Build system from scratch?

Wed Jan 16 19:45:47 CST 2002

Stay away from any of the low-end stuff from most of the major PC
manufacturers. This includes most of the Presario lines from Compaq, the
Aptiva lines from IBM, and the Pavillion lines from HP, if I am remembering
correctly. Odds are, you will get something that runs Windows only
marginally well, won't support any real upgrades, and won't run Linux at
all.  Most of these systems are considered "sealed boxes", and as such have
almost all of the system resources allocated already making adding
components impossible, and they are also chock-full of proprietary hardware
that makes life difficult.  As an example, the Presarios use a special
video adapter and driver that allows the video subsystem to use the ram on
the motherboard instead of its own video ram.  This creates motherboard
bandwidth issues, overall system performance and reliability issues, and
makes it impossible to ever upgrade your video system since it is
completely hard-wired in.  Good luck finding a working Linux video driver
for that kluge, and your Windows games will run MUCH slower.  As another
example, most of those systems are designed never to be attached to a
network.  I remember in my Compaq certification classes how the first thing
you were supposed to do if you had hardware problems with a Presario was
disable the network card (if it had one) and see if that took care of the
problem.  Stay away from the low-end, consumer-oriented stuff.

All of that having been said, there are some good PC's to be had from major
manufacturers.  They are the ones that get sold to businesses.  Ram, video,
processor, and network upgrades are the sort of things that businesses need
to do on a regular basis, so that flexibility is designed into the systems
that are marketed to businesses.  On paper there might not be much of a
difference between a Compaq Deskpro and a Presario, but they are light
years apart in terms of flexibility. You'll pay about 5-10% more for this
flexibility, but it is more than worth it. I've got a Deskpro at home, and
I'm very happy with it.  It's expandable, versatile, and easy to work on.

As far as building your own PC goes, I have only really 3 comments to make:

1) You get what you pay for.

2) The only real difference between an $89 Geforce2 TI 64mb card and a $199
Geforce2 TI 64mb card is the extra 6-8 hours of your time it takes to get
the cheap one to work right.

3) It's a whole lot easier to get a system to work under Linux if you only
choose supported components.

Good luck!

Kevin Finch
Network Administrator
DST Systems, Inc.
816/435-6039
krfinch at dstsystems.com

                    Daryl                                                                           

                    <dfallin at kc.rr.com>           To:     kclug at kclug.org                           

                    Sent by:                      cc:                                               

                    owner-kclug at marauder.i        Subject:     Build system from scratch?           

                    lliana.net                                                                      

                    01/16/2002 12:02 PM                                                             

Ok..  well looks like I need another PC and I am trying to decide if I am
going to build my own or try and buy a system from Dell/Compaq or somebody
since things are so cheap.

Anyway.. I am looking for opinions?  If I build my own system is there a
hot motherboard that anyone could recommend?  Which Motherboard on the
market has the best configuration/options.  CPU  Intel?  AMD?  opinions?

Opinions on a particular already built system?  Dell?  Compaq?  others?

of course if someone knows of a website that already has this kind of
information please point me to that direction.

My use of the machine will be a desktop machine.  Must be able to support
High End Video and CD/DVD Burning... running Dual Boot of Linux and
Windows.

Thanks

Daryl