Page 1
Buy New Or Rebuild?
by Jim "Twitch" TittleArticle Type: How-To
Article Date: Apr. 26, 2001
The Old
I had a PII 266 MHz CPU overclocked to 295 with 96MB of P66 RAM that was upgraded from 32MB. My video card was a Revolution IV with 32MB that I upgraded from the original. That company has since gone out of business. I'd put a new 7,200 R.P.M. 27-Gigabyte Maxtor hard drive in. The old keyboard had worn out and I got a Microsoft keyboard for $30. It lacked CPU and RAM power though. With the software titles out it was in need of either a re-build or replacement.
I carefully researched motherboards, RAM and CPUs. A new graphics board was probably in the cards too and, say, an Athlon CPU would need a stronger power supply. I came to the conclusion that spending $800 or so would be foolish compared to a whole new machine that I guessed would run about $1,100 - $1,200. What to do?
Every catalog I laid my hands on had something pretty close to what I wanted, but not exactly. Why should I have to pay for a DVD player when I do not want one? Or the video card was very good but not excellent. I wasn't going to buy another. I priced out some of the pieces to upgrade separately and found this: the ASUS MoBo was $159, Athlon 1.1GHZ T-Bird was $429, 256MB PC 133 RAM was $189, and the good GeForce 64MB video board was $399 coming to $1,176! My previous improvements over time amounted to just at $450 already. Rebuilding was not cost effective.
Long ago a COMBATSIM reader posted a web site that had many computer hardware configurations compared by price and listed by company. It was neat since you could link directly to the company site and, perhaps, find even more. The site is Pricewatch.com and you can shop for everything from RAM chips to complete systems in its immense listings.
I began hitting company site links and found the same thing as the catalogs—almost but not quite everything I wanted. I soon hit a site for a company called Freeway Technology and was soon involved in a screen that allowed the user to start with a base machine and add the goodies he wanted. This was more like it!
www.Freeway.com's custom system building interface
The New
I could upgrade from a base Athlon T-Bird 850MHZ to a 1.2GHz CPU for $95. 256MB of PC 133 RAM was only $49 more than 128MB. I Don't want a DVD so that's zero dollars extra. You get the picture. I stayed at 256 MB RAM to see how it goes. A 128 MB stick costs only $48 if I feel I need more.
AMD CPU
I virtually built my machine on the web site. I picked an ASUS A7V133 KT133A 266 MHZ FSB ATA100 motherboard to place my 1.2 Gig T-Bird and 256MB RAM chip on. I dropped in a 20 GB Maxtor 7,200 RPM hard drive. I'd use my 27 gig as a secondary drive in the mid-tower case with its four 5 1/4" and two 3 1/2" drive bays. My little-used CD-RW drive would slide in too.
A Samsung 52X CD-ROM drive was standard. For sound I picked the medium-priced Sound Blaster PCI 128 card. For me, sounds have always been ample even from my old SB 16 and why spend extra for better speakers when I had a rich, powerful Yamaha set at home. The pair supplied with the PCI 128 is quite inferior though, so consider upgrading with aftermarket speakers or upgrading on the web site. The 56k modem had an Intel chipset with voice/fax capability. I opted for Windows ME from up from my 95 version though I could have gotten 98. We'll see.
Maxtor Hard Drive
Now it was graphics card decision time. I narrowed it down to an ATI Radeon 64MB and the nVidia GeForce 2 Ultra 64MB. After visiting both of those company web sites I chose the nVidia that I leaned toward anyway. It was $170 more than the ATI but I sure didn't want to be upgrading in a year and my wife agreed. So for $1,238 I'd have an all-new machine as strong as Godzilla. Godzilla is a good metaphor since a powerful machine can digest anything thrown its way without a belch too.
NVIDIA GeForce
I don't use a scanner to the extent a graphic designer does but knew my four year old one would not work with its old ISA slot. I found a 42-bit Visioneer for only $10 after rebates at Staples! Actually I sent my dear wife to see if they had it in stock since I go ballistic when advertised specials are not stocked in depth to satisfy customer demand.
Getting It
I placed the on-line order on a Monday afternoon and found that I could pick it up late Thursday or early Friday! If I had purchased it from an out-of-state company standard UPS ground would run from $29-45 depending on your location. If you do that from Freeway Technology you can log onto their web site and track your package en route yourself for an ETA.
Best of all I did not go to a retail store and be ignored by the know-nothing personnel (as is the usual case), or arrive to be told that the "special" ad item was sold out since they only had a tiny number of units to begin with. These are some of the things that have driven me away from retail store purchases for computer related items. Nothing disgusts me more than to wait fifteen minutes for attention and be told, "We only had three of the $129 CD-RW (or whatever) units for the sale but we got plenty of these $200 ones." Bait and switch? You decide.
Freeway Technology is located about twenty-five miles east of metropolitan Los Angeles in an unassuming business park. It has been around for six years and still has a small staff that work like a well-honed fire team.
When an order comes in and is processed the technicians get to work building your computer. I saw no more than a half a dozen being assembled on the neat, clean workbenches. Depending on the case and base model you have chosen it is a simple process of plugging in all the parts for the people that do that all the time. Every device is set, tested and OK’ed before shipment or customer pickup. The remarkable thing is that their turn time is three or four days from order receipt to finished product.
They offer enough base systems to allow almost unlimited mixing and matching of components by the consumer on the web site. You can e-mail or call toll-free to Gary in the sales department with all the questions you want before deciding.
Driving home I wanted to hit low orbit so as to quickly play with my Godzilla machine.
Fire It Up
I unpacked the squat, mid-tower box and looked at how it was put together. I could remove the side panels to easily access the guts. Other cases I’ve owned were Chinese puzzle-like in their complexity of aligning everything. Using only two hands to set the three-sided covers with numerous tabs and slots is maddening. The only thing better than this handy case would be one with a hinged door.
I looked everything over and slid my old H.D. into a slave position in the drive bay. That is how I transfer all my files from one computer to another. The old hard drive in new computer as a secondary drive “D” makes for easy copying of your old files. Unless you have an external backup device like a Zip or Jazz drive or burn a CD ROM you need to commence the dumb, slow process of copying files to 1.44MB floppy disks. It is just so easy to open two “my computer” windows for drives C and D then drag the files you need to new drive. This works great for you if you’ve installed MSWord on the new drive and want to move three hundred document files from the old. You can basically drag the whole program over if you are using the same version of Windows. If, like me, you upgrade to ME from 95 or 98, you need to re-install your programs on the new hard drive otherwise they will not work due to registry conflicts.
I can see nothing user different from Windows98 to WindowsME at first glance. I’ve used '98 heavily on other computers besides my home machine and the overall “feel” is the same. It feels and looks different than '95 though. But this is not knocking it or praising it. It uses no config.sys or autoexec.bat files that need tweaking either.
The first entertainment title I loaded was Star Trek Armada. Needless to say I could pump up all the options to max and it ran fine. Noticeably faster was the loading time and, of course, the graphics never slowed down no matter how much action there was on the screen.
Microsoft titles like Crimson Skies and Combat Flight Simulator 2 automatically detected the more powerful graphics capability and adjusted their detail settings accordingly to maximum. European Air War and MiG Alley ran comfortably at full, high-detail. I varied the resolution size from 800 X 600 to 1024 X 768 and actually 800 X 600 gave good view sizes for me but loaded with all the detail I wanted. 16 and 32-bit color is supported. If your monitor can stand it the GeForce can manage 1280 X 960 maximum resolution as one of its twenty-two modes. It really proves how much things have changed from a four-year old 32MB video card. I know that even the nVidia 32MB GeForce is better than the Revolution IV by all accounts from COMBATSIM testers. You may be happy with a 32MB card and spend the savings on more RAM.
The new Sound Blaster produces a superior resonance in all tone spectrums. If you’re really into big sound pay a bit more for the SB Live or a lot more for the SB Live Platinum.
Neat Stuff
The ASUS MoBo has the capability to overclock by keystroke in the BIOS menu. This is the feature that convinced me to go with it. Even with a less powerful CPU you can speed up the CPU to better stretch your investment dollars. By increasing the CPU frequency in one MHz increments with the clock multiplier at 12.0x you can step up the CPU twelve MHz by clocking at 101 MHz for a 1212 MHz speed. At a modest 110 MHz frequency an 850 MHz CPU becomes a 970 MHz chip. That may be the difference in a software title operating more smoothly.
ASUS Motherboard
The layout of the board is logical and neat to me. Everything is visible and accessible in a mid-tower case. It has three DIMM slots for a maximum of 1.5 gig of memory using three 512k sticks. You can add differing memory sizes on the next slots if you want and all will be compatible if you see PC-133 128 MB chips at a good price later.
The monitoring utility is very complete and you can check fan speed, CPU and MoBo temps and voltage as well as hard drive, memory usage and hardware/device specifications. Simply put—if you overclock you can monitor to see if things are getting too hot under the hood or not and proceed from there.
The ASUS A7V133 is worth the money even if you are just rebuilding. Its abilities to adjust for future CPUs and all the things we do today makes it stand out. Alone it usually retails for about $160 in the U.S. You can buy cheaper boards but only a few have the versatility of the ASUS. And yes, you can spend more. If you are locked into a Pentium III CPU, better boards are in that same $160 range.
So I proved to myself that hanging on to that old machine and dumping money into it was not the way to go for me. Everything involved in a rebuild left too many compromises to my taste and more actual money spent. All I would have had left was a case, floppy drive, 32X CD-ROM and H.D. In my base model all those were included with just $30 extra for the fast Maxtor 20 gig hard drive.
Certainly technology will increase and some day I’ll be replacing again, but I’d have to emphasize to anyone else, to look at the pros and cons before deciding to rebuild or replace. . If you have a year old machine you are ahead, perhaps for now, to update it some. If you’re running a 500 MHz CPU on a mother board that won’t take much larger with a 16 MB video card and 128 MB RAM and a slower hard drive, think seriously about a new “Godzilla” machine.
Other Helpful Web Sites
- CPUReview.com
- AMD
- ASUS Motherboards
- ATI Video
- NVIDIA Video
- Intel
- Fast MHz Overclocking
- Sharky Extreme
- 3DFiles.com
Click to join a discussion about this article.
Click Here for Printer Version
© 1997 - 2001 COMBATSIM.COM, Inc. All Rights Reserved.
