP Microservers and for what they are I think they're superb. And yet my company supplied laptop, which is actually a mobile workstation, they don't even call it a laptop looks very well built but at just over £2k (£2,200 i think) has to be the most expensive bag 'o sh*te I've ever had the misfortune to use and the end of the three years won't come soon enough!!

I probably best end there since this is a public, google searchable part of the forum

 

[Morty]

Funny you should mention HP laptops, I have an elitebook 8570W from work and a love it, 1920 LED screen, I7, SSD etc, super quiet compared to my I7 vaio, last sony i will ever buy for sure

 

[ZedEx48K]

Funny you should mention HP laptops, I have an elitebook 8570W from work and a love it, 1920 LED screen, I7, SSD etc, super quiet compared to my I7 vaio, last sony i will ever buy for sure

Yup since they sold off the PC/Vaio division anyway