Alienware Systems

[DArque Bishop]

Argh.

WD are iffy. I've never had issues with them on my own machines, but I know people who have had nothing but problems with them. Your mileage may vary.

Maxtor, on the other hand... when I worked for a PC sales/repair store, they were the drive that had the second highest rate of failure. (The top failing drive was a no-name brband called JTS; 80% of those drives failed within a year.)

I'd recommend Seagate, personally. My own experience plus the testimony from my friends who use them tells me they're the most reliable of the three.

(I may be wrong; consult others before going with my opinion.)

Just my $.02...

[LOL]

Seagate or Western Digital. Maxtor will fail on you more than it won't.

For video editing, the Pentium is better. But at the high processor speeds you're looking at, it doesn't really matter either way. Save yourself some cash and go Athlon.

[Hero]

which provides the better balance between games and video editing: ATI Radeon 9700/9800 cards or NVIDIA GeForce4 FX series?

[GameCynic]

ATI cards have always been really good with multimedia tasks like video editing, thats what I would probably get. There is an All-In-Wonder 9700 that includes a capture card/tv tuner, although its about 100$ more than the normal 9700.

[Schlep]

If you're more concerned with video editing and photoshop, you may want to wait and see what happens Monday with Apple's new G5 systems since they seem to work closely with Adobe on Photoshop, and Final Cut Pro 4 just came out.

If the games are really important and you absolutely must have them, you may want to look into PowerSpec. I've used their systems for years and I've never had a problem with them. Plus a 3ghz P4 and 1gb of RAM for $1499 isn't too bad at all, imo. (you gain 512mb of ram and a dvd-r drive. you lose 267mhz on the bus and the better audio/video cards)

I guess if you're wanting that top of the line, it isn't as good of an option as I originally thought.

[piku]

Video editing really isn't all that dependant on the video card... all of the rendering and such is handled by the processor.

[Hero]

ATI and AMD it is, then

[Yoshi]

Originally posted by Hero
ATI and AMD it is, then

Welcome to the family.

[GohanX]

For the Hard Drives, I highly recommend Western Digital. It's pretty fast, pretty cheap, and their warranty rocks my face. A few months ago, 3 or 4 pieces in my computer mysteriously died, probably from an odd power surge, and I went to WD's website to look at warranty replacement. I bought this thing over a year ago, didn't have a reciept or anything, and three days later, I had a new BETTER hard drive in my hands. Whee!

[Rumpy]

I have an 80 gig Seagate. Running with out a studder since January.