Buildng PC - Specs :)

Right, thanx to my dad realising this comp is f***** up ... hes building a new one. The I key, U key, space bar and J key on my keyboard are gone, so apologse for those letters not showng up ...

Anyway, I would apprecate anyone pointing in the drection of a cheap place to get any of the followng:

AMD Athlon 3000+ (FSB 333)
1GB DDR 2700(333mhz) Ram
ASUS A7V8X-X Mother Board
GEFORCE 4 MX-440 1.28mb 8x DDR wth D1 TV.Out
80GB Hard Drve ATA 133-7200RPM
CD-RW - GOT
Floppy Drive - GOT? Maybe use one in current comp
Network Card - GOT
Fax Modem - Got
Coolermaster Heatsink+fan
400 Watt power unnt(PSU) - Bottom Inlet - Like a vent at the bottom for better airflow
CD Rom Drive - GOT
Keyboard - With Front Rest
Optical Mouse - GOT
40Gb Drive - Got
Thermal Interface Material(Some heatsnks include this)
Xion Blue Acrylic case - They Look Class

Case Must have:
2 USB Ports nfront(Xon)
2 secondary coolng fans
Front audio port
height: 420 * wdth 192 * depth 470

DVD-RW - Just want this pricing ...

The Power Supply must meet the motherboard oem's spec
Heatsnk + Fan must be for AMD3000+


All help will be greatly appreciated

I would check out http://newegg.com/ for build it yourself...or http://www.alienware.com/ for prebuilt...

You're from England, right? It belongs to the EU (does it?) so I suggest you order your parts from a country that belongs to the EU because all you have to care about is that you pay VAT to the country from which you order it. Couldn't find any Finnish webshops with English pages, but many Finns order equipment from Germany for example.

a very excellent place to get good pricing on parts for PC's is www.pricewatch.com I'm not sure how convenient that will be for you in Europe but the company I used to own built 50+ PC's in each of 2000, 2001 and 2002 and we found many of our components there...

one other thing to note: if price for performance is a major factor I strongly reccomend not buying a top of the line CPU. an Athlon 2800/333 is about half what a 3000+ is but the performance gain is negligble.

there is also a pricewatch in the UK but I am not sure if it's run in a similar manner:

http://www.pricewatch.co.uk/

and one more tidbit. www.crucial.com/uk crucial has great memory and their prices are always competitive -

I just love buying PC's/components and it occured to me that you might want to find out what the pro's say about individual components:

www.tomshardware.com is probably the best site for learning about components and seeing how they stack up from company to company. No biases, just independent testing by very knowledgable people.

*** I just took a look at Tom's CPU tests and it showed the 2.53 P4 to give more bang for the buck (when correlated with Pricewatch) than a comparably priced AMD chip. The AMD 2700 does look like a bargain though.

Baker, thnx for all your help, and every1 else ... but my dad wants me to price everything on its own ... so get to search around. I'll check out the sites you guys gave me, and price from them if i can.

Also, baker, about not getting the top of the range processor ... can u explan a little more please?

*warning I used to work for Intel and own stock.

In my opinion you should never buy a cutting edge cpu. You always get shafted by paying too much for something that will soon be dropping in price dramatically. There is always a processor out there that's 85-95% as fast performance wise but costs 40-70% of the premium CPU speed. Since the relative performance hit is almost undetectable on 95% of regular computer use you wind up paying about $100-$300 more for ~5-15% higher performance 5% of the time. It's simply not worth it. If you want to get more for the same money upgrade your monitor or video card you'll cetainly notie the difference much more often. As a general rule any CPU over $180 is probably still in the high profit margin zone.

take a look here:
http://www.tomshardware.com/cpu/20030623/p4_3200-07.html and on the next 4-5 (change the 07.html to 08.html etc) pages to see how the same machine with various processors did. Bottomline: a 2.53Ghz P4 will serve your purposes better in most cases and save you some cash. The AMD Athlon 2700 is pretty high performance and can be had for < $120. The high end Athlons 3000+ are not what AMD makes them out to be and you should thing about an Intel chip if you really want to spend $300. You can also look for hardware compatability issues on Tom's site.

when you compare the performance open this window too. It's pricewatch in the UK and it shows you lists of vendor prices for every component you wanted...
www.pricewatch.co.uk

this will take you right to the CPU's page:

long url

zombie edited: you really shoudn't put this long urls in the forum.. it makes all other posts unredable...

an example of a reason not to buy top of the line:

last year I bought some of my web developers new machines. I could have spent top dollar for 2.53 and 2.6 (maybe $400-450) but instead I bought mostly 1.8's for about $150-$170. If I really had to have that speed now, I could actually upgrade my machines to 2.53's for another $150 still save $100/machine (even having bought 2 processors for each) and have a pile of P4-1.8ghz chips I could make into dual chip serversor sell.

Alternatively I could buy a 2.8Ghz chip for each and have spent around the same 400-450/machine, have better chips in them (2.8 vs 2.53 or 2.6) and still have the pile of old chips...

Hey, Thnx agan for all the help im prcng everythng now