[Nottingham] Making PCs from parts

[Robert Postill]

On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 16:13 +0000, Duncan John Fyfe wrote:
> On Wed, 2005-03-23 at 14:22 +0000, James Gibbon wrote:
> > Hiya everyone,
> > 
> > Apologies if this is considered a bit off-topic, but I'm planning to
> > put together a couple of PCs from parts, as a sort of project; not 
> > something I've done before. Can anyone recommend a supplier of (new)
> > motherboards, power supplies, processors, cases and so on?
I can recommend some components that I've bought recently that I'm very
pleased with:
Antec case and PSU, a low noise effort, works well and enough screws so
it isn't a crisis if you drop one.   Check about though, Slashdot had
some reviews of exploding PSUs a little while ago.  Also look for large
fans, they make less noise.
ASUS motherboard, generally well regarded, my A8N-SLI Deluxe has two
NICs, loads of USB2 support and Firewire, the temperature sensor's a bit
wonky but a BIOS update will fix that.  Abit are a good alternative.
NVidia graphics cards, the NVidia support for linux is better than ATI's
in my opinion.  My 6600, 128MB, PCI-Express unit cost less than £100
from ebuyer.
Buy SATA drives, more capacious.  For luxury buy SCSI but expect twice
the price for that extra bit of build quality.  Also if you're buying
SCSI probably safest to get an Adaptec SCSI card.  Personally I prefer
Saegate or Western Digital drives , I had a bad experience with a
Fujitsu once and IBM have stopped making their own :(
AMD CPUs, they've been shaking Intel so badly they've brought forward
their 65nm parts and done a remix of AMD's instruction set.  Not to
mention support from all the major distros means you can take advantage
of that 64-bit magic and make Windows look extra paltry.
RAM, I've had duff RAM so I buy Crucial or Kingston these days.  Don't
buy less than 512MB.  The only thing I'd say about Crucial, they do some
unbelievably naff "gamer-oriented" RAM, if you've read the Register
recently you'll have seen the Ads...for shame.

If you want the cheapest price you might want to try Micro Mart, but
some of the dealers in there aren't as good as the likes of ebuyer/dabs.

Robert.
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