I've now built a dozen of these computers for our office use. They are about $200 less than a comparable Dell or Gateway machine. Everything we need: graphics controller, serial and parallel I/O, USB, audio and network interfaces are on the board. The first one was a bit of a challenge (installing the processor, making sure of the connections, changing the back plate on the box to accommodate all the I/O). But once you've built one it really is quite easy. We can put together a box with the mother board, 128megs of RAM, a 733mHZ processor, CD ROM, 20GB hard drive, and Fdisk for about $800. Add a 17 inch monitor, keyboard and mouse and you are at just about $1,000. The machines are rock solid, seem to be compatible with nearly as much software and hardware as any Pentium III machine I've run across.

The only on-going annoyance I have with one machine is the one that has an SGI flat panel display and its graphics card. The motherboard or Win2000 refuses to permanently remove the on-board graphics controller and I have to remember each time to uninstall it if I want to re-boot. Otherwise it takes three re-boots to get back to a working system. The first fails, the second is in VGA mode and the third works after the on-board graphics controller uninstall.

The systems with Win2000 are about as rock-solid as I can imagine. In six months I've not had a single hardware problem associated with the motherboard, the memory, the processor, the disk drives or any of the I/O ports.




Recommended: Yes

Amount Paid (US$): 1,000 for total machine