Please check this spec

A friend's Socket A board has died (a nasty ECS). Owing to the lack of availability of decent 462 mobos, he is leaning towards a partial rebuild.

An entry level machine is required. These are the components I've selected from Dabs:

AMD Athlon 64 3200 AM2 2GHz
MSI K9N4 ULTRA-F AM2 nForce 500 ultra ATX
Corsair Memory VS512MB533D2 PC4200 512MB CAS4
Asustek ATI Radeon X300 SE - Graphics Adapter - 128MB
Samsung 80GB S300 7200RPM 8MB

Total cost (delivered) = £171

Perhaps I could do better? Cheaper even?

TIA

Funky

I despise Dabs but the system seems about right.

Get it from scan though

Thanks dude.

What's wrong with Dabs?

Their customer service is a joke.

You HAVE to use their instant msg service to talk to them and you can hardly ever get through. Failing that its emails which they take days to reply to.

They dont have any phone numbers so if anything goes wrong prepare to be very annoyed. Took me almost a month to RMA a graphics card.

Thought I'd mention that for an extra £20 you could probably squeeze to a dual core amd

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staffsMike

They dont have any phone numbers so if anything goes wrong prepare to be very annoyed. Took me almost a month to RMA a graphics card.

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yep, contacting them is hard. took them 4 and half months to get my motherboard fixed, and with that they took my rma'd graphics card knowing it wasn't on the rma list and acted as everything was normal, when I asked if it was fixed they said it wasnt meant to be sent and its too late to do anything about it.

Going through Scan with the exact same setup as you have posted comes in at
£162.93 inc del
Cheaper still if you can get the free del via Hexus/Scan.

From Ebuyer I found you could put a system together for £10 extra with 1gb of Crucial PC4300 memory. For me thats the weakest part of it as XP is noticeably faster on 1gb memory compared to 512mb.

Thanks lads - brilliant feedback!

I shall avoid Dabs and order via Scan or Ebuyer with 1GB of RAM.

i would maybe avoid MSI, i have encountered a lot of 'out of the box' problems with them. its usually bios updates etc but for a little more you could get and asus or gigabyte

Dabs are fine, but only if you are on the business side.

Scan are quite useful because they're rather friendly, and their tech teams pretty damn knowledgeable :)

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dave87

Dabs are fine, but only if you are on the business side.

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still dont have a f**kin phone number though do they lol i got one of their brochures sent to me at work and thats the first thing i look for the ^&*&**(&((&(&(!!!!

do you get a personal account manager when u use the dabs for business? oh please say you do i will get an account on monday just to f**k with them!

Customer service tourettes is a terrible thing :D

Quote:

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Originally Posted by staffsMike

still dont have a f**kin phone number though do they lol i got one of their brochures sent to me at work and thats the first thing i look for the ^&*&**(&((&(&(!!!!

do you get a personal account manager when u use the dabs for business? oh please say you do i will get an account on monday just to f**k with them!

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I don't know, I've never dealt with them directly (parents use them). TBH, I don't think Dad's business spends enough for an account manager...

Quote:

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Originally Posted by dave87

I don't know, I've never dealt with them directly (parents use them). TBH, I don't think Dad's business spends enough for an account manager...

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hmm i'd hate to think what the moron on the end of the phone would be like anyway..

all they do when you chat to them is copy and paste..

Quote:

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Corsair Memory VS512MB533D2 PC4200 512MB CAS4

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whats the memory looks low is it a single 512mb in which case you forgo dual channel. personnaly i'd look for a minimum of 1gb 2x512mb modules.