Better to build or buy?

[flipjargendy]

Whats more valuable?
Saving a buck or two on your next PC or gaining the experience of building one?

And you can do BOTH! if you look around! It's AMAYYYYZING!!

[likwid]

After you've built enough of them you will want to buy pre built. Next computer I buy will probably be an 8 core HP or Sun workstation. Warranties are key.

[tech_man]

Go with building yourself. With some bargain hunting you can same a decent amount of money. With the processor price cuts coming up the 22nd expect the savings to add up.

[tommytabib]

Thanks everyone for your input, ill look around a bit more and see whats best for me.

Also I asked about the "ide cable", i wanted to know because i really want to put another hard drive in my computer but there are no more clips/plugs/whatever coming off the cable to allow me to put in another hard drive.

Is it possible to buy just the clips or does the mother board come with the max amount of clips to restrict you from putting in too many hard drives and wrecking your computer?

Thanks again!

[fingal]

Is it possible to buy just the clips or does the mother board come with the max amount of clips to restrict you from putting in too many hard drives and wrecking your computer?

Thanks again!

The IDE cable to your existing hdd should have another socket on it to allow you to hook up another drive. Strange that it doesn't ... Maybe it's just that particular cable design? You need to make sure your power supply unit has a spare lead to accomodate another drive. It's not a motherboard issue as such. You should have 2 IDE sockets on your board ... One for dvds / cds etc., the other for hdds. That's roughly it. Ages since I built anything though.

This is yet another advantage of building it yourself: you can ensure future upgrades by making sure there's room for expansion. So for example, why not buy a motherboard which can take 4GB of RAM? You might only have a Gig to start with but ...

If you do decide to build, be careful when clipping your heat-sink and fan to the CPU socket. I used a screwdriver to push the (very strong) spring clip onto the socket. I slipped and hit the board with the driver ... It's not fun, taking a piece out of your motherboard.

Before building, take a long time planning it and budgeting. Lay out your specs in a spreadsheet and cost everything up. Like Moe said (above) Dell throw a monitor into the deal when you purchase, and that's what makes self-build not much cheaper ... But (in my view for whatever it's worth) more fun. This might be worth looking at.

A further point (and this was intended to be a short post!) is that even new hardware can fail. My own build project didn't start too well when I switched on my huge beast of a PC (which is now just a toy ) and nothing happened. The PSU unit (brand new) didn't work. It's great to have spare parts though.

[tommytabib]

The IDE cable to your existing hdd should have another socket on it to allow you to hook up another drive. Strange that it doesn't ... Maybe it's just that particular cable design? You need to make sure your power supply unit has a spare lead to accomodate another drive. It's not a motherboard issue as such. You should have 2 IDE sockets on your board ... One for dvds / cds etc., the other for hdds.

Sorry, my fault, i must have forgot to mention that i already have two (2) hard drives set up. I was wondering if i could set up another.

Yes, i have enough power cable to accommodate another drive. and yes there is another cable for the DVD/CD drive.

So, is it possible?

[fingal]

So, is it possible?

If it was me I'd just plug in an external USB drive (Seagate do a good 200 GB model). Other than that you're into using RAID or PCI cards to allow extra IDE devices. I wouldn't feel confident that PCI IDE is well supported, but I have no idea really.

[sdousley]

Personally i will build myself. My reasons being mainly that I can simple "build myself" using parts from my existing PC.

My mum however, bought a PC a year or so ago now, and We got her a PC from Dell. for her, it was the best bet. Like techieMoe said, it's upto the user at the time. Personally i will always build myself, but someone may find it better to buy themselves all the time

[bigtomrodney]

Sorry, my fault, i must have forgot to mention that i already have two (2) hard drives set up. I was wondering if i could set up another.

Yes, i have enough power cable to accommodate another drive. and yes there is another cable for the DVD/CD drive.

So, is it possible?

Power cables aside do you think the PSU has enough of a wattage rating to support more than 4 IDE drives? They can be hungry...

If you are happy enough you can buy a decent but basic PCI SATA controller for about €20. That should allow you to ad maybe 4 more S-ATA drives. I did that on my old server and then when I got my hands on a better board and bigger SATA drives I just switched completely to them. Only my DVD burners occupy my IDE channels now.