Author: Matt Thomas
Date: 00:17:26 03/02/04
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On February 29, 2004 at 15:01:51, Jon Dart wrote: >On February 29, 2004 at 00:18:04, Matt Thomas wrote: > >>On February 28, 2004 at 12:24:34, Jason Kent wrote: >> >>>i know about pricewatch.com. what else is out there? >>> >>>Im looking for either an inexpensive motherboard/cpu combo or a totally new box. >>> P4 preferred. >> >>You may want to look here: >>http://www.tigerdirect.com/ >> > >I got a cheap refurbished system from Tiger Direct recently for my daughter >(built by e-Machines). If all you want is processing power, these are fine, but >the built-in graphics and sound were truly dreadful - it was not at all suitable >for multimedia apps. Something to keep in mind if you are looking at a range of >applications on the box. (I have another machine with an AMD nForce chipset and >it has quite decent on-board graphics and sound). > >http://www.newegg.com is excellent for the do-it-yourself builder. They carry >practically every brand of everything and they ship fast. > >--Jon Yeah, I don't like those prebuilt units much because they can have the mini-motherboards. These mini-mobos usually lack many pci slots and often have built in graphics controllers. This can be ok for a simple office machine but it no good for a gaming/power office pc. Especially so if you want good 3D graphics which require a good card like a Radian or NVidia. I like picking my own motherboard and hardware because I can match it to my needs better. The mobo is the most important choice when building a PC - that and the CPU of course. Next is memory, graphics card, sound card, hard drive type, etc. I like the choice of mobos you can get from Tiger. They have a lot of quality equipment. Of course they have the budget boards also, which are quality, but they are usually too simple for a decent gaming platform. If you have the skill then building your own PC has great benefits because you can read online reviews of the hardware you are about to use when building. There are many online reviews and user comments on just about every type of hardware and especially for motherboards. You may want to consider that some pre-built units will have proprietory hardware that could be hard to replace. A friend had this problem when upgrading some workstations at the office because of some odd, rare, hard-to-find type of memory chips that had to be used. Just some thoughts, -matt
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