[sclug] Comet Quad core offering - cheap high street commoditisation of computers

[Alex Butcher]

On Sun, 16 Mar 2008, M.Blackmore wrote:

> I dunno what happened to an email I sent to the Tesco thread linked to
> the RDC "pallet of Dells" price information, all sorts of odd things
> seem to be happening to sclug mail at the moment...
>
> Anyway I noticed in The Independent this saturday an advert from Comet
> (or was it Currys??) for a Acer AMD chipped quadcore computer, 19"
> monitor, nvidia 8500 summat 256mb vid card and 2gb of ram.
>
> Struck me as a lot of computer for ?499.99

Aldi were doing an Medion-badged Intel Q6600 quad core machine with 3GB of
RAM and a 500GB HDD (no monitor, though) for 499 last Thursday.

Coincidentally, I saw some potentially interesting HP and Acer models in
Comet the other day, but was put off when I noticed some were using SiS
chipset motherboards; what's the point of using an Intel CPU if you're not
using it on an Intel motherboard for best stability?

[snip]

> [B]ack in the 90s one could
> undercut by some way any maker of PCs from components bought in from
> trade suppliers if you knew the right people. I doubt that is possible
> to achieve nowadays!

I've priced up Dell and Aldi PCs and couldn't build equivalent machines for
the same money, even rating Windows with zero value. :-)

That said, there'd be a few minor tweaks (e.g. DDR800 memory for a
self-build, DDR667 for Dell or Aldi), but given today's performance levels,
I'd be inclined to trade that off in exchange for a three year system-wide
warranty, and a day not spent building the machine. :-)

Best Regards,
Alex.
-- 
Alex Butcher, Bristol UK.                           PGP/GnuPG ID:0x5010dbff

"[T]he whole point about the reason why I think it is important we go for
identity cards and an identity database today is that identity fraud and
abuse is a major, major problem. Now the civil liberties aspect of it, look
it is a view, I don't personally think it matters very much."
  - Tony Blair, 6 June 2006 <http://www.number-10.gov.uk/output/Page9566.asp>