Who sells PC's w/o OS?

[BiPolar_Nut]

Quality of parts will be a big issue. One example: you can snag cheap garbage "600W" power supplies all day long for next to nothing, but they'll burn out in a month.

This is actually hands down by far the most difficult part of building your own...deciding what brands to get and how much more to pay for quality.

Going with the popular concensus (like Abit or Asus mainboards) will likely get you a reasonably cheap computer that's better quality than mass produced Dell/Gateway/eMachine/Viao/HP/*, but still may not be the best value per dollar.

Basically it comes down to how much you value picking up the knowledge and doing the research vs spending the time to do so. Sometimes you will trigger religious brand wars...AMD vs Intel, WD vs Maxtor, Asus vs Trend Micro, blah blah blah.

Listen to what people say, but make your own choices. I disagree w/ techs often...but both opinions are "correct" based on each of our experiences. Chalk the wars up to variance, have fun, learn, and be proud of your new system [img]/images/graemlins/grin.gif[/img]

[Shroomy]

Thanks for all the input guys.

I do have experience building PC's but it was long ago, and it was just putting the prepicked parts together.

Last question. How do cases match with the typical onboard connections, such as sound jacks, usb, network, etc..

Back in my day they were all add on cards so it wasnt an issue. Do I have to worry about a case layout matching the motherboard?

And Bipolar, could you recomend a good power supply manufacturer?

Oh yeah.. any thoughts on HD's I would like to keep it cheep(ish) but have RAID 1 ... I have had issues with both scsi, and sata, but that was a bit back, am I asking for more problems with just IDE drives? And should I look for an onboard controller or a card?

[img]/images/graemlins/laugh.gif[/img]

[BiPolar_Nut]

Case connections like front panel USB/firewire will be fairly standard. Basically the same as hooking the leads for the HD & power LED, reset switch, etc. There will just be wires to hook to pins on the mobo. The mobo manual will tell what goes where, and the case wires should be labeled. Rear panel stuff like sound/network/USB...there's nothing to do, they're just mounted according to the form factor (usually ATX) and are mounted to the motherboard already. They'll just line up w/ the rear panel of the case. As in, an ATX case will line up with an ATX motherboard.

The same form factor standard will take care of cards and slots matching up.

As for power supplies, I like Antec. There are other good ones, too. I'm not claiming Antec is the best, but I've never had any problems with them.

For HD's, I like Maxtors but have had one go bad (out of about 10). A friend of mine has 100's or drives (yes, 100's) and he HATES western digital, but other people havent had nearly the problems out of them that he's had. I personally won't buy a WD, but many people do and don't have problems. I do like their newer raptor drives that are 10kRPM w/ a 16MB cache for performance reasons, but have heard nothing on their reliability yet. I like Hitachi drives, too. It's hard to make a recommendation since they all suck due to cost cutting and poor heat disapation. HD's are a crapshoot and everyone will have different favorites simply due to variance. That's partially why I pick Maxtors since they're usually on the lower end of the price spectrum. I'd go with SATA simply because it's a faster interface than PATA ("regular" IDE). No real need for SCSI unless you're going with hot swappable arrays.

As for on board vs controller card: Pick the best motherboard you can get performance and quality-wise in your price range. If it happens to have onboard RAID-1, cool (will likely be SATA). If not, get a controller card. Some mainboards will claim "RAID capable" but only do RAID-0.

Also, are you planning on booting to the mirrored set or having a single boot drive plus a 2 drive mirror array? If you're booting to it, you will likely need a driver floppy from either the motherboard or the controller card and catch the "Press <F6> to install third party drivers for SCSI, RAID, etc" screen when installing windows...which means you will also need a floppy drive (but you could use your old one and even remove it after windows is installed). I usually don't bother installing floppy drives anymore, as long as there's still one around someplace. If I need one, I'll share the one over the network from a laptop or something (which wouldn't be an option during system installation).

[SamIAm]

[ QUOTE ]
you will likely need a driver floppy from either the motherboard or the controller card and catch the "Press <F6> to install third party drivers for SCSI, RAID, etc" screen when installing windows...which means you will also need a floppy drive (but you could use your old one and even remove it after windows is installed).

[/ QUOTE ]
Yeah, last time I built a machine, I needed a floppy drive for Raid drivers. I just borrowed a junk drive from a friend, and let it dangle out from the case during installation. [img]/images/graemlins/smile.gif[/img]

[ QUOTE ]
A friend of mine has 100's or drives (yes, 100's) and he HATES western digital, but other people havent had nearly the problems out of them that he's had. I personally won't buy a WD, but many people do and don't have problems.

[/ QUOTE ]
I won't buy Western Digital, either. I've had a couple bad personal experiences, and bunches of bad professional experiences.

If my monitor dies, it's a pain in the butt to replace and wrecks my day. If my harddrive dies, I lose vital data and wrecks my year.
-Sam

[CORed]

It seems to me that I looked at Dell's site a few moths ago and they did have some minitowers availble with freedos and linux. Freedos is an open source DOS clone. I don't know why anybody would actually use this on a modern PC, but IIRC, the machines with freedos were cheaper than the Linux PC's, so this might be an option for you if you want to install your own copy of Windows.