best "bang for the buck" pre-built desktop PC for use with SW2004

Good Luck!

Joa,

You ain't gonna find "ANYTHING" pre-built, and SW capable at that price.

You may be able to cobble something together with no-name junk from Fry's (fried) Electronics, but that's about it. An acceptable video card will cost you $250.00 to $300.00 all by itself.

Regards

Mark

I went on Pricewatch and found these items. I'm sure you could find someone to build it for you, or just do it yourself...

350W Case IntroPC $32.00 AthlonXP 2200 CPU AMD $51.00 512MB PC2100 RAM Generic $54.00 Quadro4 550XGL Video Card PNY $106.95 40GB Hard Drive Western Digital $54.00 CD-ROM 48X Internal Samsung $11.00 Motherboard ASUS A7V 333 $42.00 Keyboard Generic $7.00 Mouse HP $2.00 Monitor 19" Daewoo $149.00

Total---> $508.95

This setup should do very well actually. You would want to increase the RAM as much as possible and find a good CPU fan.

Mike Wilson

You forgot one major line item--

XP-pro, OEM liscense, $130

I knew I forgot something. I thnik we're still under budget. Maybe add a sound card and speakers? I suppose Microsoft Office would need to be purchased as well to do design tables. That may throw us over $800.00.

Mike

On my budget system, the copy of Office gets moved over from the old PC. I'm still running my five year old copy of Office 2000, and see no reason to upgrade.

I uploaded my Excel matrix to my website in case anyone wants to plug their own numbers in...

If I missed something, or if anyone sees a better deal, let me know and I'll add it.

So far the grand total is $777 bucks.

Mike

Put any extra money into two things ~ More memory ~ since the dawn of digital history, money in memory has always paid off. With memory intensive apps like SW, there is no such thing as 'extra' memory.

Graphics upgrade ~ 3/4 of any money 'left over' should be put into GPU upgrade. Bang for the buck, this is tops. Nothing else so dramatically effects program perfomance, or degrades or crashes the same, like an underpowered, inadequate graphics card. A couple hundred $ on this is money well spent.

Other hardware/sofware/system considerations are secondary.

: > I knew I forgot something. I thnik we're still under budget. Maybe : > add a sound card and speakers? I suppose Microsoft Office would : > need to be purchased as well to do design tables. That may throw : > us over $800.00. : >

: > Mike : >

: >

: :

This is good stuff and I've actually kind of been wanting to build a PC for a while now. Is this everything I need?

Can anybody make any comments on how to improve (without significantly affecting price) or substitute? Any of these components you would stay away from? Thanks Mike!

J oa

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I like

out the new prices on the 36 & 73 GB 10,000 rpm Western Digital Hard Drives, they rock. Best Regards, Devon T. Sowell