August 1 - Build of the Day

As promised - its Friday, August first. I've been scouring the Internet looking at my favorite shopping sites to bring ya all a build with the best bang for the buck. Today's Build is named - Broke as a Joke. What do you do when your broke but need a new rig... check this out...

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3949938&Sku=A455-2810%20G

Your also gonna need a CPU fan - check hit the jump and peruse this one - http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2604150&CatId=2545 - Oh yeah... its cheap BABY!

Yeah... 200 bucks for a complete system (give or take about 30 bucks). Is it top of the line... nope... that 3800 proc is not about to light the world on fire. Integrated video as a general rule of thumb always sucks (no matter who makes the video chipset). The hard drive is small, the case is cheap, the power supply.. generic... so whats so good about this?

Well... the motherboard is an Asus (pronounced A-Soos). They make some of the best equipment that I've ever seen. Here's a link just for the motherboard from Tiger Direct just for the mobo - this gives good shots of the overall layout and connectors -

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-Details.asp?EdpNo=3574530&sku=A455-2810

For a micro ATX board this thing is feature rich... 4 USB Ports, Integrated 10/100 Ethernet, SATA that is RAID capable, a full size PCI-E x16 Slot... which means when your budget allows it you can upgrade to a Geforce 8 series or 9 series video card.

Sometimes its not about performance out of the box, but scalability later on.

This build is so scalable that you can spend as little or as much as your budget allows. Drop in a AMD Athlon X2 6000 proc, a Sound Blater X-Fi Gamer, and GeForce 9 series or ATI's new 4800 series of cards and you'll have yourself a nice gaming machine.

or

Forget about the proc upgrade, drop in a 1 Terabyte drive - I like this one: http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=3346290&Sku=TSD-1000AS add a TV Tuner device - http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=2942132&CatId=1427

Then pick up a decent PCI-E (like an el cheapo ATI 2400 HD) video card and BAM you've got yourself an entertainment PC.

What about an operating system?

Well if your computer literate and not afraid of new things you can download a free copy of Ubuntu Linux while you save for a copy of Windows Vista Premium (the lowest version of Vista that I would recommend).

If you have an old Windows XP installation disc (that is not part of a restore disc but stand alone) you can install that and then call Microsoft's activation hotline. They have been really good about activating the operating system on machines even when its already been activated as long as you only use the OS one machine. Just tell em your last computer caught fire and you really need them to activate the OS. I haven't heard of anyone having a problem with it.

Finally - there's torrents. You know what I mean. I'm not going to explain it or link to torrents on how to get there but if you know what I'm talking about then your probably all set already.

That's it for today - l8r