There is one by my house that I used to frequent regularly its part comic/anime/card shop part ongoing halo c.e and call of duty lan party.
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There is one by my house that I used to frequent regularly its part comic/anime/card shop part ongoing halo c.e and call of duty lan party.
Get some used/refurbished off lease business machines. They'll most likely be Core 2 duo and have at least 2gb of RAM. They'll probably have Windows XP on them so that will have to be upgraded to a newer version of windows or something like Ubuntu. It will give your customers a much better experience.
Core Duo (or even Core 2 Duo) iMacs are going for only a smidgen more than the G5's nowadays - and although they still have their issues they'd be a far more reliable, quick & quieter choice to go with.
It's many many years late, but CS 1.6 is on the Mac. There is an official port from Valve on Steam. (They also have the original Half Life and all the spin offs.)
Still won't work on a PPC Mac though.
Not all white Intell iMacs have a bad GPU. The GMA 950 based ones are pretty stable.
What? The Intel iMacs with Mobility Radeons kicked the ass of any G5 iMac.
The GMA ones were crippled educational dump stuff
Apple used the GMA950s in the entry level 1.83GHz Core 2 Duo iMac in late 2006 (which were available to the public). Give me the option of an entry level 1.83 C2D iMac w/ the GMA950 or a 2.0 C2d w/ the X1600 & I'd go with the 1.83 all day long.
Of the four GPUs offered for white Intell iMacs, I'd rather use the GMA 950 over the ATI X1600 or the Nvidia GeForce 7300/7600 GT. While the slowest of the bunch, they don't have the GPU failure problems that the other cards have. The GMA 950 iMacs were not all crippled educational ones. Towards the end of that iMac's model run, they became available to the general public.
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Seriously? The GMA950 wasn't awful if you had no other options, but it was a dog. The X1600 at least had dedicated VRAM and actual shader units.
I guess if you're not playing games it's ok. But it's like comparing a bus to a sports car.
The NVidias of that era did have problems, but I don't recall the X1600 having wide spread failures.
I am not talking about speed. I am talking about iMacs which GPUs artifact and fry like an egg.
Can any and I mean any of the white imacs realisticly run bad company 2 on lowest settings? no
crysis 1 which came out in late 2006 when these imacs came out? no
all of them were dogs to begin with and the imac lineup always will be
now to the op lets talk about getting you some real power with some overclocked pentium d gamers with 4670s and 6 gigs of ram for your customers to enjoy their computing lives on
each computer can be built for around $150 and if you have 16 of them it should be quite the lan party on bad company 2
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Have you ever owned any of the white ones with x1600? I've had 3 of them. I sold the last one a couple of months ago. None of them ever had any problems with the gpu. I only opened them before selling them to clean the dust as a measure of precaution. They were all used in rooms where there was cigarette smoke. I must tell you that they were cleaner on the inside than any of the Alu Imacs they replaced. I bought the first one brand new when they came out, and the other two second hand. All 3 of them a still in pristine condition, both visually and from the functionality point of view.
Some of them had problems with faulty gpus, NOT ALL OF THEM!
Have you considered how high his electricity bill is going to be if he has an armada of Pentium D-powered machines? The older ones have a 130W TDP. That's ridiculous. If you're going to build, you can get much better C2Ds for less than £20.
Who even plays Crysis in an internet cafe? The defacto games (and the ones specified by OP) are CS 1.6, WC3 + DoTA, DoTA 2, Quake Live, Starcraft 1, Starcraft 2. All of those will run on just about anything, and even SC2 has quite low requirements if you adjust the settings.
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The GMA950 is a dog. But does do/has done everything I needed to on a computer (had a white MB w/ the 950 & an iMac w/ the X1600). If you're playing games at all you're not going to go with an '06 iMac full stop. Peace of mind is worth more than anything in my book. I'd rather drive around in the bus over the sports car if I knew the bus would run forever & the sports car would run for x amount of time before conking out (x being a couple of months or forever, it's all luck of the draw).
Maybe that will be his unique selling proposition
("the worlds only internet cafe that offers you Crisis to play... if you want to") If you are short on money at the start up it would be like gambling. a) shall I buy better/costier machines to be able to offer crisis? If they don't play crisis there is maybe more power for the future, but also more value loss of the machines in a short time b) shall I buy less powerful machines at lower prices, but not be able to offer crisis? Well the downside can be, that you will be reinvesting after 1-2 years, because the machines are to slow for the future or you see it like, if the price is already at a low baseline, than the loss of money when selling them for newer ones will be not that much.
Both cost something (a. costs much once; b. might costs less but at two times). You will also want to have in mind, when you invest, what you will loose for a) and what for b) if the visitors are coming, but they are not coming much because of a bad first impression OR if it doesn't work out anyway.
Hm, I don't know...
Consider price for getting them versus price for electricity bill (cheap machine with high power requirement might be only cheap at the beginning).
! about flash: all the workarounds do not help, if there is a site that tells you "you need flash 10.2 to visit this page" and the plugin that allows PowerPC Macs to tell the asking webpage that it is 10.2, though it is 10.1 does not work.
I have this plugin and I still can't watch short sport-video-summaries, because the site (sportschau.de) still says "you don't have 10.2 installed, so piss off!". I contacted the television channel that hosts this page (it is one of the two major German state television channels. They told me, if flash can't be used, the site should usually detect it and switch to html5 for smart-phones, which should work on an old PowerPC, too.
Well it does not and I still can't watch it.
Would you like to always run around and try to get it running and help the visitor find out, how he can watch the content as html5, if the site does not switch on its own? Most customers will just quit the browser and go away, without tellign you it did not work. After a few months you will think "why are less and less people coming?"
I do not think Romania is that much of a poor or even under developed country that people will think "ok, I can't do that, but at least I can read my emails here" or is it?
Well, young people might like your cafe, if they can play games there that are only sold to them, if they are over 18 and they are not, but letting them play these games at your cafe might be illegal, too. I do not know what laws you have over there. In western europe one would think that you can buy a copy of a game for cheap in Romania anyway, is that the same to residents of Romania, too? Or just a cliche.
Electricity again (measured it myself with a wattmeter):
- iMac G3 DV 400MHz uses about 100W, because of its built in CRT. What will an eMac with a bigger CRT consume, though with more CPU power?
- ibook G4 12" 1,33GHz uses about 30W, youtube-videos: cartoons at 320p are ok, only skipping frames/jumping, every 10minutes. Sports at 320p, stop-motion picture-show, with skipped scenes. 240p like looking through mist
- PowerMac G4 500MHz = 55W
- same PowerMac G4 with 1,2GHz (7455) Upgrade = 90W (almost same to the CRT-iMac)
- same PowerMac G4 with 2x1,8GHz (7447) Upgrade = 145W (youtube would not use the second core though)
I did not test web experience on the PowerMacs.
Now, what consumes an iMac G4, G5, Intel? I never had one. But using an Intel-Mac may be more power at the same electricity used.
Buy yourself a wattmeter. Buy some machines the other users recommend at EBay. Only buy one and sell it again, then buy the next. Do all tests on them that you want and make a note, what they consumed and how your experience was.
After doing these test, make your decision/calculation: buying price + electricity for number of hours the cafe will be open + fees for the room (if it isn't yours) + considering future reliability and value loss over time.
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2GB 680MX and an I7-3770. Please. Just stop now.
The new iMacs beat the crap out of your set up above.
IMO keep away from PDs, they are just P4x2 - Which has even worse power requirements and heat output, while still being slow, than P4s. You'd have to be mad to get a PD.
C2Ds or PDCs are much better and pretty much the same to each other except the PDC is a lower-end C2D - They also output less heat and consume less power than the PDs while still being much faster.
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2GB 680MX and an I7-3770. Please. Just stop now.
The new iMacs beat the crap out of your set up above.
IMO keep away from PDs, they are just P4x2 - Which has even worse power requirements and heat output, while still being slow, than P4s. You'd have to be mad to get a PD.
C2Ds or PDCs are much better and pretty much the same to each other except the PDC is a lower-end C2D - They also output less heat and consume less power than the PDs while still being much faster.
Not really, in a price/performance difference the pentium d gaming rigs of yesteryear really blow the new imacs out of the water. unless the op wants to spend $1000 a piece on some piece of hardware he is going to charge about $12 dollars an hour for someone to use. And since he was origionally considering emacs for about $25 a pop I would say that anything more than a pentium 4 based computer or powermac g4 quicksilver would be way out of the op's price range
Speaking of which, where is the Op? he just sorta asked if emacs would work and then just dissapeared
Intel were always digging themselves a VERY big whole with the P4's - they just had to keep on upping to the GHz to high-heavens just to keep up with their competitors. Then that wasn't enough - so they came along with the D's, which produced decent performance but sucked even more power, ran even hotter & still had to be clocked at 3GHz+ to make it even a feasible option.
These ex. office pizza box C2D systems are EVERYWHERE online, they will blow the D's out of the water, will run a lot cooler, will have newer I/O on the board & will cost about the same.
^^ This, as far as raw GPU power goes, the HD 4000 in the current MB Airs is outdone by the oldschool Radeon X800 in my G5 tower with a slight overclock.
I've got a 20" 2.0GHz CD with the Radeon, it's alive and kicking after ~7 years. It did have artifacts at one stage, but that turned out, somehow, to be the result of a huge dust buildup around the memory (literally blowing the dust out and reseating the memory fixed that.)
I think it was more a bad capacitor problem rather than a GPU issue when it did happen, I've looked after 4x 17" iMacs with vertical distortion down the screens, never gets any better or worse, two were G5 units with Radeon X600 Pros, one other was a C2D model with X1600, the other was an Intel model with a GMA 950.
I don't live in exactly the biggest town, but even years ago the defacto games with the highschool kids were stuff like CoD4
Depends on your standard of "well". It runs OK, mostly, at low-res and low to moderate graphics on a CD Radeon X1600.
Good for you.
...But what relevance does have to my post? If anything it backs it up.