Originally posted by papadage:
An alternative at Dell that nobody mentioned are the 400SC Servers.


Once in a while, about every 4-5 weeks, Dell will sell you a 400SC tower server for about $290, shipped. This is usually accompanied by a free upgrade of the CPU to anything from a 2.26 to 2.6 P4. The remaining components are bare bones. It has Gigabit ethernet and built in video. Add in a decent video card (it has an 8X AGP slot), some RAM bought from Crucial, and a good sound card and you're set.

The machine itself is great, if large and heavy. Excellent components, great build quality and almost completely silent. It also has a lot of expansion room.

I bought one of these for my mechanic for his DVD shop manuals, accounting, invoicing and internet/email for his eBay account. It's been rock solid since. Total cost would be about $500 to you, shipped, with a decent video card, memory and sound card, leaving you plenty to wait for a Dell sale on LCDs. I bought a 17" Samsung for $430.

The only drawback to this is that the running of a workstation OS is not supported by Dell in the Server. The AGP port is also not supported, even though it works fine. The rest of the components would be supported by Dell Business support, which is much better than the consumer side support.





The only other drawback is that they don't come with any OS, so unless you happen to own a suitable OS, either Windows or your favorite flavor of Linux, you've got to figure that cost in as well.

I was personally this -><- close to jumping on the last 400SC deal, which would have been a 2.6G P4 for ~$300 after rebate, but I can't justify even that relatively small amount of money on a computer for the wife to web surf only on when the old AMD K6 will still run Win XP Pro just fine, if a bit slower than the AMD 2500+ Barton I built for myself for around $350 all told.

Scott

Troll! '99 BMW 328i