I have now received and installed all the parts to my upgrade for my computer. It came out to $820 to replace the major components of the system. I haven't purchased a DVD rom drive (I have a DVD player in my entertainment system, and no games are coming out for it yet), or a new hard drive (3.1 GB is enough for me for now, although it is now the apparent bottleneck in my system) and my current 17" monitor will do.
I have written up a review of each of the companies I used to put this together, click on each Distributor below, or go straight to the whole review.
I used Pricewatch
exclusively for my pricing on this computer. I tried using
E-bay, however found I
didn't have the time to mess with trying to bid on the auctions there.
| State | Product | Manufacturer | Distributor | Retail * | Best Price ** |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Installed 12/1/98 | PII 350 Processor - Retail | Intel | Accubyte, Inc. | $290 | $275 |
| Installed 11/13/98 | P6B40-A4X PII 4 DIMM/3 ISA/4 PCI/AGP | TekRam | Universal Computer | ~$120 | $106.35 |
| Installed 12/1/98 | 128 MB PC-100 SDRAM | Generic | Accubyte Inc. | $220 | $179.95 |
| Installed 12/2/98 | Diamond Viper 550 TNT | Diamond Multimedia | Data Market Distributors | $199.99 | $125.78 |
| Installed 12/2/98 | SoundBlaster Live! Value | Creative Labs | Data Market Distributors | $99 | $75.77 |
| Installed 11/13/98 | ATX Mid Tower Case w/ 250W Power 3 L. bays, 4 Sm. bays, removable sides | Premier | PC Broker | $79 | $57.68 |
| Totals: | $1007.98 | $820.53 | |||
So I saved $187.45 from retail price (not including the 6% sales tax in NC which would run $60.50).
* - In most cases retail price is based of the Manufacturer's Web Page. All others are based off Intrex Computer's Parts page. Intrex is a local computer parts provider in Raleigh/Durham/Chapel Hill, NC. All of the retail prices do not include sales tax.
** - In all cases best prices include Shipping & Handling costs. I used mainly 2nd day/ground UPS on all but the video card and sound card, which I used next day air.