isitreal - 5:48 pm on Oct 30, 2004 (gmt 0)

<<< Re Dell, I've heard several warnings from friends who should know that, in underpricing everyone else, Dell has had to sacrifice quality.

Reading this thread made me wonder, hmm, maybe Dell's are better now? So I went to the dell site, took a look at the specs, still the same story: you can build a superior machine for about 50-75% less if you do it yourself.

You really have to look around to find a mobo that is as stripped down and the stuff dell uses, it's actually hard to find stuff that limited.

Things the specs don't tell you:
The bios is generally totally stripped down from a standard quality mobo bios, probably to avoid tech support issues.
PCI slots. 2-3 versus 5-6
Extra slots for hard drives and cd rom units are almost non-existent, these machines are not built to be upgraded.

For the price of a dimension 8400 you can build a high end Opteron 64 bit processor system, with a superior case, a superior mobo. As always dell pockets the economies of scale and uses those to generate its profits.

You can build a machine that's twice as good as their low end celeron things for exactly the same money.

The mid level offerings are a slightly better deal.

Dells are quiet, that's their big plus.