[H]ard|OCP 2000 Q3-05 : $2000 Systems

[Krell]

I want to breath some life in to this forum and get away from all the hurricane crap with some new threads.

This article at [H]ard|OCP reviews their choices for building a new system, or upgrading one.

If you have any ideas or modifications to this pass along your ideas

Finally, ZPMan stay the hell out of my threads!


Introduction

In the past, we have covered system guides with prices ranging from US$500 – US$1500 and higher. Each of those guides offered a targeted system based around either AMD or Intel as the processing core. While those guides offered a view into segments of the market, most of them didn’t show the bigger picture of what is truly available in the enthusiast market. Our guide uses a two-pronged approach:

First, let’s build the best all-around computer system our money can buy. This system should offer competitive performance for both application and gaming users. Second, let’s upgrade an already existing system in the tradition of our previous upgrade guides. This second system will offer a no-holds-barred attention on gaming performance.

Fast forward to this installment and we have increased the budget to US$2000, which is quite a bit of cash for a full system build and it offers some very nice options on the upgrade side. We’ve also decided to increase the scope of these guides from this point forward and put together complete and upgrade systems from both AMD and Intel. A more thorough approach allows us to see the current market with a much broader viewpoint and gives us the opportunity to address systems from both sides of the fence.

Our primary goal of these system guides is to build the best system available for the money with future upgradeability. This means that we need a path for CPU, memory, or video card upgrades at some point in the future without replacing every component in the system. We’ve hit that mark with this $2000 guide. Other goals are stability and performance. We know these products work because we have used them ourselves with one system or another. We wouldn’t recommend a component that we would not buy for our own systems.

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[Mels_Smileys45]

Good post Krell. I am just now brave enough to build my own PC as I just built my first one totally about a month ago. I didn't want to have to buy a high price POS like I did lars time from Compaq only to end up replacing EVERYTHING but the mobo, which for some reason was very nice (a fluke as I could not find out about it from compaq as it was not listed as being from them for some reason! WTF? I dunno!) Anyways -

My main criteria was price, build cheap!

I set out to not spend much money at all since it was my first try and I didn't want to be out a lot of $ if I F'ed it up. I eneded up deciding on a FIC Mobo with an AMD 64 3000+ 800Mghz FSB, $189, two sticks of 512M 3200DDR ram $95 and a new tower (This is were I splurged because in the future I want to have a nice case of course!) with black light, multi colored - with lights that shine outward - 500watt PS and front lockable midtower $110. The rest I robbed from my old PC. Cost about $400 for a very nice PC that I know is quality shit. I pplan to upgrade the ram to two Gig sticks sooner or later and get a much better grafix card or maybe just start building another PC and sell this one, not sure yet.

I don't now if this is the sorta post you had in mind but there it it.