[ILUG] Good for hardware?

[ronan at cunniffe.net]

Quoting Paul Linehan <plinehan at yahoo.com>:

> 
> Hi all,
> 
> I'm planning to make up my own PC (now that prices
> have fallen NOT!!!).
> 
> I have a crappy oul monitor, keyboard, mouse
> cdrom and floppy drive.
> 
> I want to purchase Motherboard, processor, 
> case, memory,  fan, HDD + anything else I 
> might need.

As others have said, three places to check: Peats (Parnell St.),
Maplin (Jervis St. (?)), IT Direct (Parliament St.)
I've bought/built ~4 PCs between these three and scan.co.uk.

Mobo/processor: compare Peats and IT Direct.  IT Direct go through
several shipments/week, may not have any chips when you're there, ask them
to hold one for you.  Obviously, you need to know what you want/can afford
before even walking in their door....

Fan: Peats gave me some guff about not being willing to take back a dead 
mobo/chip if I didn't buy the heatsink/fan from them.... dodgy legal territory 
here, but I see their point - I bought the heatsink from them.

Case: Peats have some cheap (£50) and horrible cases.  Whatever about looks, do 
not, on pain of pain, get a three-bay case.  Most mobos now mount the CPU in the 
'back right' corner - near the serial/usb/kb/mouse sockets.  On a three-bay 
case, this means the top face of the heatsink fan is less than a finger's width 
from the side of the power-supply casing.  Which is why the machine I'm typing 
this on is running with a CPU temp of 52C.  Go for a 4-bay unless you've picked 
a mobo with the CPU somewhere else, or feel like living dangerously.

Memory: IT Direct will probably win out.

HDD: What do you want?  Same *shrug* here as for chip.  This is completely your 
call.

Overall, I could recommend looking at Scan to get a comprehensive look at 
price/performance and sweet spots, and making a couple of decisions on what you 
want before going hunting availability in the real world.  My experience of the 
staff in all three places is that it's *completely* hit and miss - magicians and 
muppets side by side.

Good luck.
You *are* going to need it..... ;-)
Ronan