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Dollarshops Budget Office-Student PC Review

Others/Miscelleneous by jmke @ 2007-10-17

AMD and Intel have been flooding the market with highly affordable hardware for the past year, manufacturers of motherboards, memory and other PC components have also brought down the overall cost, the positive outcome of this competitive behavior can be seen in our test today, a complete system for a mere €315. What do we get for this price and is it enough for the budget minded user out there? We find out.

Introduction & Specs

Introduction

With the continued price war between AMD and Intel, ATI (now AMD) and NVIDIA we, the end users, have been blessed with lower than ever hardware prices; the proof of is the article we are writing here today. For a mere 315 euro we were able to pick up a complete system at Dollarshops.eu.

Madshrimps (c)

Here’s what we got for €315:

- AMD Athlon 3800+ AM2 CPU
- Jetway M26GTM with onboard 6150 VGA Motherboard
- 1Gb DDR2 PC2-6400 Memory
- 320GB Sata HDD
- Casetek V.Pandora ATX Mid Tower Case
- Sirtek 310W Power Supply
- LiteOn HH Lightscribe 20X DVD Writer

Optionally for an extra € we added the following options and check their impact on performance:

- Upgrade to 2Gb DDR2 +€30
- Upgrade VGA NVIDIA 8600 GT 256Mb +€96

Dollarshops.eu offers a nice service, they build the system with the components you choose and send it to you with registered postal service, all this costs a mere €15 on top of the price of the system, seeing as the shipping charges alone easily match this price, they are building the systems for free.

The system by default comes without OS installed, on request you can buy the OS of your choice and have it installed by them. We asked them to preload with Windows XP.

Packaging

The box arrived few days after it was sent out, they used the original cardboard box of the case, a Casetek branded product.

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Let’s open the package ->

Comment from Sidney @ 2007/10/17

It is good to see smaller localized businesses are taking on Dell and HP alike. Bring me back to the good old days of the early 90's when small system builders provided good service could make a living.

Let's hope manufacturers will give the small business owners a chance intead of kissing the behinds of Dell.

Comment from SuAside @ 2007/10/17

well, decent rig for the small tasks. though i do hope no one falls for it as a gamerig... Dell/HP/etc always tend to sell 'multimedia' and 'game' pcs that are more or less like this. doesnt take the buyers too long for find out it's not exactly the powerful gaming machine they were promised.

still, if it's used for normal student tasks, this rig has very good value.

Comment from jmke @ 2007/10/17

if you add the €97 VGA you do have a decent gaming rig though, not top, but decent

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