Good inexpensive branded PC's

[gdement]

Does anybody have advice on good quality, inexpensive, brand name PC's? My brother wants to buy a new computer. If I were buying for myself, I'd buy the parts and put it together. But I have a feeling it will be far less expensive to buy a complete branded system. I hate not knowing what's inside those things though. Is there any information somewhere about what motherboards are used by the various PC's on the market right now?

I'd like an upgradable, standards compatible, socket AM2 board with one PCI x16 slot, and some reasonable mixture of PCI and PCI express slots for upgradability. It would be a lot easier to just buy a motherboard and build from there, but I'm afraid costs will make that prohibitive. I have no idea what kind of expandability and quality the typical low cost PC comes with.

He's upgrading from an SDRAM Asus P2B-F. He has a 40GB hard drive which he can keep using, but he doesn't like his existing case or monitor so there isn't much he can carry over to a modern machine.

He largely wants a new computer for aesthetic reasons. He does play games on occasion, but it's not a big pastime for him. His biggest quirk is that he loves to install lots of software he finds on the internet. So spyware bloat is a problem with him.

The bad news is I'm meeting him in 2 hours - so in the meantime I'll try to research as much modern info as I can. I'm out of date and don't even know what the layout of the video card market looks like nowadays, so I guess that's the first thing I'll look into. We do have a Fry's nearby, and that's likely where we'll be going. Maybe they have some good package deals, but those always seem to involve ECS.

Thanks for any insights on the modern brand-name world. I'm out of touch with it.

[Spacedye69]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

I've had good luck with Compaq. Go on their web site and you can configure what you want. You can look up the specs of the motherboard by their p/n. My last one was upgradable with standard parts. The motherboards are made by ASUS, which are very similar to the regular ASUS boards, except for the bios.

[toastygoodness]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

Acer is also good, if you don't mind having a cointoss for support. It's usually been good for me, but sometimes it gets bad in the UK, is what I heard. HP or Compaq is relatively good; their customer service is excellent and they use ASUS (Acer sometimes uses ASUS), but the dreaded Bestecs that the still use are what's keeping me back. Acer uses Deltas, and occasionally I see Lite-Ons, so that's a good sign. Keep in mind that most Branded PCs don't come with a rear exhaust fan, so make sure you buy one and install it to prevent the KZGs or whatever caps from failing early.

[Shroomie]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

but the dreaded Bestecs that the still use are what's keeping me back.

Everyone still uses those things. Spotted one in a Gateway, dual-core 4800, two gigs of RAM, 320 GB hard drive...the owner had a 7600GT in it too. And it was all powered by either a 300 or 350w Bestec! I almost crapped when I saw it...

[gdement]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

Thanks for the responses. We went looking today and it turns out his budget isn't as low as I assumed. The machine he really likes is the HP m7760n. I could tell that the adjacent m7780n had a video card in it, so obviously it has the slot. I don't know if the m7760n uses the same motherboard or not though, and I don't know what other slots are in there. I hate the black-box approach they use for selling these things. It's like buying a car without being allowed to lift the hood.

I might also try to figure out a component-built PC, but I think he really likes the aesthetics of the HP better than anything I'll be able to do using components. He's more enthused about the media center type stuff than he is about raw performance.

If anybody has experience with the m7760n, I'd love to hear any and all details. #1 most important question is whether it has a PCI express x16 slot. I'm lucky though - I just found a newegg listing for the same computer at
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16883107286
and from the 1 review somebody posted, he says he installed a video card. I can also see the motherboard in one of those pictures, so maybe I can identify it and get more gory details from there. I can't tell from the photo whether that's an AGP or PCIex video slot, but I hope the latter.

I also see it appears to have standard PCI slots. Not sure how I feel about that. PCIexpress is the new standard, but only about as pervasive as RAMBUS so far. I guess I won't worry about it.

[gdement]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

I think the board shown in that picture on newegg is an Asus P5LP-LE. That was actually mentioned on the newegg specs page, and it does match the photo.

But the specs for that board say it's for P4's and Pentium D's:
http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport...ctID=c00590499

This machine is supposed to have a Core2 Duo so something is wrong. Anyway, I get the idea it's going to be an Asus microATX board of some kind.

[gdement]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

For anybody reading this that wants to know the answer, I found what looks like the correct motherboard information:

http://h10025.www1.hp.com/ewfrf/wc/d...dlc=en&lang=en

For some reason it has the same name (P5LP-LE) as the board I found earlier, but this version supports the newer processors. HPQ calls this version the Leonite-GL8E. The board looks fine to me. I'm impressed that HP actually provides this much information.

I'd prefer if it had at least a single PCIe slot besides the video card, but that probably won't matter. I also wish the bios chip had a socket, but for some reason OEM boards never do.

[Spacedye69]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

My last Compaq had a Hipro. It was a solid ps.

[shadow]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

I'm impressed that HP actually provides this much information.

Yes I have noticed this as well, even on ancient PC's and parts that they sell are reasonably well documented on their website. I have only had experience with the HP Vectra PC's, HP SCSI RAID Controllers and HP Tape Drives. The Vectra's are workstation PC's that many businesses buy. Never had anything wrong with any that I have had. I like how they keep the number of fans as well as noise to a minimum in their designs.

[stevo1210]

Re: Good inexpensive branded PC's

HP PCs are very good in terms of reliability too.

I have a Pavillion 6305 Desktop PC that has worked since 1997 till now with no major issues even though it was covered in dust and oil grime because it sat in a mechanics garage for about 8 years or so before I got it, everything was good about it apart from a dead PSU after many 8 years of 24hrs continuous service, but that was easily solved.... I just put my standard ATX PSU outside the case since the original HP/Delta electronics PSU was a smaller variant but still used the 20 Pin ATX configuration.

It ran an AMD K6 CPU with a SiS chipset and best of all it came with all Rubycon caps.
The documentation for the PC was very easy to find but the Video drivers were quite hard to find for some strange reason. The HP site had all other drivers (Audio, CD rom, keyboard etc.) but no Video driver.... my solution was to install Windows 2000 and use the native Windows driver.