System builders list...

ddrueding

ddrueding

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Joined
Feb 4, 2002
Messages
19,879
Location
Horsens, Denmark
I'm just curious what the other low-volume (ok, Tony too) system builders here are putting together and what they're charging. As my systems are oriented towards gaming and I hate building budget boxes, here's my current offerings:

Budget:
Antec Super Lanboy
Seasonic S12-330
Scythe SCNJ-1000
GeIL 2x512MB PC3200
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9
Athlon64 "Venice" 3000+
Gigabyte X700Pro PCI-E
Seagate 80GB SATA
BenQ DL DVD-RW
Windows XP Pro SP2
$1300

Value:
Antec Super Lanboy
Seasonic S12-330
Scythe SCNJ-1000
GeIL 2x512MB PC3200
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9
Athlon64 "Venice" 3000+
Gigabyte X800XL PCI-E
Seagate 200GB SATA
BenQ DL DVD-RW
Windows XP Pro SP2
$1600

Performance:
Antec P180
Antec Phantom 350W
Scythe SCNJ-1000
Corsair XMS DDR550 1GB
Gigabyte nForce4 SLI
A64 "San Diego" 3700+
HIS X850XT Radeon 256MB
Creative Audigy2 Gamer
Seagate 400GB SATA
BenQ DL DVD-RW
Windows XP Pro SP2
$3000

Of course, that includes my margin, 1yr warranty and tech support on any software they bought with the system.

How about you guys?
 
I try to keep the volue as low as I sensibly can, David. Otherwise we have to do too much work. :o

I'm at home, fed up to the back teeth with trying to understand a great big PHP/MySQL program, let alone write an extension for it, and bored, so here goes.

Oh ... I can only remember model numbers for products we sold new five or more years ago, and am a bit vague about prices, so I'll just stick in the bits I can remember. We customise a lot, of course: screens, video cards, mainboards, optical drives, and so on. You can have any colour case you like so long as it's white.


Budget:
Don't know the manufacturer, but a decent quality plain vanilla case
Gigabyte VIA-based Socket A board
Sempron 2200
512MB Geil
On-board video (Astonishingly good picture quality for an on-board unit)
Samsung 80GB PATA
Lite-On CDRW
Panasonic 1.44 FDD
17 inch Mitsubishi or Acer CRT
Logitech keyboard (OK, but not great. The Mitsubishi Professonal that they don't make anymore now was quite a lot better. It has become impossible to source a quality keyboard now.)
Logitech optical mouse
Rock speakers (little ones - worth about $15)
XP Home

Lower mid-range:
As above, but:
Gigabyte Socket 754 mainboard, VIA chipset, all-in-one
Sempron 3000
Bigger speakers

Mid-range:
As above, but:
Bliss case and power supply. (These are a bit expensive, but still nice plain vanilla and superb quality.)
Gigabyte Nforce III Socket 754 board (K8NS? Something like that.)
Sempron 3000
Leadtek Gforce 4000 128MB AGP
Samsung 120GB PATA

These are usually our best-selling system. Obviously, we tinker with the basics for particular tasks - bigger video cards for gamers, more RAM, different CPU options, and so on.

Nothing else sells in any volume worth talking about, just those three, especially the third one.
 
The CPU mix right now is interesting too.

If they still made them, we would still be selling better than 50% of the total CPU mix in Athlon XP 2500s. The Barton 2500 is superior on the desktop to any Celeron, Socket A Sempron, Pentium 4, or small-cache Athlon (2400, 2700 non-Barton, etc). On the desktop it is indistinguishable from the higher-clocked Barton-core Athlons (XP 3000+ for example) and the A64-based Semprons. Only an Athlon 64 outperforms it for normal everyday use, and even then the difference is small. Simply, it was one of the all-time great CPUs. Alas, you can't buy them anymore.

The nearest substitute is the Barton XP2800 - but since AMD put the 2800 price up by quite a lot, these are a non-starter.

So that leaves us using the lack-lustre Socket A Semprons for the low end. The Socket A Sempron 2800 is a reasonable performer, though slower than the old XP 2500 and not much cheaper than a Socket 754 Sempron 3000, so we rarely use those. In any case, we can't source KT-600 motherboards for them any more and have been reduced to sticking in a Nforce II based thing and hoping to Christ that it doesn't bugger up. It is a Gigabyte though, so maybe they will be OK.

In the end, the only reason to select a Socket A Sempron is because you don't want to shell out for a Socket 754-based one (and also because the current model Celerons are complete crap and not even cheap), so if you are buying on prce you might as well have the cheapest one - i.e., the 2200. We will switch to the 2400 when the 2200s run out. Mainboards for these are easy: in this segment, you are only really looking at all-in-one boards, and the Gigabyte VIA-based boards just plug in and work.

I don't know why anyone buys Pentium 4s. They can seem allright on first impression, but the moment you start a second task up they bog down and race along like a champion 100 metre sprinter up to his waist in a sewage pond — lots of arm-waving, very little progress over the ground. We sell, on average, one every couple of years.

The surviving Athlon XPs are hopelessly overpriced. A Socket 754 Sempron costs less and goes equally well on the desktop, better in games.

Of the Socket 754 Semprons, the 3000 is the one to have, though the 3100 is in the ballpark, price-performance wise. The Sempron 3000 is our best-selling CPU right now. We sell roughly 60% of them on a Gigabyte Nforce III board with stand-alone video, 40% on a Gigabyte VIA-based all-in-one board. Although the Nforce III boards have been completely trouble-free so far, I have bitter memories of the bad drivers and poor reliability of Nforce I and Nforce II chipsets, so I'll look into replacing them with a VIA-based board soon. (Why take chances when you don't have to? Gigabyte have a VIA-based board out now, so I'll probably switch to it.)

In Athlon-64 space, the Socket 939 3000 is probably the one to have. It's barely any dearer than the Socket 754 equivalent, so on the face of things you might as well go with the newer platform.

But the hard, cold commercial reality is that it simply isn't practical to try to stock more than a certain number of products. Your economies of scale go down and (inevitably) your prices have to rise to cover that. By buggerising around with five different chip families on six different types of motherboard (you have stand-alone AGP and UMA versons of each of the three socket types, remember) AMD have made life much more difficult for their OEMs.

In the glory days of the XP 2500, we carried just two different motherboards: an AGP board for the 2500 and the high-end 3000, and an all-in-one board for the entry-level 2000 chip (sometimes used for bigger CPUs too, of course). Or go back to the days when the Athlon Classic was the fastest thing in town: you had one board for Athlons, and the FIC VA-503+ for everything else. (Boards with on-board video were such crap in those days that you usually tried to avoid them.)

So we carry the Socket 754 Athlon 3000 in stock and only get in Socket 939 parts to order — usually the 3500, because if you are that keen on performance, then you will probably want to spend the extra anyway.

Overall, at a rough guess, we sell:

30% Sempron 2200 (Socket A)
5% Sempron 2800 (Socket A)
35% Sempron 3000
25% Athlon 64 3000 (Socket 754)
5% Athlon 64 3000, 3200 or 3500 (Socket 939)
5% other stuff

(Yeah yeah, so that adds up to 105%. I exaggerate a bit sometimes. What else is new?)

It wouldn't surprise me to see the Athlon 64 percentage go up quite a bit more over the next couple of months. They will probably become our #1 quite soon.
 
The CPU mix right now is interesting too.

If they still made them, we would still be selling better than 50% of the total CPU mix in Athlon XP 2500s. The Barton 2500 is superior on the desktop to any Celeron, Socket A Sempron, Pentium 4, or small-cache Athlon (2400, 2700 non-Barton, etc). On the desktop it is indistinguishable from the higher-clocked Barton-core Athlons (XP 3000+ for example) and the A64-based Semprons. Only an Athlon 64 outperforms it for normal everyday use, and even then the difference is small. Simply, it was one of the all-time great CPUs. Alas, you can't buy them anymore.

The nearest substitute is the Barton XP2800 - but since AMD put the 2800 price up by quite a lot, these are a non-starter.

So that leaves us using the lack-lustre Socket A Semprons for the low end. The Socket A Sempron 2800 is a reasonable performer, though slower than the old XP 2500 and not much cheaper than a Socket 754 Sempron 3000, so we rarely use those. In any case, we can't source KT-600 motherboards for them any more and have been reduced to sticking in a Nforce II based thing and hoping to Christ that it doesn't bugger up. It is a Gigabyte though, so maybe they will be OK.

In the end, the only reason to select a Socket A Sempron is because you don't want to shell out for a Socket 754-based one (and also because the current model Celerons are complete crap and not even cheap), so if you are buying on prce you might as well have the cheapest one - i.e., the 2200. We will switch to the 2400 when the 2200s run out. Mainboards for these are easy: in this segment, you are only really looking at all-in-one boards, and the Gigabyte VIA-based boards just plug in and work.

I don't know why anyone buys Pentium 4s. They can seem allright on first impression, but the moment you start a second task up they bog down and race along like a champion 100 metre sprinter up to his waist in a sewage pond — lots of arm-waving, very little progress over the ground. We sell, on average, one every couple of years.

The surviving Athlon XPs are hopelessly overpriced. A Socket 754 Sempron costs less and goes equally well on the desktop, better in games.

Of the Socket 754 Semprons, the 3000 is the one to have, though the 3100 is in the ballpark, price-performance wise. The Sempron 3000 is our best-selling CPU right now. We sell roughly 60% of them on a Gigabyte Nforce III board with stand-alone video, 40% on a Gigabyte VIA-based all-in-one board. Although the Nforce III boards have been completely trouble-free so far, I have bitter memories of the bad drivers and poor reliability of Nforce I and Nforce II chipsets, so I'll look into replacing them with a VIA-based board soon. (Why take chances when you don't have to? Gigabyte have a VIA-based board out now, so I'll probably switch to it.)

In Athlon-64 space, the Socket 939 3000 is probably the one to have. It's barely any dearer than the Socket 754 equivalent, so on the face of things you might as well go with the newer platform.

But the hard, cold commercial reality is that it simply isn't practical to try to stock more than a certain number of products. Your economies of scale go down and (inevitably) your prices have to rise to cover that. By buggerising around with five different chip families on six different types of motherboard (you have stand-alone AGP and UMA versons of each of the three socket types, remember) AMD have made life much more difficult for their OEMs.

In the glory days of the XP 2500, we carried just two different motherboards: an AGP board for the 2500 and the high-end 3000, and an all-in-one board for the entry-level 2000 chip (sometimes used for bigger CPUs too, of course). Or go back to the days when the Athlon Classic was the fastest thing in town: you had one board for Athlons, and the FIC VA-503+ for everything else. (Boards with on-board video were such crap in those days that you usually tried to avoid them.)

So we carry the Socket 754 Athlon 3000 in stock and only get in Socket 939 parts to order — usually the 3500, because if you are that keen on performance, then you will probably want to spend the extra anyway.

Overall, at a rough guess, we sell:

30% Sempron 2200 (Socket A)
5% Sempron 2800 (Socket A)
35% Sempron 3000
25% Athlon 64 3000 (Socket 754)
5% Athlon 64 3000, 3200 or 3500 (Socket 939)
5% other stuff

(Yeah yeah, so that adds up to 105%. I exaggerate a bit sometimes. What else is new?)

It wouldn't surprise me to see the Athlon 64 percentage go up quite a bit more over the next couple of months. They will probably become our #1 quite soon.
 
Something like half the PCs I build are least-possible-cost machines - under $500 including the monitor and the Windows COA.

That means that things most of you would call compromises are facts of life for me: Integrated video, secondhand displays, $40 cases.

80% of the motherboards I use are Gigabyte branded.
75% of the PCs I sell *do* have DVD Burners. The rest get DVD/CD-Burners.

I don't particularly have a problem with Sempron CPUs. They work fine for just about everybody. Several of my computers have Sempron 3000s in them right now.

I do my best to convince customers to move to Socket 754 if possible. In general, I prioritize upgrades from my "basic" system as DVD Burner, bigger hard disk (80 or 120 instead of 40 or 60), socket 754 over socket A, better case, real video card.

The rest of the PCs I build are sold to college kids who have a little more money, or on Ebay. It's hard to generalize those. They get nicer cases, non-integrated-video socket 754, Via-based motherboards, 160GB hard disks and at least midrange video cards (e.g. Radeon 9550 Pros or 9600XLs). Speakers and Wireless keyboards and mice are what actually sell these systems, I think. Usually these are machines I sell for around $750 (512MB, A64 3000). Maybe $900 on Ebay.

Sometimes I get a hard-core gamer. It annoys the crap out of me that anyone who wants to play PC games can't build a computer themselves, because they've usually learned enough about PC hardware to know exactly what hardware they want. Lately the demand has been for PCs to play World of Warcraft, but I've built a couple PCs for the people I play City of Heroes with as well. These machines get 1GB RAM, A64/3200s and as much graphics card as they feel the need to pay for. Every once in a while someone will tell me they want RAID. If they do, they get RAID1. I've never built a machine for anyone else that used a drive bigger than 250GB. These expensive machines usually end up in Chenming clones of Antec cases, or in Antec Sonatas. I pretty much don't buy cases that cost more than $75 or so.
 
I don't build SPECIFICALLY to sell on Ebay. Sometimes someone will ask me to build a PC and then decide they don't want it. I try to keep those PCs around for the next person, but if I've already ordered my next bunch of parts, or if the PC in question has something special in it (expensive graphics card) it goes to Ebay.
I've never not made a profit from selling a PC, but I've made as little as $17, and sometimes they don't sell at all. To keep that from happening I usually start auctions at $.01 with no reserve, these days. Usually I make $80 or $100 on a computer if I do that.

I do not build PCs with any expectation of making a profit. I sell a service plan, but that's more to minimize my own aggravation than any capitalistic motivation on my part.
 
Mercutio said:
I sell a service plan, but that's more to minimize my own aggravation than any capitalistic motivation on my part.
Click to expand...

I'm very interested in this idea for the same reasons, but haven't figured out how to do it just yet. How is your phrased?
 
All of my systems are customized for each customer. I try to start out with a few recurring items:

Motherboards:
Gigabyte GA-K8NF-9
Gigabyte GA-K8VM800M (thanks for the recommendation Merc & Tony)
GA-7VT600P-RZ (used primarily for Socket A replacement now)
Asus A8V Deluxe
Asus K8V-X
(99% of the time it’s Gigabyte)

CPUs:
Sempron 2800 or 3000
Athlon 64 3000 or 3200

Memory:
Kingston 512MB

HDD:
SP0802C
SP1213C

Optical Drives:
LG GSA-4163BK

Monitors:
AG Neovo F-419 (R12)
(This changes often)

Video:
P65-MDDA8X64
GV-R925128D

Case:
Antec SLK-1650B
Apex 100-G2/1060-G2

Plus some of the other peripherals, but the systems always change by the time the order is finalized and sold. Also, this is the current list, it could easily change by next week.
 
ddrueding said:
I'm very interested in this idea for the same reasons, but haven't figured out how to do it just yet. How is your phrased?
Click to expand...

I don't have a copy handy - but it boils down to this:

I warranty parts against failure for two years. The only caveats I put in this are that the PC must be connected to a surge protector or UPS, and I won't service a PC that's been visibly, physically damaged (I had a customer who went all Cougtek on his machine one time...). Anything that is OBVIOUSLY failed hardware gets a 48-hour turnaround on replacement. Sadly, I have enough hardware laying around that I can do things like that.

I don't warranty data at all, but I usually image drives before I do anything more serious than spyware removal. I give all my customers restore discs and a document describing how to use 'em.

I charge $150 for 18 months of telephone or email support. My day job description includes doing telephone and email support for people anyway, and the people I work for don't care as long as I prioritize personal stuff lower than business stuff. People call my office all the time looking for free support anyway.
Since a lot of the PCs I sell are $400 units, or are to college kids who know at least one "computer" major, I don't get a lot of takers on this, which is exactly what I want.

The other nice thing about my day job is, I can sit around and write support documents. People like to complain that they don't get manuals or learn how to use important features on their PCs. I'll print them out for someone for $20, but I throw what I have in "My Documents" for free.

For $300 a year I'll do on-site service with a 24-hour response time, and I'll give out my personal cell phone number (rather than the business number).

These plans are available at purchase time only. I have had exactly one person pay the $300 fee in the last three years, and she uses the hell out of it. I don't mind too much. She's not much of a computer person. Her problems are usually really simple, and she gives me cookies every time I see her.

If someone calls me after the fact, and has a problem, I charge them if they want my help. Usually I charge 10% of the price of the computer per incident or per hour, at my discretion. For home users, I insist that the computer come to me - I hate doing in-home service.

People who buy hardware off Ebay get 30 days of support or to ask for their money back. The only serious problems I ever had with an Ebayer were 1. a guy who swore up and down that he was owed a copy of Windows XP (the description said "no OS. Windows installed for additional fee") and 2. a gentleman who received a machine DOA. I covered return shipping and refunded his money but he still left me a pissy neutral feedback.
 
Very interesting.......

The computers I build are for a manufacturing business. They either control or monitor a manufacturing process. Time is money, therefor reliability is paramount.
The latest computers contain:

Intel D915GEV motherboards.
Intel P4, 3.0 GHz CPU.
Crucial RAM, usually 1 GB.
Antec SLK 1650B cases and power supplies.
Seagate SATA hard drives.
3Ware SATA RAID cards where applicable.

I use Drive Image to back up the computers. A complete spare is built too.
I keep a spead sheet of what's in each computer I build. This gives me the ability to have multiple 'spares'. ( if a computer is not being used for anything critical, it can be loaded with an image from some other process and put in service) Some of our processes have multiple computers.

The only problem I've had with these computers is heat. The ambiant temperature in some places can go over 100F. Add to that the P4 room heater and the internal computer temperature can go above 140F. Rather toasty.

Bozo :mrgrn:
 
Santilli said:
OK:
I would like to build a 939 socket machine, with an ATX Gigabyte motherboard, using AGP.
I'd like it to be silent, so Seasonic PowerSupply, cheap, so 3000+ Athlon,
1 gig ram, but, I'd like it in a case that is designed for a

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.asp?Item=N82E16817121401


SCA box.

Suggestions???

s
Click to expand...

Just so you know, that SCA box and silent aren't compatible. The fan on the back is quite noisy and cannot be swapped or removed without the very loud alarm going off. Removing the alarm requires a soldering iron or surgical hammer.

I'd suggest this:

11-152-054-07.JPG

11-152-054-08.JPG
 
Actually the fan on the hard drive rack is removable. I replaced mine with a Antec temp controlled 92mm fan.
As long as the fan can report RPM to the circut board, it works fine.

Bozo :mrgrn:
 
Bozo said:
Actually the fan on the hard drive rack is removable. I replaced mine with a Antec temp controlled 92mm fan.
As long as the fan can report RPM to the circut board, it works fine.

Bozo :mrgrn:
Click to expand...

I wonder what the min RPM is? I tried a Nexus in one and the alarm sounded constantly
 
I wonder if they changed fans? When I put mine in, I booted up, and listened to the fan. Not loud. Of course that's relative, and, at the time, I had the screaming meanies in residence, the stock Xeon cooling fans...

See if we need to change that after the new power supply is installed.

s
 
David: couldn't find the case you linked to, and all I get is a picture using that link.

I pulled my new box apart, and the Swifttech cooler is, at least with the current weather, a passive cooler. The fan is controlled by a sensor, and the
temperature never gets over 85 degrees F on the thing, most of the time.

Guess I'll have to fire up Quake and see how it works, or Far Cry.

Another thing I didn't know, and the more I don't know the more embarassing it gets, is DDR on this motherboard requires matching DIMMs, if possible.

That means another gig of ram, to get DDR working. 2 gigs??? Oh well, that's life, live and learn, and, as a last resort, read the manual.

s
:wink:
 
Santilli said:
Another thing I didn't know, and the more I don't know the more embarassing it gets, is DDR on this motherboard requires matching DIMMs, if possible.

That means another gig of ram, to get DDR working. 2 gigs??? Oh well, that's life, live and learn, and, as a last resort, read the manual.

s
:wink:
Click to expand...

Not true. DDR works fine with single DIMMS. However, Dual-Channel DDR requires matching DIMMS in specific sockets to support Dual-Channel mode.
 
Santilli said:
David: couldn't find the case you linked to, and all I get is a picture using that link.
Click to expand...

How embarrasing. Try This one. Sorry about that.

Santilli said:
I wonder if they changed fans? When I put mine in, I booted up, and listened to the fan. Not loud. Of course that's relative, and, at the time, I had the screaming meanies in residence, the stock Xeon cooling fans...
Click to expand...

I'm thinking our definitions might just be different. I recently had to swap out a Zalman Fanmate as it was producing the slightest whistle while slowing my Nexus 120mm fan to 5v.
 
ddrueding said:
Not true. DDR works fine with single DIMMS. However, Dual-Channel DDR requires matching DIMMS in specific sockets to support Dual-Channel mode.
Click to expand...

Some Intel boards throw a BIOS startup error if you don't have two channels populated.
 
Some AS/400s I've worked on have required quads, or sets of 4 identical DIMMs. One model required octets. Not really a problem, mind you, as when you ordered your RAM it came the right way. Imagine the system board with 64 memory slots. :)

The 16GB in my current i5 is 4 x 4GB DIMMs.
 
ddrueding said:
Santilli said:
David: couldn't find the case you linked to, and all I get is a picture using that link.
Click to expand...

How embarrasing. Try This one. Sorry about that.

Santilli said:
I wonder if they changed fans? When I put mine in, I booted up, and listened to the fan. Not loud. Of course that's relative, and, at the time, I had the screaming meanies in residence, the stock Xeon cooling fans...
Click to expand...

I'm thinking our definitions might just be different. I recently had to swap out a Zalman Fanmate as it was producing the slightest whistle while slowing my Nexus 120mm fan to 5v.
Click to expand...

That case is close. I wonder if they have anything with 5-6 drive bays?

Or does that cost another 150 dollars???

s
 
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