bronco93

I was having some comp issues so I took my pc to a shop and had them look at at. I have a Dell Deminsion 8400, 3.2 ghz, 1 gb ddr ram, 2 sata HD's, 2 sony dvd burners and a decent nvidia vid card. Come to find out one of my capacitors was bulged and leaking so I was told I have to replace the motherboard then everything else should work fine. The computer itself is about 4 yrs old and I paid about $1200 for it then and at the time it was a great machine, so now I'm faced with a few options.

1.) replace the MB and continue to use this machine since everything else works
2.) buy a prebuilt machine (like another dell)
3.) buy all the parts and attempt to build the machine myself from scratch.

I have basically no experience on pricing/selecting parts for a new build however I do have some friends that could probably assist me. I mainly use the machine for gaming, music and to watch movies on and before it dive bombed on me it worked great for what I was doing with it.

I'm not super hardcore into pc's I just want one that performes well for what I need, my friends tell me to go with a dell because of the support you get. They have build their own machines and always ended up going with a prebuilt one. Any suggestions or feedback would be sweet, thanks!

AdmnPower

well, if you want to go with a new one prebuilt machines are always better. they are only worse if you don't know what you're doing. If you want something that's easier go with prebuilt. I'd recomment just getting a new board for your current machine, as you said it worked fine for what you were doing before. So that wouldbe the most cost effective option as a new board would only cost 50 - 100 bucks.

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Intel Core 2 Quad 2.4 ghz
4 gig DDR 2 800
Sapphire Radeon 3870 X2
250 gig Seagate Barracuda
Windows Vista

oscaryu1

Agreed. A new board should solve all your problems.

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salman

Hi bronco, if i was you i would; 3.) buy all the parts and attempt to build the machine myself from scratch.

Because its probably not gonna be long until your comp is gonna become too old to run the newer games being released, so i think replacing your mobo is gonna be a waste of money if you're gonna have to get a new computer anyway soon to be able to play the newer games which are being released.

If you build there are a lot of guides to how to build, all over the internet and you will have help from computerforum also. You will also save yourself money and be learning something new, by having built a computer it also becomes easier to repair one yourself (you won't have to take it down to a shop and get them to repair it, so you'll save money)

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CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6300 @ 2.5
MOBO: Abit Fatality FP-IN9-SLi
RAM: Geil Value DDR2 1.0GB PC6400 800 MHz
HDD: Maxtor DiamondMax 21 250GB 7200RPM 8MB
GFX: Inno3D GeForce 7600 GS
OPT: Lite-on LH-18A1P-488C
OS: XP Pro
[Ableton Live, Fl-Studio, Reason]

paratwa

Salman, I agree totally.

Building your own is cheaper and you learn how they work. The only difficult part can be loading the operating system or some times setting the timings on your ram. If you follow the directions in the motherboard manual you will be fine.

Your system is 4 years old now, it's time to build a new one. With Directx 10 out, and the need for newer video cards, you would be better off building new. You could use your existing hard drives and cd/dvd burners in your new system, that will save you some cash. Also when/if you make the switch to vista, having new parts will insure that the system will be compatible with vista.