Not going to argue anything but I am a computer builder, less now than before, but you will never use anywhere near 16 gigs of memory unless you were running terrabyte servers. There's at least 10 gigs of memory that you paid for that even 64 bit Windows can't utilise.
So it's false economy.

If you run 64 bit Office, Windows and database applications then it's worth going 64 bit, otherwise, 64 bit is pretty much a waste, as Windows will only allocate 64 bits to the programs that can use it.

16 gig is really for storage centres and high end servers that run high loads and operating systems like Server 2012 that can use this memory and are built to allocate it correctly.

Anyway, horses for courses and all that. The point is that a very fast and effective system upgrade is affordable providing you read up on the specifications of the hardware rather than the hyped up promotional material.

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 399,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/03/2024
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

My final point is be very careful with those SSD's and backups.
If your data is corrupted and backups are corrupted, you're toast.
Back up at least a week's worth, and rotate backup drives, because I was called in to fix a major problem and the backups were also corrupted going back a week - the client was in all sorts of trouble getting data back.
I implemented a plan whereby a backup was taken on a seperate drive for archiving which was verified by a second system and rotated backup drives for the remainder. However, this was a very large organistation. Just an example of the many pitfalls.

__________________
RaceCensus - powerful system testing software.
Now with over 399,000 Metropolitan, Provincial and Country races!
http://www.propun.com.au/horse_raci...ng_systems.html
*RaceCensus now updated to 31/03/2024
Video overview of RaceCensus here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W821YP_b0Pg

Thanks to all who have commented on my thread. All points taken into consideration and I will take it from there. I will certainly not be buying "Off the shelf".
Cheers.

Enjay

Hi

Sorry to reopen the discussion , but there is something vital that I forgot to mention in all of this. The future. For instance you cant run a 64 bit program in 32 bit windows (unless you use emulators or VM), but you can run a 32 bit on 64 bit (unless its a really old technology). Besides Win 32 or 64 are around the same price anyway. This morning my Ram usage spiked to 6.5 gig. If I had 32 bit windows or less ram, that data has to go to the paging file slowing things down. Every time I open a browser tab in FireFox my ram seams to spike 100 megs. The files I download are getting bigger and bigger, the graphics are more intensive. Programs are getting bigger. Things change!

My point is that when you design a machine, building in redundancies is not false economy, at worse you may have 'wasted' a few bucks. If you have to replace the whole thing because you can't run something or worse still you persist when its painful to run something; then you wasted a whole lot more, money being just a small part, mostly you are wasting your time Enjay. For instance running a Bet selector test taking hours to complete; that's your life slipping by, being wasted. THAT is false economy; when using an SSD would speed it up or using a different program would cut it down to a few minutes.

Building a machine to fit today's specifications is one way to look at things; if you wount use it today, that's fine but what will you be doing in a years time? My argument, perhaps poorly presented, is that a good quality 'SWEET SPOT' PC makes every sense especially when running data intensive tasks.

A sweet spot machine is a machine built using the upper end of the currently mass produced (read competitively priced) technology components. NOT the most expensive, top of the range components. Top of the range is a waste of money for not a whole lot of real processing difference.

Sweet spot PC provides the best mix of speed, quality and affordability.

Best of luck with what you decide.

__________________
Michal - Ratings2Win Pty Ltd
R2W Axis - Axis is Australia's leading horse racing software and database;
with sophisticated form analysis tools and accurate horse performance ratings for TAB meetings.
http://www.ratings2win.com.au/

if you're in Sydney google ccpu
have used them for 10 years and never had a prob
you'll get a state of the art computer with windows 7 or 8 for about 600 without a graphics card upgrade

I still run a couple of old 16 bit DOS proggies on Win7 64 - checkout DOSBox, it's free open source software. Takes a bit of fiddling to get the settings right but after that it works well.

http://sourceforge.net/projects/dosbox/

Thanks for that, have had a look and am interested.

enjay