Desktop brand.

[Blazeix]

Hello, I am looking for a new desktop computer, and I was wondering about which brands I should look at.
Dell seems to have a fairly small selection
HP seems to have some quality issues,
Systemax seems ok, but they are a small company i've never heard of before.

I'm mainly looking at performance, I'm not going to stick to just one brand. There are many "to good to be true" deals out there, so who can I trust?

[ANZAC_ELITE]

My advice: Don't buy a brand name if you dont have to, you will get far better performance and value for money building your own or if this not for you at least shop around for a custom built system.

[bookworm]

I'm with ANZAC_ELITE on this, go for custom built, if not look around get the models then go to support and check out the specs for the models your interested in.

[onespeedreed]

Custom built is not for everyone. Researching hardware can be a time consuming and daunting task for anyone.

I would suggest buying from a smaller shop. You will get better hardware and, most of all, much better support. You still need to be aware of hardware. Main thing is not to scrimp on the motherboard.

I put a list of hardware together when I needed another machine. I found a machine on Ebay with the hardware I wanted. It was much cheaper than I could have bought the parts for. It is well over a year old now and bullet proof.

www.motherboards.org

[Blazeix]

Where do you buy your custom parts? newegg is the only place I know, is this one of the better places? I guess the only problem that i have is knowing what all the motherboard descriptions mean. My eyes glaze over when I hear "Abit AW8 LGA775/955X/DDR2/SATA2/ Motherboard"
I have looked for motherboard tutorials, but I always find ones with lines like "The Pentium II is today's powerhouse CPU" and are hopelessly out of date. Are there any good tutorials you can point me to?

[ANZAC_ELITE]

Abit AW8 LGA775/955X/DDR2/SATA2/ Motherboard

I'll break it down for you a little,

Abit AW8 is the m/board model description
LGA775 is the latest Intel cpu socket (pinless, for P4 socket 775 cpu's)
955X is the chipset on the board (controls memory addressing etc)
DDR2 is the ram supported (latest incarnation of ram)
SATA2 is the latest SATA version for higher bandwidth (faster than SATA)

Give us an idea of what you want, maybe we can spec out a pc for you. Compatability is the big thing you need to pay attention too, only reading the specs of the components will help you there.

As to US retailers, I see Newegg mentioned in forums with people buying from them a lot but being in Australia it means nothing to me. Maybe some of our US users could suggest retailers for you. Doesn't Newegg have a "Design and cost your pc" function on their website?

[Blazeix]

Sorry I didn't mention I was in the U.S. Actually, your breakdown helped a lot. I was able google parts of the description and see what every thing is. I have two more questions (hopefully simple):

• Are motherboard specs backwards-compatible? For instance, could I use this harddrive (Maxtor DiamondMax 10 6B100M0 100GB 7200 RPM 8MB Cache Serial ATA150 Hard Drive) with the abit aw8 motherboard? , sata150 sounds like it's an earlier version of SATA2.
• What is the average price range for a motherboard? I looked around, and they go anywhere from $50 or less to over $4000. What does a decent motherboard cost (by decent I mean capable of supporting a 2.8Ghz cpu)?

Thanks for all your help!

[ANZAC_ELITE]

SATA 150 is indeed the old version of SATA, you would not be maximising the full bandwith provided by the m/board if you used this drive, SATA 150 is 150 mb/s whilst SATA2 is 300mb/s

When you say a 2.8ghz cpu I presume you intend retaining your present one, what socket is it? 478? I think you will be hard pushed to find skt 478 boards these days (I know they are as scarce as hens teeth here in Aussie) so you will probably end up going skt LGA 775, personally I tend to use Asus boards, around the $A300 mark.

[onespeedreed]

You can check www.motherboards.org too. They review and rate many motherboards and their information is quite uptodate.

[Da Proffessa]

My advice buy a brand name, customs can suck balls. TRUST ME ON THIS BUY A BRAND. I most suggest DELL.

[ANZAC_ELITE]

Originally Posted by Da Proffessa

My advice buy a brand name, customs can suck balls. TRUST ME ON THIS BUY A BRAND. I most suggest DELL.

I take it you've never tried to upgrade Dell components? or had one of Dell's vertically mounted hdd's fail on you because they're not designed to be mounted vertically etc etc, or compaq's where you need an install programme to add ram etc etc.

Without any corroborating evidence to back your claim your post is sheer fanboyism.

I have been building custom boxes for years and have repaired far more DeHells than any of my custom boxes. If your budget is limited and you don't want to overclock or tweak your machine and just want a glorified word processor then get a Dell or similar.

For the purest, custom boxes are the only option.