[lorrieholdridge]

My mom does light/medium architectural 3d design with Autodesk VIZ 2008 and light Photoshop and Freehand work (expo stands and stuff like that) and currently her PC is crappy with an A64 3200+, integrated gfx and whopping 512 megs of ram i.e. insufficent for the work.

So her boss was looking to get the pc upgraded and we agreed that because of my knowledge in stuff like this, I'd pick out the components and build it. In return I'd get the old components to myself.

I made a shopping list from a particular shop's selection as the boss suggested he'd buy them from there. Very decent setup; quadcore S775 Xeon, 2 gigs low latency Corsair XMS mem (using the old WinXP), ATI FireGL gfx card, Seagate enterprise sata HDD, quiet Zalman PSU and a P35 chipset mobo. I made sure that all of the stuff were in stock.

I had a feeling the boss for some reason will **** things up and I was right. He went to a different shop with the list who didn't have the components I wanted in stock so they made a mess of it:

Instead of the quiet Zalman PSU, he bought some OCZ "gaming" PSU.
Instead of the P35 chipset mobo, he bought a P31 mobo.
Instead of the Corsair low latency mem (which was only 40 euros), he bought some Kingston value ram ****, which wasn't any cheaper.

Well, those three aren't too bad, at least they are (almost) equivalent to what I requested. Anyways, it gets worse, obviously.

Instead of the Seagate ES line HDD, he bought some Samsung consumer HDD.
Instead of the q-core Xeon, he bought a friggin' C2D E6750!
and finally
Instead of the FireGL, he bought a Radeon 3870 with included Neverwinter Nights 2!!![no]

Obviously I called him up and asked what was all this. He just came up with some lame stuff like "the shop was right down the street" and that some guy who sells/used to sell Autodesk products recommended the products he ultimately bought.

What a bunch of dimwits. Any respectable computer sales person who sees a list with FireGL, Xeon and ES hdds should figure out that no bundled games or other gamer's stuff is needed nor wanted. Heck they had equivalent Quadro cards in stock but didn't bother.

I'm so pissed right now and needed to vent. I was hoping that my mom would get a proper work pc but now she has to settle for a half-witted effort.[thumbdown]

[Aqgkvwzm]

Well, if it makes any difference I don't think his choices where any worse than yours...

[Obebtetibre]

I can understand why you're pissed, but did you check the graphics applications actually support quad core and, if so, use them effectively?
IMO, you may both have been aming a little high in some ways.
PSU just needs to be reliable, motherboard/RAM combo should be ECC if possible and there MUST be mirrored drives and some form of backup (server?) - lost DATA can cost thousands and has forced many companies out of business.
As you've pointed out, a specialist graphics card can make a huge difference with some applications where drivers are available.
I'd also like to see a UPS to go with the setup as reliability is most important.

Regardless, the boss is paying for it and your mother should see a nice performance improvment.

[lorrieholdridge]

The company isn't exactly financially sound so they wanted to upgrade on a tight budget. That's why no ECC or RAID. Everything important is stored on a server though. VIZ does recommend at least dual-core and as there's pretty much always Freehand and Photoshop running at the same time I figured quad-core should be essential.