I would "roll my own", as well. It's not hard. At least it's not as
long as all the pieces you buy work. I built a 500mhz PIII about 4
months ago, and had no trouble at all. If you get a bad component or
two, though, life can get a whole lot harder. That's the virtue in
having a local outfit put it together for you -- they can swap parts to
isolate what's bad a lot more easily than one of us building a machine
at home. But, there's a special satisfaction in taking every last
piece out of their individual boxes, assembling the system from the
chassis up, and having it work. (I'm an old fart -- I built a Heathkit
color TV 27 years ago -- it's the same satisfaction, except that
assembling a PC is a tiny fraction of the work, and you don't even need
a soldering iron.)
However, the original question seemed to indicate that the person would
rather buy a complete system. My first advice there would be to go
over to Tom's Hardware Guide (www.tomshardware.com) and read up on the
processors in question. Also read up on the motherboard issues. Some
of these choices aren't as simple as picking the best processor
(whatever your personal definition of "best" is). My sense is that
there's a problem getting motherboards that will let the AMD processors
perform the way they should be capable of. Also, I'm very skeptical of
Dell having the parts on hand to make a 1gig PIII system, even if
someone wanted to pay 4K for it. The last I read, there were barely
enough of those chips for the magazine reviewers (and only those in the
US at that).
Dave Wilson
> Roll your own ... Or even have a good local computer tech build it
> for you.
> You will get *** EXACTLY *** the components *** YOU *** want (no
> compromises ...), and in many cases you will get longer warranties
> from the individual manufacturer than the system warranty from one of
> the "BIG" vendors. You can choose the monitor, video card, hard
> drives, etc. ...
> Further, you will not be paying for a bunce of bundled software you
> probably don't want and will never use, along with the fact that the
> "BIG" vendors ship their systems with all that stuff clogging up your
> "start up" files and making a "War and Peace" document out of your
> Windows Registry ...
> IMHO, go with the AMD Athlon. It is absolutely terrific, and it
> doesn't work off a 100mhz bus in the normal sense, but an effective
> 200mhz bus, as it can write data to the RAM on the rising and falling
> cycles of the 100mhz FSB clock ... That's why theyt call it 200mhz
> EV-6 ...
> I built an Athlon 600mhz (when 700 was as fast as was available ...)
> based system a few months back, and it was sooooo much cheaper.
> For instance ...
> Athlon 600 (OEM tray product)
> RDJD K-701 heatsink/fan
> 256mb PC-100 cas-2 SDRAM (2 128mb Corsair DIMM's)
> Asus K7M motherboard
> 2 IBM 13.6gb 34GXP ATA-66 7200rpm hard drives (27.2gb total)
> Plextor 8x/4x/32x IDE CD-RW drive
> AOpen 52x UDMA CD-ROM drive
> Mitsumi floppy drive
> 3dfx Voodoo 3 3000 w/TV out (retail box) video
> Tennmax V3 Stealth video card heatsink/fan
> Aureal Vortex 2 SQ-2500 SuperQuad sound card (retail box)
> Netgear FA-310-TX 10/100 network card
> In-Win Q-500 case (and three high-cfm fans)
> Antec PP-303x power supply
> 17" Trinitron monitor
> Altec-Lansing ACS-490 speakers/subwoofer
> LogiTech I-Touch cordless keyboard and mouse
> Win 98 SE OEM
> and get this ... it runs flawlessly and fast, fast, fast ...
> and all for less than $1900.00 bucks ... all parts brand new.
> But, its your money ...
> >On Thu, 16 Mar 2000 18:48:56 -0500, "David L. Cook"
> >I'm in the market for a new PC. I can spend about $2800 to buy it.
I'll be
> >using this at home for business and ***. The 1Ghz Intel Pentium
III is
> >out of my reach right now as it approaches $4000 for a system from
Dell.
> >If I configure a Dell 800Mhz system, I can get a 21" Trinitron,
128MB of
> >RDRAM running at 356Mhz, the motherboard has a System Bus of 133Mhz
and it
> >comes standard with a 32MB 4x AGP TNT2. I could spend another $320
and get
> >the 64MB GeForce DDR but I think I'll wait and buy the 3DFX Voodoo5
64MB
> >card instead so that I can run sim's like GPL with full screen anti-
aliasing
> >and 24-bit color.
> >The other choice I have is the AMD Athlon 1Ghz from Gateway. For
about the
> >same price I get the 1Ghz processor that we've all dreamed about,
but I only
> >get a 100Mhz System Bus, 100Mhz SDRAM, AGP2x, and a non-Trinitron 21"
> >monitor. The video card is a 32MB GeForce but plugged into an AGP 2x
> >slot...
> >I think the answer is clear. Go with the Dell. What do you think?
> >--David Cook
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Before you buy.
