New PC in da house!

Posted by JD 08/02/2008 at 09:03

I love Georgia Tax Free Holidays.

On these 4 days, I plan a trip to the local Fry’s to see what’s available as a deal. This year was no different. Thursday a few ex-TIAs from AT&T met up and shopped.
I walked away with this booty:

  1. Intel Core 2 Duo E6550 ($139 bundle with MoBo)
  2. ECS junk MoBo,
  3. PCIe x16 nVidia 7200GS card (free AR) and
  4. 2×1GB RAM ($18 AR)
    All for about about $160 AR today! Life was good. Then I discovered that the Mobo only supports 1 IDE connections – which needs to be a DVD drive. I need to get 1 SATA disk to boot it. Back to Fry’s.

Friday at Fry’s – 2 ex-TIAs meet. The mobo/CPU combo has changed to a 50% faster CPU, E8400 – for the same price!. Must get deal.

  1. Return the Thursday deal, get the Friday CPU/Mobo deal. There’s more to the story because the returns guy said they were sold out – they weren’t.
  2. Need a SATA drive since the exact same cheap Mobo is used. 500GB for $87 – eh, not the best price, but I need it. I mention that sounds expensive since the ad had a hitachi 500GB for $69 (which I don’t recall then).

Go and check out. The E8400 CPU doesn’t come with a fan/heatsink … need one of those!

Return the Thursday Mobo/CPU, come back inside. Search for a heatsink/fan – found $9.90. See a cheap power strip for $1.99 – pick it up. Check the ad and see that Hitachi 500GB for $69 is the deal I wanted. Ask about it – yep – get it. Now I need to return the $87/500GB drive. Pay – they make me sign something that says the disk can’t be returned after 15 days. Guess these are really bad disks? Just the disk in an anti-static bag is provided – no cables. I decide that returning the other 500GB disk is too much hassle – I need to mirror them anyway.

CPU Performance Summary:
|=.CPU|=. SPECInt Rate|=.Relative Perf|
|Intel E6600|=.53.7|=.1.0|
|Intel E6550|=.52.7|=.0.98|
|Intel E8400|=.81.5|=.1.57|

Definitely worth the $9.90 added cost to get 50% performance improvement!

Yes, I spent more than the $200 that I intended. Yes, I got much more machine. Yes, it is much cheaper than buying a new machine anywhere else. Heck, it may be fast enough to run MS-Vista …. ok, maybe not – it only has 2 CPUs and 2GB of RAM.

On the good news side, we couldn’t tell the total amount of RAM this cheapo mobo supported – turns out 4GB with 2×2GB sticks. That’s perfect.

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