Attn Custom Computer Builders

[dipique]

For those of you who have made dozens of custom computers in your careers: what brands should I look out for? What specs should I keep a careful eye on? Some examples:

In computers, eMachines is a bad name. In PSU's, you have to watch the voltages, not just the "500W" stickers. In Processors, celeron is a bad name. In hard drives, "5200rpm" is a bad sign.

What are bad names/specs in mobos, ram, hdd, processors, etc that can be easily spotted and avoided?

Dan

 

[FghtinIrshNvrDi]

Well, it's really hard to pin down certain companies as 'bad quality.' What I like to do is find the product I'm looking for, and search around the internet for reviews. The first place I look is usually Newegg. They do a lot of business, so they push a lot of reviews. Good luck on your hunt.

Ryan

 

[ThE_MarD]

Heyyo,

It depends really. Sapphire makes ati-brand vidcards, and most are great, but they do have some crappy revisions among them. Their 9600 pro and 9800 pro lineups have had some bad vidcards. The ones with the black PCB have cheap ram that tends to fail, so watch out for those. RMA them for ones with blue pcb's.

Mostly you can trust asus for mobos. They're high quality. I hear their vidcards ain't as good though.

Samsung. Put your trust in samsung. Everything they make is high quality. Their incredible monitors, their low priced ram (some are starting to come with heat spreaders with barely any price jackup! like a few bucks! it's great!), and even their dvd writer drives. Just insanely good. Crosshair and crucial ram, and kingston (though a bit pricey), and OCZ are good ram as well.

For HD's? it's hard to tell. Western Digital is the highest quality, but HD's seem to be quite prone to bad sectors out of the box. My seagate barracuda 80GB HD only has 74GB's. I should've RMA'd.. but got too lazy. Maxtor's HD's tend to be hit or miss for the smaller sized HD's (the smaller, the less reliable it seems..) so you might wanna think about getting a good HD, big and preferrably SATA.

vidcards? hmm, evga is the forum favorite, so is leadtech (a little pricey). I myself love ATI vidcards as well. They got some of the best AGP cards, but their newer lineups are overpriced I say. Pretty rediculously overpriced. It seems after the radeon 9800 pro ati kindof got too ahead of themselves and now they're bombing.. hopefully not too much, cause they're Canadian, and let's face if, if nvidia had no competition, their vidcards would be a lot more expensive than they already are...

For cpu's I like AMD's better. Always have. Ever since my AMD K6 I've loved them. Never gave me any grief. The only prob I have right now is my HSF is finished, so not the cpu's fault actually. I guess I should've left the stock HSF on cause this custom one's too beaten up, and I did get it for free so... lol.

 

[003]

The specs in my sig. Oh ya, Lian Li cases and LaCie monitors.

 

[Eagleboy]

I know everybody hates Celerons, but for a decent way to snap off $40 in a consumer level computer, I do it sometimes. No complaints.

I have a Celeron 2.6 in my system (I was on a real, real tight budget), but I can still run all my games and programs at full settings no problem. I am definitely looking to upgrade but it's a nice level to start out at. The Celeron D chips aren't too shabby for the price, either.

 

[SHAWN]

^aggree'd

 

[gaara]

For HD's? it's hard to tell. Western Digital is the highest quality, but HD's seem to be quite prone to bad sectors out of the box. My seagate barracuda 80GB HD only has 74GB's. I should've RMA'd.. but got too lazy. Maxtor's HD's tend to be hit or miss for the smaller sized HD's (the smaller, the less reliable it seems..) so you might wanna think about getting a good HD, big and preferrably SATA.

Actually, there is nothing wrong with your hard drive and there is no need to RMA it. Drive companies will list an 80,000,000,000 byte drive as an 80GB one, although 1,000,000,000 bytes does not equal 1GB.

 

[ThE_MarD]

Heyyo,

I know, but it should be more eh? a KB = 1024 Bytes. so 80 GB = 81,920,000,000 Bytes. I'm only getting like, 75,776,000,000 Bytes. So I'm lacking quite the huge amount of bytes man.. and I could've used those extra few GB's man as I've only got 3GB's free, and I need more free in order to defrag my HD.. won't defrag the big files for some reason. I know you should have 15% of the HD free for a good defrag, but that sounds pretty rediculous to me.. the fragmented files are mainly my BF2 ones thus my longer loading times with that game.

[EDIT]
I guess you also can't really depend on advertising anywho.. next HD I'm buying is definately WD. Gonna give them a try.

 

[DJ-CHRIS]

Your calculations are reversed

Anyways, I do NOT trust Asus at all for AMD motherboard's, and nobody should.

 

[DoomUK]

I do NOT trust Asus at all for AMD motherboard's, and nobody should.

Reverse that: I Do trust Asus for AMD mobos, and everyone should I know you've had bad experiences Chris with your A8V...

While many will currently swear by DFI, all my past Asus boards - A7N8X Deluxe>A8V Deluxe>A8N-SLI Deluxe - have never let me down in any respect: Reliability, (overclocking) performance, great features.

(nVidia) Video card brand: EVGA, BFG, Gigabyte, XFX, Asus, Leadtek... all great brands of nVidia-based cards imo. EVGA & BFG often OC their GPU's at the factory, with custom HS/fan combos, which I suppose makes them the creme-de-la-creme.

AMD vs Intel/ATI vs nVidia: ......... Don't ask. Just. Don't. Ask.