Pre Built+ Upgrades cheaper for me??

mash

mash

New Member
Ok, I'm getting a new comp soon and was going to build it all, then I looked into pre builts. On HP/Compaqs site I customized a presario desktop w/AMD 64 3500, 1gb RAM, 80gb SATA hdd, Windows XP Home, etc, and it came out at $490. Thats an excellent deal (better than what it would cost if I built it, anyway), but obviously it wouldn't be good for games.

So since I have like $800 in the budget, I check out the eVGA geforce 6800GT for $285. If I got the presario and that card, it would be even less than what I was going to build for $800 (a 3200+ w/ a much worse vid card).

Anyway, would this be a good way to go? There would be less building for me of course, but I'm a bit worried about cooling. Do most pre built comps come with decent cooling so it would handle the card? Let me know :)
 
The power supply would be the thing to worry about mostly. And there really cheap because they use a very cheap motherboard and other parts. This is what i came up with using similar parts from newegg:

CD Burner
Black Mid-ATX case w/ 350Watt PSU
80GB IDE Hard Drive
PC Chips S939 Micro ATX motherboard
1GB PC2700 Ram
Athlon 64 3500+

All this came to a cost of $416.47 + $25.79Shipping = $442.26 Total
And i bet those are better quality parts then what compaq qould give you.
 
MOst box computers have limited cooling but you can always add fans to push more air.
The PSU's provided usually are just enough for the existing configuration so probably a new psu would be needed when you upgrade the vid crd.
If you have a $800 budget you can build a much better computer than the compaq and have better individual components and not have to worry about any kind of proprietary issues and lack of headroom to upgrade.
 
Do you know if the hp is agp based or pci-express based? It plays a big roll into what video cards you can/can't get.
 
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