If you need to get a plain vanilla box for a Sixpack with plain vanilla computer needs, you can certainly do worse than this one.
For $369, you get a 65nm Athlon 64 X2 4000+ running at 2.1GHz, 2Gb of RAM, XP Home.
You don’t get a big hard drive (80GB), but 80GB should be more than enough for the average plain vanilla user.
You don’t get a DVD burner (better to pick up a SATA burner (this is an all-SATA system, no IDE) for $40 elsewhere or discrete video (though it does have a PCI-E 16X slot). No monitor, either, but there are some relatively decent deals with combos that include
It’s obviously not a thunderbox, but it is curiously future-proof. It already has enough memory for Vista, and if your Sixpack feels like switching over later, pop in a cheap DX10 video card, and he’s good to go. If Vista 64-bit actually takes off, you still have two open memory slots.
I bought an E521 a while back for someone, it’s OK enough. I suspect that if you kicked it hard enough, your foot would meet the CPU, so I suggest not kicking it.
Yes, you’ll pay sales tax, so factor that in. If you’re not a small business, just say you’re Me, Inc..
No, you won’t get a better deal with Dell Home. Usually, the Home prices are a lot higher than the SB prices, and the discounts and coupons just cut the bloat.
Yes, you can take a low-end C2D and cobble together an overclocked system that will outperform this, but it will cost rather more (at least all new), and really, does he or she need it?
Not for everyone, but for some.
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