The cost of building

[nevermind1534]

500GB PSU

You mean 500W?

EDIT: Another idea, throw a similar PC together on Newegg and see what the price comes out to be. I'm certain it probably won't be as cheap but you never know.

I'll try that now. I'm assuming it has budget ram, a cheap PSU, and a mATX motherboard?

[nevermind1534]

OK, with $477.23, you can get everything, except for vista, with no mirs, but with a 640GB HDD. You can get a 750GB one for the same price with a mail-in rebate. You could then get an OEM copy of Vista. This is assuming that it has a mATX motherboard and DDR2 800. You could probably spend a little less on the monitor and speakers and everything else, though. That is for the $500 Dell.

[xRyokenx]

Yeah, I meant watts... lol.

I think it does have the mATX mobo and the DDR2 800... it still works great though.

[.Maleficus.]

Keep in mind folks - I haven't yet found the manufacturer of my mom's Gateway but her old HP had an Asus so they aren't all bad .

[nevermind1534]

But those boards that they used in that HP, if it's a socket 370 were prone to failure.

[luciusad2004]

I hate to say, I've been noticing this as well. I'll go on to newegg expecting to set up an awesome rig for dirt cheap only to find that it costs a bit more than expected. Then the next day ill browse through the adverts in the newspaper or whatever and find that i could easily get a decent rig for the same money or less than the one i was trying to set up via newegg. As mentioned earlier, the OS is often a deal breaker. I also find nicer power supplies and better mother boards tend to increase the cost quite a bit. If you just want cheap junk at a low price, you can build yourself a computer, but I don't know how long it will stay running.

Since i probably wont be in the market for $1500+ machine for a long, long time, I probably wont get a better deal building by myself. I'll still do it for the love of it though.

[FuzzyPlushroom]

...buuuuut you save money when you upgrade - or don't have to. OEM machines (aside from Dell and some HPs) tend to use bottom-shelf PSUs (remember the eMachines Bestec snafu?), motherboards, etc - and those that don't have onboard video are generally a bad deal, as once you get over the 600-700 dollar mark you can build a better system for your money. Additionally, if you wish to upgrade the case or motherboard, you'll often have to do both at once (which you'll likely want to, since both are built down to a price).

I was pleasantly surprised, recently, by an Acer - Foxconn mATX motherboard with Japanese capacitors and a vacant PCIe x16 slot, Fortron (FSP) 300w (I believe) power supply. (This was an unremarkable AM2 machine, dual-core 4400+ [which I ended up swapping out for my old 3500+] and two gigs of RAM.) Standard mATX layout, too, and it seemed fairly solid. Seagate HDD, for those of you who care. Based on that sample alone, I'd consider an Acer first off as a basic prebuilt machine.

[nevermind1534]

[QUOTE=FuzzyPlushroom;198794]tend to use bottom-shelf PSUs (remember the eMachines Bestec snafu?)/QUOTE]

Yes, this happened to my grandparents' computer. The PSU, motherboard, one of the two sticks of ram, and the keyboard were all dead, and all had to be replaced. Luckily, I had just purchased a motherboard/CPU kit cheap from newegg that fit in the emachines case. I just put their cpu in the new motherboard, and I'm still stuck with the celeron 2.5GHz that came with it.