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What to buy with $500, what barebone.....

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96redformula

Member
Joined
Aug 10, 2004
I am going to be spending ~$500 in a month or so and would like to know what you all reccomend I do with that money to get the best bang for my buck. I was looking around and it seems that www.unitedmicro.com would be a good place to get a barebone system. I am wondering if it would be worth the money to buy an Athon 64 3000+, 512 DDR 400MHZ, unknown on motherboard. I would like to get it to be $500 with cd rom/dvd rom and a small hard drive, but i doubt that will happen. What motherboards do you all reccomend and which system shall I get?? My 9800 Pro will be the video card and 420w Thermaltake PSU.

Oh and I have not used anything besides ide Hard drives....anybody care to explain the whole SATA ATA hard drive thing, the new mothermoards come with them from what I am reading, no controller needed?
 
Last edited:
96redformula said:
Oh and I have not used anything besides ide Hard drives....anybody care to explain the whole SATA ATA hard drive thing, the new mothermoards come with them from what I am reading, no controller needed?

The current IDE standard is Parallel ATA - long wide ribbon cables.

SATA is Serial ATA, using thin cables, and a different power connection.

SATA is just a faster interface, although it doesnt provide much benefit as drives are nowhere close to saturating Parallel ATA as it is.
 
you might want to look at the barebones avail at Newegg, they have a lot of them
 
All I see at newegg are some little compact size towers that I definatly don't want............
 
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