I need a new desktop badly, trying to do it cheap as my car habit has caused me to be poorer than a leather coats salesman on the equator.

Looking for something with good graphics and fairly fast with decent hard drive space. You folks think I need to build something or can I find a decent deal somewhere that would save me the hassle? Anyone have an idea of the parts and total price to build something half decent?

Mike <--- PC n00b

 

How bout a dell?

Usually great prices..

 

Yea I have been looking at them I was just wondering is I could build something better for less and figured I would put to the masses of the BAIC.

Mioke

 

Check out Dell outlet.

I bought my dell 8400 3.2ghz with winXP Pro for $600

it's been great.

 

Where is dell outlet?

 

you can build a decent PC for Sub 700

newegg.com and monarchcomputer.com are good sites for cheap stuff

go with an athlon processor, mid level MOBO, value ram, 160 or so gig HD, dvd burner, dvd rom, and save the rest for a nice vid card

 

How fast, all depends on what you are gonna use it for! What programs your are gonna use on it (photoshop, 3d programs, After Effects, Editing programs etc.) If the programs are heavy for the processor or graphics card, then yes a fast computer would be nice. Otherwise save yourself some money, and just get a lower end computer. Also check craigslist. If you buy used get a computer guru friend to go with you to check it out, sometimes you can get sweet deals.

~gus

 

Online!

 

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/topi...=us&l=en&s=gen

 

avoid the 8200 dim line.

they use RDRAM (rambus) and they are expensive as heck... and sometimes hard to find, if you need them in a pinch.

 

I just went thru this, and found that Dell is really the best bet. A friend I trust just built an awesome PC with just what I wanted so I am picking that up from him, otherwise I would get the deal earlyapex suggested. I have an IBM P4 2.66Ghz w/ 768MB RAM, 60GB and 80GB drives and nothing else special I won't need. Trade ya for an Exedy Sport clutch kit for an '01 RS and I will even leave the 50GB of mp3s.

 

While you can certainly build one on your own, I've found that for a truly cheap decent machine buying some premade Dell will get you more hardware for the money.

 

Dell desktops are not bad, but the laptops are bad.

The question that matters is what you will use it for.
Because yeah, Dell might be best bang for your buck, but they don't always have everything you need.

 

BTW, make sure you get SATA drives, DDR RAM. I would personally go for an AMD Opteron or Athlon 64.

 

+1000000 for AMD's... too bad Dell is too lame to carry AMD processors!

If you want an AMD, HP/Compaq's usually have the 64 bit at a price that is easily comparable to the Dell P4 hyperthreading's