*UPDATED* Go Dell or Build it Yourself

Yeah, if your friend is into gaming more than tech, it might be worth the extra money to avoid spending the time putting it together and dealing with any incompatibility headaches later on. However, if he’d like to get his hands dirty, there’s no time like the present.

If you must go prebuilt, try monarchcomputer.com. They’ll prebuild for like 200 bucks, but you can choose every single part. You’ll end up with a faster, cheaper, more upgrade friendly PC. They even have tech support, though I don’t know how good it is.

Thats not a bad deal, especially if you need/want a 20 inch LCD. Its not that hard at all to build your own system but if you/your friend aren’t that into it, don’t want to have to deal with warranty parts yourself with each part maker when something breaks, then go dell, upgrade the parts on the 9100 and enjoy the system. If homebuilding, I’d go AMD myself. Better performance in gaming, generally cheaper than intel and less power consumption by far.

There are middle toptions too, like buying a mobo/cpu combo from say, monarch. No build cost, they burn it in and update the bios, all you do is toss it in your case and add ram/hd/videocard.

Similar pricing to newegg.

Well, he has made a decision NOT to build. Now it comes down to two choices. First, there is the Dell XPS with the following features:

256MB PCI Express x16 nVidia GeForce 6800 (plain, not ultra or GT)
Pentium 4 Processor 640 with HT Technology (3.20GHz, 800 FSB)
1GB Dual Channel DDR2 SDRAM at 533MHz- 2 DIMMs
160GB Serial ATA Hard Drive (7200RPM) w/ Native Command Queuing
Intel® 955X Express chipset
WinXP

Final Price $1400

http://www1.us.dell.com/content/products/productdetails.aspx/dimen_xps5?c=us&cs=19&l=en&s=dhs

Next there is Hypersonic PC. His current baby is a Hypersonic, and he has really loved the system. He dabbled on their page and came up with:

3.20GHz Intel® Pentium® 4 Processor 640 (with EM64T)
1GB DDR2-533 (PC4200) Clock Speeds 4ns DDR2 FBGA Memory Chips
Nvidia GeForce 6800 GT PCI-Express 256MB
160GB Seagate 7200rpm Serial ATA-150 w/ 8MB Cache
Asus P5LD2-VM 945X PCI-Express Motherboard

Final Price: $1600

design is here: http://secure.hypersonic-pc.com/scripts/custom_sys.asp?sysid=Phantom_GX

Which system would you recommend from these two? Again, thank you in advance.

If he’s really into gaming, he should probably get an AMD chip. They’re pretty much the accepted gaming king right now. And apparently they’re coming out with a cheaper dual core chip that should be in the retail pipeline soon (Anandtech article). He might want to wait to price one of those at hypersonic.

And those two links don’t lead to custom systems. :( Nonetheless, if I were buying dell, I’d buy one of those tricked out 9100s (to save a couple hundred bucks over the XPS), but the system I bought myself last november was a Monarch PC, because I’ll probably stupidly want to change the mobo/cpu one day.

Ditch the Dells and definitely go with AMD over Intel.

Also, if you don’t build one now and go with Dell instead, you’re pretty much guaranteeing your next system will be either another pre-built or entirely from scratch. I just stopped using a Dell, and I’m a lot better off for it. They don’t give details on what kind of motherboard you’ve got, because it’s their proprietary crap and they want to keep you on a leash for upgrades and accessories. I ship my computer from coast to coast for school and when the case got a little beat up, there was no way to remove the mobo and PSU from the case either; I got the hard drive out with some considerable effort. Plus, if you take your hard drive out for use in another computer, it’s a guaranteed reformat - my new PC didn’t even recognize the drive otherwise.

In short, you’re better off building it yourself. You’ll save a lot of money, and having a personalized PC is just a lot cooler.

Really, go to monarchcomputer.com, configure a socket 939 Athlon64 PC w/ 3500+ CPU and a 6800GT. You can get it with the OS, 160GB SATA drive, DVD+/-RW, etc for $1400. They’ll build it for you.

While I do enjoy people whose answers always involve, “Dude, buy this other system that I bought,” I’ll actually answer your question.

I was fairly unimpressed with the performance of the stock 6800, so any system with a 6800GT is significantly better. I prefer Intel motherboards for Intel systems, just for their general rock-solid reliability, so one option could be to get the cheapest videocard possible in that Dell and buy an aftermarket videocard.

The truth of the matter is that either machine will be great for gaming, and last a few years, and be plenty fast. If he likes the aesthetics of the Hypersonic and likes his previous machine, he should buy it for that reason alone.