🚀 go-pugleaf

Chad Irby (cirby@news.gate.net) wrote:
: G (blackbob@sashimi.wwa.com) wrote:

[ disagreements about prices deleted]

: Oh- and we forgot the modem.  And your extras.  And the CD-ROM.

: No- we're talking at least 

: Motherboard $650
: RAM         $300
: 500 meg HD  $200
: SVGA        $100
: Monitor     $250
: Modem/etc   $100
: CD-ROM      $200
:            ------
:            $1700

: ...and you can get a PMac 5200 for about that- with more RAM and a bigger 
: monitor.

: : >All for about the same amount of money or MORE!  WHEE!  And when 
: : >something goes wrong six months from now, and the place you got the 
: : >pieces from is out of business because they didn't make any margin on the 
: : >stuff they sold, you get to try and deal with a bunch of parts from 
: : >fifteen different companies!

: : Please explain.  What parts are you talking about?

: : a) Memory and disks are made by the same companies for Apples 
: : and clones so the users will experience the same number of
: : problems.

: ...but the cheapo motherboards aren't.  And the I/O card isn't.  And the 
: keyboard is a $10 piece of crap.  And due to the low prices here, a lot 
: of this stuff isn't "name brand" anyway.  And when the incompatibilities 
: start popping up...

: : b) Intel is not a fly by night company.

: You think you get a real Intel motherboard for that price?  Nope- you get 
: a cheap Taiwan clone with an older chipset.

: : c) The items not covered by a) and b) are of minimal cost, so
: : replacement is not taxing, and they do not often break anyways.
: : Be realistic, have you ever heard of PC user having to replace his
: : multi-I/O card?

: Constantly.  The folks I know who buy machines a piece at a time have a 
: *lot* more trouble with hardware.  Cheap is cheap.

: So to summarize: for the same amount of money, you get a slower, less- 
: capable machine (lousy graphics), and you still have to assemble it 
: yourself.  Bargain City.

: -- 

: Chad Irby           /    My greatest fear: that future generations will,
: cirby@gate.net     /      for some reason, refer to me as an "optimist."

I really do not enjoy seeing people pull numbers out of their heads,
especially when it's not very accurate.

I was recently given the task of looking at some prices for a friend who
wants to put a system together, out of half decent components. This is
what I found. a decent Pentium P5-100 system  could be assembled for
about $1800. without a CD-ROM, slightly less than $2K if you add a 4X IDE
CD-ROM for about $150. I'll list the break down below. I think that if
you really want to compare something against a hand assembled system, the
parts below and their respective prices should give you a good idea.
(all parts are "mail order" prices)

$235 Intel Zappa Board 
 		http://ifu.ifu.net/html/tech/rcs/contents.html
		(more advanced/faster boards run about $300-$340)
$355 Intel P5-100				
		maxk@telerama.lm.com
		(This seems like a fantastic price, though I haven't
		 verified that anyone has bought one from this guy.
		 my friend will probably try to buy one from him
		 later this week)

$70  mid tower case. 
		all over the place. you can be cheap/pressed for space
		and buy a mini tower for $40.

$500  16 megs of RAM @ 60ns
		from that Alex Sio guy @ Primenet. He claims that for 
		this price, he is able to provide 2 8 meg 60ns, non 
		parity DRAM simms made by Micron, I have not personally
		verified this, though this doesn't seem too tough to do.
		70ns RAM is cheaper, EDO is more expensive. take your
		pick. look for him on the .forsale.memory group

$30  1.44 meg floppy drive
		I've managed to pick up a few at $31 or $29 locally.
		$30 isn't very tough to do.

$50  14.4 modem	internal
		tolerable. 28.8's are $100~$200

$185  850 meg WD EIDE drive. 
		CompuPlus, reachable via gopher://pccatalog.peed.com
		or Call (800)287-2323 to Order from COMP-U-PLUS 
		a NY company, bought over $1K worth of drives from them
		before, they've never screwed up an order, Good company
		IMHO.  1.2 gig is $265.  Connors are even cheaper, though
		WD's are better than Connors IMHO.

$400  15 inch monitor + 1 meg PCI card.
		we can go cheap and get ISA 1 meg + 14 inch, but why?

$150  4X IDE CD-ROM.  
		also look on the gopher site, as listed above.

#30 ~ $150?    KB+ rodent. 

So you can put together a very nice P5-100 system W/16 megs  for about
$1800 without the sound card or CD-ROM. and running Linux on this system
wouldn't be bad at all.  IMHO I'd rather have this system+ linux instead
of the 5200 + MacOS. Though that's my opinion, you may be perfectly
happy playing with the 5200.