Better Ingredients, Better PC
Written: Jan 26 '02
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Pros: High quality components, good construction excellent value for money
Cons: Technical Support...What Technical Support?
The Bottom Line: If you are into PC Hardware, this is a great option to building it from scratch. Quality third party technology assures a long economic life for this system
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| exploder's Full Review: ABS Multimedia System 3 |
The Story:
Normally the PC’s in this household are assembled from various carefully selected parts after months of researching. This is usually followed by an even longer period of tuning, tweaking, over clocking and various other tinkering activities. The result is often something that is blazingly fast, and totally unreliable with short lived stability. It’s fun for the builder, and total frustration for the hapless user, my wife! When the last incarnation – a Pentium PIII – system finally irritated the wife enough to the point where she would not use it any more, it was time to consider building the next version. Now this has been a family ritual for years, and my wife makes me feel like the computer equivalent of “Home Improvement’s” Tim Taylor! It is true that it can bring out the truly obsessive tendency in my character. Tom’s Hardware is one of my favorite haunts, (www.tomshardware.com) so I went there to begin preparing my hardware ingredients list. My wife discovered the list and so I had to switch tactics or suffer the consequences!
Initial Search:
I started to look at the various “boxes” on the market. Where we live we have numerous local box builders, and some are actually pretty good. The prices are all over the place however. I looked into the big names. The day job brings me into sufficient contact with all of them to know who does what. The choices are many, but once you boil it down to the core ingredients, and the process of elimination soon kicks in. Here’s where most of the big names failed: Graphics! The needs for our replacement system were driven by my wife’s requirements. As an artist she needs a system that has good graphics performance, ability to record to CDROM, and handle I/O devices such as a scanner and so forth. Games are not high on the list, and besides we have a Playstation for that need. Internet surfing is not listed as this is satisfied easily by default on the above requirements – excluding connection technology.
The Contenders:
Initially we looked at all the usual computer suppliers available at the local electronics stores. The Compaq and HP boxes had really poor graphics controllers. The performance plain sucked. Worse still, these are highly commercialized systems. They don’t upgrade well. Most of the important bits are integrated into the motherboard. Gateway is pretty much in the same boat. Dell products tend to be better, but still suffer from being marketing driven. That formula typically dictates a large CPU at the expense of the rest of the system.
The typical “gotcha’s” are limited memory, slow drives, and crippled graphic controllers – often with an OEM special controller that uses custom (to the computer supplier) drivers. Worse the customized motherboard often utilizes similar compromises where it matters – such as disc controllers. Where this leads to is a three year or less life span with a technologically frozen device. Problems occur most often when a new version of OS comes around, and you find yourself dependent on the box supplier for those essential drivers unique to that compromised hardware mix. This is most prevalent at the lower end of the market where the pressure on manufacturer’s margins is enormous. In a sense we the consumer are absolutely to blame. We push for the lowest price, and accept the consequences.
Most of these manufacturers do have potentially good systems. Further they do reveal on their websites pretty much the major components. So the moral here is to educate yourself on what’s available. You also need to look very carefully at your needs, and what best satisfies those needs. A hard core gamer has today probably the highest demands in terms of performance. Whereas someone that wants a box to surf the web could easily be satisfied with the very affordable e-machines product, for example.
The Discovery:
ABS was discovered through an extensive search on the internet. The company has numerous awards and accolades from respected members of the computer press. I discovered them through a review on ZDNET (a part of the Ziff-Davis publishing group: http://www.zdnet.com/). A quick scan of their very business like (http://www.buyabs.com) website provided some interesting suspects. Further leg work on Tom’s Hardware helped identify key components and individual ratings on them. As a result, I found that I was able to home in on my own formula within a fairly rich framework of a family of PC recipes supported by ABS. Obviously customer support and company reputation are a concern when dealing with a smaller supplier. If you are comfortable with PC hardware, and can support the product on your own, the risk becomes more of fiscal liquidity. Analysis of ABS customer recommendations etc., revealed them to be an acceptable supplier for this customer. ABS has received numerous recommendations for their products from “Computer Shopper”, “CNET”, and various Ziff-Davis publications such as PC Magazine and PCWorld.
Purchase Decision:
We selected a version of their Multimedia system sans Monitor, and speaker systems which were already covered with a nice NEC Professional Monitor, and Acoustic Research sound system. This computer was selected as it contained the powerful AMD Thunderbird Athlon CPU, which at the time was eating Intel’s lunch.. It also had the Leadtek GeForce MX2 3D graphics card, combined with a Maxtor 7200 rpm, 40 GByte hard drives and 256 Mbytes Ram. This combination is potent, and despite the improvements of the last nine months, this system still outperforms many of the low cost bottom end products. Nice touches with ABS are things like the ability to select motherboards. We chose the ASUS motherboard which I would rate extremely high from over seven years of using various products manufactured by them. The compromises on the purchase were the DVD player, and CD burner. In retrospect I was too cheap, but we were on a fixed budget with this project. In hindsight we should have plunked for the Plextor burner, and the Pioneer DVD. But, to be absolutely fair to ABS that was our choice! The only peripherals purchased were a Microsoft keyboard and mouse.
It should be noted that the ABS system comes with a limited 3 year warranty on components, with options for on-site support at $29 for one year - extendable to three for $129. They claim to offer lifetime labor warranty. Another reviewer has noted that the component warranty is indeed quite limited and apparently does not cover certain key components. That has not been our experience, with albeit a different failure mode.
Life with the ABS Computer:
We have had our ups and a few downs (actually only one!) The system was purchased on-line. A delivery date was returned by email within 1 hour. The unit arrived a day earlier than they promised, in a large carefully packed box. It came with a large binder and a super connection diagram – everything is color coded. It included all component part manuals, discs, drivers and warranty cards. The only other company that I have seen that does as good a job on an installation guide is DELL. Also all connectors and connections were color coded. Although I set it up the first time, my wife has been able to successfully move the computer on several occasions since the first install. On power up I immediately kicked myself for selecting Windows ME – for a Win NT/2000 user it really sucks. However, it worked well enough for my wife’s initial needs.
The only problem we had after installing the computer was with the AOpen CD burner (a 12x20x32 device.) It sort of worked but was very temperamental. After a lot of experimenting, and moving from the supplied Nero software to Roxio, it became obvious that the drive was on the fritz. Specifically it was very noisy in use, and the burner would manage to burn only small data files or single tracks before rejecting the disc. This is where ABS fell into a great big hole. The support staff’s recommended solution was to reload the OS. I reloaded it alright - after I reformatted the drive I discovered that we only had a dreaded OS restore disc! OOPs! That’s right OOPs; there was nothing on the drive to restore from. A minor problem! A quick dip into our MSDN subscription quickly rectified that slip. As expected the burner performance remained crippled. This time I by-passed the technical support and main lined the customer service people. Two days later a new drive arrived. It was quickly slipped in and the system was up and running in twenty minutes. The inside was very nicely laid out and very business like with all cables neatly tied down, and secured at all terminations. ABS does require that you actually purchase the part, and it refunds you in full on receipt of the faulty part if you repair the system yourself. They were as good as their word, and very fast on both transactions. If you are handy, this is a much better solution, than having to return the whole box. This has been the only problem in nine months, and it was resolved very fast.
In early November we were given by Microsoft a free legal copy of XP Professional as a professional courtesy. This was loaded on the system with no hassle, except for that “bargain” DVD player – also by AOpen. It has to be one of the few DVD players out there that has no support for XP. So we lost one hardware feature, but lost the dreaded Windows ME, which seemed a fair enough trade. So we’ll replace the DVD player with a DVD burner later in the year, or as soon as the price falls to the mid $200’s! XP ran flawlessly on the ABS package. New drivers were readily available where necessary. The only casualty (walking wounded as we can use the Microsoft generic drivers) was the Creative Technology V92 modem we added after purchase - which STILL DOES NOT HAVE XP DRIVERS!
All of the wife’s software transferred over without complaint. The system today chugs along merrily cranking out CDROMs, and scanning in pictures, photo’s and all manner of artistic materials gathered lovingly by my wife. The system runs various graphics programs, and all the standard office type programs. It runs daily for about eight hours, and has served as an unexpected heat source in the studio! It is very quiet for an Athlon based system, which can be a little noisy because of the higher heat dissipation compared to Intel processors. The 1 GHz CPU seemed outrageous nine months ago, but now is only an entry level product. That said, this computer still feels fast. Perhaps the last word on that one belongs to my wife. After a visit last week to the local CompUSA she remarked by way of statement that her system was really very fast compared to the systems in the store. She had been playing with a new budget priced Pentium 4 system! Graphics performance remains strong and stronger still since upgrading to XP. She loves the XP OS, although as of late it has lost some of its much vaunted stability. But that may be subject of another review in the future….
Conclusion:
There are not many choices in the main stream computer market today. A supplier that is able to provide value for money, great performance and a range of product choices tailored to individual applications is becoming a scarce breed. To survive the economic turn down of the last twelve months is testimony itself to the ABS business model. ABS delivers a product of your tailored choice, within a reasonable price point, and to a very acceptable level of quality. Its failings are poor technical support, balanced by excellent customer service. If you are comfortable with PC hardware this supplier is definitely worth considering. Consider the potential for future upgrade of key components when you purchase any PC. ABS’s use of recognized, high quality, third party technology suppliers guarantees reasonable longevity and economically maintainable performance. Other suppliers to consider in this category are Alienware and Pollywell Computers who operate slightly further up the bleeding edge technology curve – expect to pay accordingly.
If you are a novice buying your first computer then consider either DELL or IBM who have great customer service if you need it. If you are dollar constrained Gateway is a possible contender. Unfortunately none of these vendors will supply you an AMD based Athlon system due to excessive discounting by Intel. That’s another story…..
Recommended:
Yes
Amount Paid (US$): 1150
Operating System: Windows
Processor: AMD Athlon (K7)
Processor speed: over 1000
RAM: 256
Internal Storage: CD-RW and DVD
Hard Drive (GB): 31-40
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Epinions.com ID:
exploder
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Location: West Coast
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 14 members
About Me:
Hell raising Brit, with magic cat and artist in tow. aka Phileas Fogg...
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