Damn kids! GET OFF MY LAWN
So my parents have informed me that my bro's tower died on him and he needed a new computer at some point. So as a Christmas/birthday present to him, they wanted me to go online and see what I could come up with, preferably under $500. Hell... preferably under $300.
So I did.
I came up with a system all right. I used the video card out of my dead tower (128mb card, good one) and because of that, had to stick with AGP on the motherboard... apparently AGP isn't used anymore in favor of PCI-E. But Newegg.com still sells the old boards. The system I came up with for only $300 is basically thus:
Athlon64 3800+ 2.4Ghz AM2
Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 board
1gb DD2 533 with the option of being able to add another 1gb stick if needed
ATI Radeon something something. It's a 128mb card out of my old tower
580W PS
WD 250gb Ultra ATA100 7200rpm HDD
Some random cheap case
Sony NEC Optiarc 18x DVD Burner
3.5" Floppy (to update the boards BIOS because it apparently needs it on occasion)
All for $300. Cheap as shit basically. It's a tower, ps, board, processor, memory, drives... everything for barely anything. And yet all the reviews and crap were all "OMGS IT'S SLOW" and "OMGS THIS DRIVE IS LOUD". Bite me you bastards! That system is more powerful than my dead tower. I've been running a XP2500+ Barton for the past 4 years with 512mb ram and a GeForce 2! Yet all the parts you find now are Dual Core processors with 4gb of DDR2 memory as a minimum max for the boards. 750gb hard drives using SATA 3.0g/s. Video cards usin' PCI-Express... basically if I made a tower the way I used to make a computer, for $500-$700 I could make a system so goddamn powerful I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Hell, I grew up on Pentium 133's and Windows 3.11. I still have a P2 400mhz system where the 12gb drive in it was HUGE in its day, and even moreso when I had 128mb running in it! The computer being loud because of all the fans was just something you learned to accept. The system taking a bit to load something up was normal. A computer game taking up 5gb of hdd space (I'm looking at you, WoW) was unheard of.
Bunch of spoiled bastards. I'm perfectly fine with my 1gb memory, 1.6ghz processing speed, 80gb hard drive (granted, I need more for music and movies), and 64mb video card. And that's all in my laptop.
I'm scared to see what I could price out for a new tower, hardware-wise...
So I did.
I came up with a system all right. I used the video card out of my dead tower (128mb card, good one) and because of that, had to stick with AGP on the motherboard... apparently AGP isn't used anymore in favor of PCI-E. But Newegg.com still sells the old boards. The system I came up with for only $300 is basically thus:
Athlon64 3800+ 2.4Ghz AM2
Biostar K8M800 Micro AM2 board
1gb DD2 533 with the option of being able to add another 1gb stick if needed
ATI Radeon something something. It's a 128mb card out of my old tower
580W PS
WD 250gb Ultra ATA100 7200rpm HDD
Some random cheap case
Sony NEC Optiarc 18x DVD Burner
3.5" Floppy (to update the boards BIOS because it apparently needs it on occasion)
All for $300. Cheap as shit basically. It's a tower, ps, board, processor, memory, drives... everything for barely anything. And yet all the reviews and crap were all "OMGS IT'S SLOW" and "OMGS THIS DRIVE IS LOUD". Bite me you bastards! That system is more powerful than my dead tower. I've been running a XP2500+ Barton for the past 4 years with 512mb ram and a GeForce 2! Yet all the parts you find now are Dual Core processors with 4gb of DDR2 memory as a minimum max for the boards. 750gb hard drives using SATA 3.0g/s. Video cards usin' PCI-Express... basically if I made a tower the way I used to make a computer, for $500-$700 I could make a system so goddamn powerful I wouldn't know what to do with it.
Hell, I grew up on Pentium 133's and Windows 3.11. I still have a P2 400mhz system where the 12gb drive in it was HUGE in its day, and even moreso when I had 128mb running in it! The computer being loud because of all the fans was just something you learned to accept. The system taking a bit to load something up was normal. A computer game taking up 5gb of hdd space (I'm looking at you, WoW) was unheard of.
Bunch of spoiled bastards. I'm perfectly fine with my 1gb memory, 1.6ghz processing speed, 80gb hard drive (granted, I need more for music and movies), and 64mb video card. And that's all in my laptop.
I'm scared to see what I could price out for a new tower, hardware-wise...