OP
OP
cute fuzzy bunny
Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ...
Believe it or not! I ran a study that showed that this is a false economy, but moreso in business. It was a real study, not a fiddled with one. Trust me
By buying the top cpu system and its usual accoutrements (which is usually a better video card, more memory, larger hard drive, etc), you can add as much as a year to the useful lifespan of the machine. People who bought topcpu usually kept the machine in service for an average of four years without upgrades/replacement. Those that bought topcpu-1 or lower usually upgraded or replaced after slightly less than 3 years. The cost of the upgrades/replacements? More than the savings margin on the original system. And you get to enjoy the "better" system for the full four years rather than a lesser machine for 3. Customers also reported a very high rate of problems and dissatisfaction during upgrades/replacement which the four year system buyer avoided.
I dont recall exactly the numbers for home machines as I had most of my focus on the business product lines...but they yielded similar results and were a year or two higher on both topcpu and topcpu-1 analyses.
Of course, that was in the days where each new processor had a 10-20% step up in speed over the last one. If I was buying a machine today, except for someone wanting to play first person shooters I'd buy the least expensive thing I could get my hands on from a reputable vendor. Warranty, packaging, quietness, reliability, and features/ports/extras are about the most important things right now. Even a 2GHz northwood based celeron is more than good enough excluding twitch games, dvd editing and video conversion work. Most modern systems include enough disk, memory and a plenty good enough graphics card.
In this light I like recommending Dell...they often offer 3 year warranties, their systems are rated fairly high in reliability, their service is usually in the top 2 or 3, and their machines are very quiet compared to a lot of other top brands.
If you want to go cheap, and I mean UncleMick cheap, look on ebay for an HP vectra VL400 tower (not desktop) in the 1GHz+ range. One of the best machines ever made. You can use the case for a jackstand, you can work on it without any tools, strong quiet power supply, decent no-frills motherboard, and the tualatin pentium III's and Pentium IIIE's in most of these boxes are faster than a p4 up to 2GHz and a lot cooler running. Probably net a low mileage one for ~75-80.
