ot: the best online computer parts store?

[Janina Sajka]

Gregory Nowak writes:
> > You could buy a bare bones computer 
> > for about the same price that you can buy the parts seperately.
> 
> The problem with bear bones systems is that the bear bones parts can
> be proprietary.

Well, you will want to avoid the proprietary, of course. You'll want to
know that what you're buying is directly supported by Linux. But, if you
do that, you can get a much better system for about the same money. I
did this year. Here's what I got about 5/6 months ago, and what I would
tweak today ...

Asus Pundit P3-PH5 bare bones -- Caso, power supply and socket 775 mobo,
about $200

I paid $30 to significantly enhance the cpu fan with a Zerotherm 
PU Cooler

I paid about $30 for a DVD/CDR burner.

I paid around $240 for an Intel dual-core 6600 CPU, key factoid being
the 4-Mb L2 cache. Very nice, but I'm already looking at swapping it for
the $275 quad-core.

I paid about $116 each for two 1Gb sticks of fast OCZ memory.

I got a 500Gb 7200 RPM Western Digital SATA disk with 16Mb cache to use
for file storage for about $110.

So far, the above all came from Newegg.

Lastly, I bought a couple of 10K RPM 36Gb SATA disks, also 16Mb cache,
on Ebay for around $40 each. One of those two is the slash partition on
this system I'm describing. Admittedly, this was a darn good price for
this disk.

This gave me a smoking fast system for around $900. It's also an
extensible system. I can go up to 8Gb in RAM in four slots. And, as I
said, I'm already looking at swapping the dual-core for a quadcore--same
socket.

Best of all, Fedora 7 just installed--over PXE no less. Yes, I needed to
get sighted assistance to configure the bios to look for PXE on power
up, and I accepted help installing the parts, because I'm not
particularly good at that.

Every device is natively recognized and properly supported by Fedora. It
just works, and I love it. Can you buy a system for under $900? Yes, you
can. Can you buy a system like this for less? Not today--unless you put
it together from parts. Probably not for another year or so.


Janina