I built my first machine from parts bought mostly from NewEgg. The box cost just over $1000, but from what I can find, I’d have to pay close to $3000 to get anything like it prebuilt.
Here’s the parts list and some pics:
I got an Acer 22″ widescreen monitor from Office Max for $169, and a wireless 1600 dpi mouse from Best Buy for $40.
It scores a 5.7 on the “Windows Experience Score,” only because the processor is 5.7 — everything else scores 5.9 (the highest score available).
The only thing I wish I’d done differently is to successfully get the SATA installed. This particular Gigabyte board requires that you burn the SATA drivers to removable media *before* installing the OS, which I didn’t know until 3 days after I’d installed the OS because the information is buried in Chapter 8 of the mobo manual.
There’s room for expansion: a Quad core processor , media card reader and more memory would be nice eventually. I didn’t get them for the original build to hold the costs down a bit.
All in all, though, I love this machine. It’s incredibly fast compared to the machine it replaced: a 2000 WinXP Compaq, and the only reason I hadn’t posted before now (the machine is a month old) is because I’m too busy gaming on it =)
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March 7, 2009 at 7:27 pm
Beautiful man, absolutely beautiful. You did a good job on this. The only thing I would have done differently is used a Sony DVD burner instead of Lite-on, and picked up a cheap copy of winxp OEM, least until Windows 7 drops later this year. But other than that, you did a friggen incredible job man.
March 8, 2009 at 8:42 am
Thanks Cas.
The CD / DVD device I picked was a little cheaper than the Sony I think, and actually the only thing I’ve used it for so far is to install the OS and Warhammer lol. I was pretty stoked about the lightscribe capability, but I haven’t tried it yet.
I like Vista — though it definitely takes some getting used to after XP. As far as Windows 7 goes, I don’t really see the attraction.
From what I’ve seen so far, it looks like they just created a new number so they can sell more software when they probably could have just made some patches to Vista for the cool stuff.
The only things that look like real improvements are the Device Manager changes, otherwise I don’t like the way the window preview works and the Home Networking requires that each computer be running Windows 7. Oh, and the window sizing options are kinda cool too.
It bothers me that WinXP won’t be supported soon, and 7 will probably be necessary at some point, but I think they’re having their way with us
Unless I’m missing something, which wouldn’t surprise me a bit.