Computer Builders/Pros...check this out

About a year ago I got this great deal on a Dell Laptop thanks to Marty's coupon code. Someone made me an offer to buy it at the same price I paid so I am looking to going back to a Desktop since its on the desk 99% of the time anyhow. I was wondering can something custom be built to similar specs for less money? I've never needed the warranty or tech support but its good to have. I use my computer mainly for photoshoping, games and internet.

I did some configuring on Dells site. I was wondering what you thought of this


DIMENSION XPS GEN 5
Pentium® 4 Processor 640 with HT Technology (3.20GHz, 800 FSB)
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2 DIMMs
24 inch UltraSharp™ 2405FPW Widescreen Digital Flat Panel
256MB PCI Express™ x16 (DVI/VGA/TV-out) nVidia GeForce 6800
80GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (10000RPM)
250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
16X CD/DVD burner (DVD+/-RW) w/double layer write capability
Sound Blaster Audigy™ 2 ZS (D) Card w/Dolby 5.1, IEEE 1394 capability
2nd Hard Drive 250GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM)
Limited Warranty, Services and Support Options 1Yr Ltd Warranty, 1Yr At-Home Service, and 1Yr Technical Support
XPS Specialized Support Dimension XPS, Specialized Support

TOTAL:$2,216.28 (Price reflects 34% Dell Home Discount)

Q1: Does 2 Dimms means it takes up two slots on the mobo? like 2x512?
Q2: I was thinking of getting the fast HD for games and the larger one for photos. Would there be that much difference? I would much rather have 500GB than 320GB.

Also Marty, anymore 50% off coupons?

The price sounds a bit high tho. I'm guessing the screen was expensive...

edit:
oops didn't even read your questions. Was drooling too much...
Ok so yes, 2 dimms does mean it takes two spaces on your mobo. Most have 3 or 4 so upgrading shouldn't be a problem. Besides, 1gb is plenty until you change your OS...
As for the hard drive thing, it won't help in gaming, only in loading times, which is great but if you only want to play games, the vga card (and cpu/ram) is what counts. There are rumors of a new physics card being develloped for future games but at the rate these things go, we'll know soon enough if it's a good idea... Personally, I'd wait a bit before investing.
Your comp sounds insanely sweet tho. :wave:

edit2:
Darn it! I didn't read your top questions either! Must control drooling...
So to answer honestly, yes you can probably do better if you build it on your own but it would entail shopping arorund a lot which can be a potential pain in the gluteus maximus... This is already a pretty good deal.

The screen is $800 on ebay

I purchased the 2405 FPW about a month ago from Dell. IT'S AWESOME!!!! You'll love it. It's worth every dollar.

Does your HD have 4mb cache on it? if has only 2mb cache, it will run slow. The cache is very important nowadays. Otherwise, the rest of your PC spec is very good. You have deal on 24inc digital monitor.


I have 4mb cache on my120mb Western Digital.

That looks like a pretty good price on a top of the line machine!

there are some tradeoffs

Dell is hard to beat for price, and maybe support depending on your local stores and so forth. You can beat their prices, although probably not by much. Also you will have to hunt around for the parts you want and then worry about compatibility. Plus you will have to take the time to assemble it and load all of the drivers.

The advantage of doing it yourself is that you can get exactly what you want and configure it the way you want. And it won't come with extra stuff loaded that you don't want. OTOH you might prefer to just pick up the phone and spend much less time messing with it.

Found a new coupon code with 1% extra off! Saved another few bucks

35% coupon code is 4WD?TVMQ5GLG4B and works for select Dell Desktops

your pc sounds great. am pricing that machine now vs building my own. you might want to add a cd-rw drive(cheap)so you can burn on the fly. just some more versatility. i have a 20" hi-res septre flat panel that is very good. does the dell have an extra 5 1/4" slot on the case? you could add a 12 in 1 memory card reader plus extra usb and firewire ports. you can do it yourself. i hate to crawl around to the back of the case! buy an uninterruptable power supply(upc). apc is good one(sams, bestbuy). when ele. fails, it goes to battery power for 10-20 minutes, allowing time for shutdown. it also filters your power and regulates it if power goes hi/low voltage. if lightining strikes and blows out upc saving your expensive pc, apc will usually give you a new upc. just my 2 cents worth.

Good idea. Its happened to me twice, thankfully I am on a laptop. I did some more work and took out the 80gb drive in favor for a 250+160 and also added 2GB of ram. The price came out to be $30 more.

KFC: With what I want in a custom, it will probably end up costing more and then I have no warranty, etc. Add that to the fact that I will be depending on other peoples free time to assemble it. Plus I haven't found a case that I like, except for the Thermaltake Armor.

I would say you're pretty much set. Two DIMMs means two slots correct, but you need that configuration. They spread the load over both DIMMs and both slots to double available memory bandwidth (dual channel). If you only have one DIMM, it will run, but you're only getting half your memory bandwidth and that can hurt performance in varying ways (ranging from a little to a lot). Don't worry about it because modern boards have 4 slots, they took this into consideration. Load 2 today, load the rest tomorrow when you upgrade.

10kRPM.. some performance gains, not that substantial. Depends on your need for space, personally I feel one of each is a good compromise but it's up to your individual requirements.

I've been building for a decade and often Dell will simply come up with something cheaper. They can do better than any of us too, because they can work with the case manufacturers and component suppliers to have custom stuff made cheaply, as they buy in bulk. One of my Dell desktops has some very nice injection-molded ductwork, a very unusual (but effective) airflow path and inaudible squirrel-cage blowers instead of fans. I need to place my ear against the case to hear them. That having been said there are still some occasions where I would prefer to build. Comes down to a judgement call as to who can do better.

Get a UPS and make sure it is by APC, as has been mentioned before. They are the best in the business; I would bet my company's infrastructure on them (and incidentally, we do.. plenty of insistence by yours truly helped). You may also be eligible for APC's additional coverage - if the UPS fails to stop whatever is coming down the line and your equipment blows up, you can file a claim with them. We are not eligible (only applicable in North America) so I don't know the specifics, but free insurance is always a Good Thing(tm).

V8TOYTRUCK said:

KFC: With what I want in a custom, it will probably end up costing more and then I have no warranty, etc. Add that to the fact that I will be depending on other peoples free time to assemble it. Plus I haven't found a case that I like, except for the Thermaltake Armor.

Click to expand...

You're probably right but the point of making a custom pc is the flexibility; you can downgrade a few small things and get something else that you really really like...
If you do build it yourself, the warranty on the hardware will be included with the parts you purchase. And if you meant the maintenance for the computer software, it won't really help either; this is entirely based on my own experience but the technical assistance I've received for my computer issues in the past have been a complete waste of time, patience and perfectly good un-broken-in-two phones... You'll get much faster and helpful advises from real experts on online boards than a guy who'll ask you to check if all the wires are connected, reboot and finally reinstall windows.
Besides, with the proper protection software and decent internet habits, you shouldn't ever need any assistance until your pc gets completely obsolete.
Again, this looks like a pretty sweet deal so I wouldn't sweat it.

Wow, what a deal with that screen included.

I've been buying Dells for years for myself and for my customers, as I do tech support. In my experience you would save yourself a H-U-G-E amount of headache if you make an image copy of the drive as soon as you get it (such as with Symantec's Norton Ghost). The Dells I've used have been enormously reliable, but there has also been an enormous percentage delivered with drives that die shortly after delivery. After replacing that initial drive, they fly along without a hitch for years. I don't know what's up with the as-delivered drives, but that has been my experience with both desktop and laptop. YMMV

What is an image copy? Is that like RAID having back up on a second drive?

Selling my laptop makes it feel like im also getting 1k off. I can't wait to go back to a full sized keyboard that doesn't get super hot when typing. The current P4 3.06 gets so warm my fingers get irritated when typing unless I put a small fan next to it.

It's not RAID mirroring. It's a snapshot copying program that is run. What I meant by an image copy is that you'd essentially make a complete copy of everything on your drive to some other place. Think "bit-copy of the drive" and that's the general idea. It makes a copy of either everything in one drive partition or everything on the whole drive including the partitioning. If/when your drive dies, you start the Ghost program, it asks for the source (where the image is stored, maybe you had chosen to put it onto a DVD or external drive when you had made it) then it's 15 minutes or so to having everything as it was when you made the image, with XP, Office, and whatever else all loaded. Otherwise, as you probably know, it's at least a full day's work to get XP, Office, etc re-loaded onto a blank hard drive and you can't actually get it back to how Dell delivered it because Dell puts a Ghost-like 'restore' image and other stuff such as a diagnostics partition onto the drive.

The caveat: Ghost 8 is a DOS-level, non-Windows program. The program is fairly straightforward to use once you see what to do but the directions are amazingly obtuse, such as spending many pages on the least-likely scenarios and saying little about out the most usual. Ghost 9.0 is supposed to do everything from a Windows-level but I haven't used that version.

RAID mirroring (level 1) is very nice, but the caveat there is that it covers single-drive failure but will diligently mirror any OS-level corruption to both drives. If a corruption occurs under only level-1, you're cooked.

picard said:

Does your HD have 4mb cache on it? if has only 2mb cache, it will run slow. The cache is very important nowadays. Otherwise, the rest of your PC spec is very good. You have deal on 24inc digital monitor.


I have 4mb cache on my120mb Western Digital.

Click to expand...

I think there are 8MB cache HDDs too if I'm not wrong.

I think a common cache size is 8MB nowadays, and some even have 16MB caches.

I just bought the Dell, not the XPS though. I built a similarly eqiupped 9100 for a few hundred less. No 2nd hard drive, a cheaper vid card. I did some research and found the ATI Radeon X600 256mb should run Battlefield 2 very well, and it was about 180 cheaper the 6800. Good idea or bad idea? I also got an additonal year of warranty.

So:
No Nice XPS case
No XPS Tech support
No 160 GB 2nd drive
a cheaper vid card

= $450 less



$1750 shipped.

Have you considered building one yourself? I built a pentium 4 system for about $530 bucks. Did have to shop around for the parts and use some coupons to save a bit more.

List:
Asus MB New $70 Newegg.com
2GB RAM New $80 Newegg.com
Intel Chip and fan New $110 Newegg.com
21" CRT Monitor USED $35 Local store
5 button wireless Optical mouse New $20 Radio Shack
DVD/CD 16X 2 layer burner New $50 Newegg.com
120W audio New $30 Office depot
Keyboard New $15 WalMart
256 mb Video card New $50 Newegg.com
ATX Case New $20 Fry's Electronics
Photo quality Color printer, scanner, fax and copier, New $50 Walmart

Grand total: $530 rounded numbers which includes any tax and shipping.

Compare that to $1000 + for a name brand system. You can save for about 10 surefires or 4 custom made lights :rock:

Check Newegg, Monarchcomputer, tigerdirect. Maybe you'll find a good deal.

HTH
AlexGT

I was putting together a computer with those specs at newegg.com, but since you already bought one, I'll stop heh. Newegg.com rocks they have suck a large selection you can order from one place. And the reviews are helpfull. Plus they tell you shipping price for each item, and that's cheaper than when you shop else where. I've built 2 computers from there and they all were great deals and screaming fast just what I wanted!