Quoting Paul Linehan <plinehan at yahoo.com>:
>> Hi all,
>> I'm planning to make up my own PC (now that prices
> have fallen NOT!!!).
>> I have a crappy oul monitor, keyboard, mouse
> cdrom and floppy drive.
>> I want to purchase Motherboard, processor,
> case, memory, fan, HDD + anything else I
> might need.
As others have said, three places to check: Peats (Parnell St.),
Maplin (Jervis St. (?)), IT Direct (Parliament St.)
I've bought/built ~4 PCs between these three and scan.co.uk.
Mobo/processor: compare Peats and IT Direct. IT Direct go through
several shipments/week, may not have any chips when you're there, ask them
to hold one for you. Obviously, you need to know what you want/can afford
before even walking in their door....
Fan: Peats gave me some guff about not being willing to take back a dead
mobo/chip if I didn't buy the heatsink/fan from them.... dodgy legal territory
here, but I see their point - I bought the heatsink from them.
Case: Peats have some cheap (£50) and horrible cases. Whatever about looks, do
not, on pain of pain, get a three-bay case. Most mobos now mount the CPU in the
'back right' corner - near the serial/usb/kb/mouse sockets. On a three-bay
case, this means the top face of the heatsink fan is less than a finger's width
from the side of the power-supply casing. Which is why the machine I'm typing
this on is running with a CPU temp of 52C. Go for a 4-bay unless you've picked
a mobo with the CPU somewhere else, or feel like living dangerously.
Memory: IT Direct will probably win out.
HDD: What do you want? Same *shrug* here as for chip. This is completely your
call.
Overall, I could recommend looking at Scan to get a comprehensive look at
price/performance and sweet spots, and making a couple of decisions on what you
want before going hunting availability in the real world. My experience of the
staff in all three places is that it's *completely* hit and miss - magicians and
muppets side by side.
Good luck.
You *are* going to need it..... ;-)
Ronan
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