How to buy a PC in Dublin City

KdjaCL

Ahh had lots of fun yesterday mate wanted new pc budget of €500 basing it on this pc.

* Athlon64, socket 754, 2800Mhz processor
* 512MB of DDR400 memory
* Sapphire Radeon 9600 with 128MB, dvi & tv out
* Asus K8N motherboard
* nForce3 250 chipset
* AGP8X, 5 pci
* Serial ATA with Raid 0, 1, 0+1, JBOD
* Onboard 8 channel audio with SP/DIf and Optical Digital Out
* Auto Sensing audio jacks for correct connection
* NV firewall built into the motherboard
* 8 USB2.0 ports
* AI Overclocking options
* Maxtor 40GB 7200rpm HDD with 2MB cache
* Samsung 16x dual layer DVD-Rewriter
* Kansas ATX tower with 350W power supply
€499 in Peats

So the plan was to drive into town go into It Direct 1st see what they could offer for that price then Unity Etail then Maplin and on to Peats.
Oh it gets funny right form shop 1 Funny in a sad kinda way.

It Direct had no pre builds it was all to spec and with a broken website (which worked while we were in the shop, it was hard to gauge a pc + price)
So an AMD 3000+ with a P4 board was part of the inital package
So price on the pc came to about €650 all components build myself.

So left there went to Unity Etail got offered a souped up calculator for €515
Sempron, 512 ram, 80GB HD, 6600GT, Dvdv burner case and fan. The fact he had Fred Flintstones old mouse and was using a gateway when they sold laptops themselves kinda put me off that shop.

K so onto to maplin had a pc of components for about €630 but no prices on ram had to ask to find out. Decentish PC but still more than the budget.

So PC world next p4 celeron pc with monitor and 120GB hd Dvd burner for €599 graphics card was neglible and board didnt have AGP or PCi E.

Then to Peats the pc that we based the others off was out of stock ,shop dude went out of his way to find out what was in stock (took him 15 minutes, fair play to him was very impressed with service compared to the other clueless mofos who couldnt even assemble a compatible pc).
The Peats one was €805 but only because they had no AGP boards and it was a X800 card, still ****ty HD and sempron 2800+.

So after all the time spent in shops etc: Bought this

# 307201 - AMD Athlon 64 3000+ 1.8GHz Socket 939, 512KB, BOXED w/fan

# 307925 - Sapphire ATI Xpress 200, Socket-939, ATX X300on-chip, SATA, LAN, AC97, PCI-Ex16
# 117212 - Corsair Value S. PC3200 DDR-DIMM 512MB Unbuffered, Non-parity, 64Megx64, CL2.5
# 309415 - NEC ND 3540A - DVD±RW (±R DL) drive - IDE
# 307909 - Samsung SpinPoint P120 200GB IDE ATA/133 8MB 7200RPM
# 303550 - In-Win S508 Midi Tower ATX Black Case w/350W PSU

for €475 off Komplett be here on wednesday.


yes building your own pc is cheaper :rolleyes:


kdjac

SolarNexus

If you want to get it cheap, you have to find businesses that dont supply highstreet buyers - they are always more expensive, mainly because they can be. What I do is open the phonebook for computer hardware distributors (the type of company that sells computers and hardware to businesses) and try to convince them to let a private individual purchase from them.

in the meantime, try Castle Computers - I used them for my laptop, and they were the cheapest option at that time.

kitfrog

KdjaC wrote:

yes building your own pc is cheaper :rolleyes:

Only if you don't take the price of a copy of Windows XP into account. You can't beat Dell's prices on PCs because they basically give you XP for free. There is almost no possible way to build a cheaper PC (including a copy of WinXP) than Dell

Zerolord

kitfrog wrote:

Only if you don't take the price of a copy of Windows XP into account. You can't beat Dell's prices on PCs because they basically give you XP for free. There is almost no possible way to build a cheaper PC (including a copy of WinXP) than Dell

If you take it that Komplete will give you windows for 99 euro when u buy things off them i say there alot cheap.

You could also have other windows copy's as well

Endurance Man

If you want to get it cheap, you have to find businesses that dont supply highstreet buyers - they are always more expensive, mainly because they can be. What I do is open the phonebook for computer hardware distributors (the type of company that sells computers and hardware to businesses) and try to convince them to let a private individual purchase from them.

in the meantime, try Castle Computers - I used them for my laptop, and they were the cheapest option at that time.
Yesterday 10:13

Thats how my buying operates . My dad buys mountains of stuff from a wholesaler, so anything i want i get very cheap and dont pay vat. You usually need to be vat registered to buy from them. Try and find a m8 who buys from wholesalers in his job. You will get the stuff a lot cheaper than komplett.

Orion

KdjaC wrote:

Ahh had lots of fun yesterday

So PC world next p4 celeron pc and board didnt have AGP or PCi E.

kdjac

erm - WTF? P4 or celeron? And you can't buy boards without AGP or PCIE. Apart from that nitpicking it sounds like you had great fun

Khannie - Sticky this one. It's a gem! Ripoff Ireland beware - boards.ie/Computers is wise to you

stevenmu

Macros42 wrote:

erm - WTF? P4 or celeron? And you can't buy boards without AGP or PCIE. Apart from that nitpicking it sounds like you had great fun

Cheaper prebuilt PCs often won't have them, you're pretty much stuck with onboard graphics. Oh, and shops often refer to the newest generation of Celerons as Pentium 4 Celerons, or just P4 Celerons to make them more saleable.

KdjaCL

Did anyone here order this thing off Komplett too? had 15 on sat out of stock now.


Mate has XP on his old pc, and Pc World thing was inbuilt crap altho got a TFT monitor with it.
Should be here morrow be interesting to how well it runs Bf2.

Thinking of the future ability to add in a PCI e card and a better AMD cpu and 4gb of ram, this is a very good deal.



kdjac

digitaldeath

2Gb of RAM should be enough - reports suggest that anything beyond that is barely noticable and so not worth it!

Orion

stevenmu wrote:

Cheaper prebuilt PCs often won't have them, you're pretty much stuck with onboard graphics. Oh, and shops often refer to the newest generation of Celerons as Pentium 4 Celerons, or just P4 Celerons to make them more saleable.

I would have thought that cheaper ones would still have AGP but fair point.

As for P4 Celeron - if I ever saw that I'd say it to the manager - P4 != Celeron and stating otherwise is a no-no.