Sigh... you'd think I was hoping for an income tax refund or something; I'm looking yet again at a nice inexpensive computer to run SL.
I went to a $70 motherboard, the ECS GF8200A; I don't think the Jetway's offered any more. I couldn't pass up another $10 for a 500 GB hard drive rather than 250, so it's $60 rather than $50, the Samsung Spinpoint F1 HD502IJ. Same case as before, the APEVIA QPACK-2; same DVD burner.
Ah, but the CPU... now you can get a real AM2+ Athlon 64 X2, 2.7 GHz, 2 MB of Level 3 cache, for $60. That added cache will help, and it can take full advantage of the AM2+ socket. The motherboard will take DDR2 1066 RAM, and 4 GB of G.Skill (2 x 2GB) costs $53; more than DDR2 800, but hey, it's still not very much at all.
Again, the graphics card will be our biggest expense; the Sparkle SFPX98GT1024D3H is a 9800 GT with a gigabyte of RAM on the card; while only two have reviewed it on newegg.com as I write this, both give it five eggs, and one of them mentions that he is an SL resident and that it makes a big difference... and that he had moved up from a 9600 GT, which is what we were thinking of last time. $140.
Total, aside from shipping: a hair under $505. Now, if only they gave the dimensions of the graphics card (some of them push the edge of what can go in Micro ATX cases) and its power requirements (they can be very hefty these days).
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