[LUAU] Who's building system units?

Clifton Royston cliftonr at lava.net
Fri Aug 1 15:13:30 PDT 2008


On Fri, Aug 01, 2008 at 08:26:24AM -1000, Karen Lofstrom wrote:
> My old Zen teacher's computer is a battered hand-me-down
> (approximately seven years old) on its last legs. The CD drive has
> failed and the HD is making unpleasant noises. He may need a new
> computer soon. I could assemble one from parts, but it might be too
> expensive to buy all the parts retail and have them shipped here. If
> you're going all new (rather than just upgrading a few failing parts)
> I gather that it's *usually* cheaper to buy from someone who gets the
> parts wholesale. So, who here in Honolulu is building PCs now? Who's
> reliable?

  The low-end Dell prices are hard to beat, but you made a good
argument against them.

  Don't know of any place in Honolulu you can get a low-cost PC, all
assembled.  Maybe Personal Touch or PDC Systems (Personally Designed
Computer), but I haven't priced them out.

  If I buy one single part, it can be cheaper (or at least no *more*
expensive) to buy it locally and pay the "paradise" markup, e.g. at
Pure Digital (Byteware's successor.) If buying more than one thing,
it's almost always cheapest to buy them online, all from one place, so
you're paying only a single shipping charge.

  Usually I just order everything from Newegg, occasionally from
ZipZoomFly where you can sometimes get better deals on shipping to
Hawaii.

  Right now I think the best values for a cheap from-parts system are
via buying a microATX AMD 740-series motherboard, which has integrated
ATI graphics - that's one less part to buy and one less part to fail. 
The AMD x64 CPUs are really cheap and fast.  I recently bought a mobo +
CPU + RAM for about $110 + shipping; add P/S, HD, DVD-ROM and maybe
you're at about $250 without case?

  -- Clifton

-- 
    Clifton Royston  --  cliftonr at iandicomputing.com / cliftonr at lava.net
       President  - I and I Computing * http://www.iandicomputing.com/
 Custom programming, network design, systems and network consulting services



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