What do you need?
Where do you like to get your stuff from?
What brands?
I know you need a motherboard, hard drive, memory, etc. We’re talking about building our own PC’s at work to ship out with our instruments, instead of buying these shitty things from Dell (especially because I’ve been trying to order a PC from them for two weeks now and my sales rep won’t call me back! How the fuck can you be a sales rep for dell and not call your customers back, or return their emails!!!??? :rant: )
40GB HDD is fine, Pentium 4 only (No Celerons!!). I looked at NewEgg.com and found a $56 HDD, Western Digital 80GB SATA.
Looking to spend no more than $500 including Windows XP.
Go to www.pricewatch.com
I also like newegg when they have specials.
A $500 dollar PC would be like 2-3 year old stuff. 2500-3000 processor, Decent motherboard with sound, Pre FX Nvidia card, 512 mb good DDR ram or 1gb slower DDR ram. I would look for a 60-80gig HD and maybe a DVD drive/burner. Depends what you want it to do.
So far I found an Intel Chipset Motherboard for a Pentium 4, $59.99. Western Digital 80GB HDD SATA for $56.00. CD-RW is $35 at the most, even for a Sony one. (is Sony good?)
Well, we provide the computers ONLY with our equipment. That’s the entire purpose of them. But the Dells I bought last time for $558 each were shitty (or so our software guy says… they were too slow to run our software), so I figured that we could build our own for cheaper and they would work better. The boss was talking to them the other day about “cutting corners” with the computers and stuff, and me and the other web guy here think this is the best way to do that.
Those are the places I go for processors, drives, and motherboards. I go to an overclockers hardware place for cooling stuff, video cards and ram. Then other stuff like cases can be found all over. I have had 2 power supplies fail from newegg and destroy motherboards, so I am not touching that stuff from them again. However, my processor and motherboard are both from newegg and have taken the overclocking for 2 years.
I agree. I am working with Unigraphics and Solidworks at the lab here and it is on a dell with the best of everything. It is slow. My 2 year old home pc is alot faster with these programs. Dell uses some cheaper parts so the quality is not always up there with home built systems.