Pentium III 866 retail $250
Asus CUSL2-C $120
Crucial 128mb cas2 ram $73
Pioneer 16x DVD-ROM $100
TDK or Plextor 12x10x32 ~$180
Nice case w/ 300w PS $60
3com 10/100 NIC $35
Decent optical mouse $25
Decent keyboard $25
Leadtek GeForce2 GTS 32m $180
AOpen AW744Pro SoundCard $30
1.44 Floppy $15
30g Quantum Fireball LM $100 (If you get in on the rebate they're having right now)
This comes in at just under $1200 if you shop around and use a couple of rebates. Quantum is offering $30 rebate on the LM fireball drives until the end of the year, as well, TDK has a $50 rebate on the VeloCD until the end of the year as well. I have a very very similar setup to these components. The reason I suggested that sound card is because it sounds better than the creative cards, has an optical out if you wish to run this to a home theatre system, and costs a lot less.
The pentium processors are actually new to me, I've been running a k6-300 for quite some time now but recently upgraded and love the stability. For your friend, will not have any cooling issues. The 1ghz and 1.1 ghz T-birds are somewhat hard to cool and will require an alternate cooling solution than the stock if he plans to do a good amount of gaming.
The Leadtek card is one of the best values you'll find at $180 shipped from
www.nutrend.com/orders/buyparts.html. I recommend this card and place to buy it from.
The pentium processor you can get on
www.z-buy.com for $252 with free shipping.
You can find the audio card on
www.computergate.com for $26 plus shipping, about $33 total.
For your ram go to
www.crucial.com/webpromo and click on "GO" then select your motherboard from there. You will get 15% off this way.
For your case, I recommend
www.directron.com. They have a huge selection of cases at great prices. The hydraulic case is an excellent buy, but more expensive than what you might need.
For the rest of the components, they can be had at most places for the prices I've listed. You might consider buy.com for the Plextor or TDK drives and try finding a coupon. That may or may not be the best place to go for it right now.
The hard drive you can get from buy.com as well and use a coupon.
Sometimes you have to wait a couple weeks for things to go on sale, but I bought everything, including my 17 inch diamondtron monitor for less than the prices I listed above, whole system came out to $1486 shipped. It's in my sig.
These are ONLY my personal recommendations. Do not blame me or hold me accountable for anything. I know some people will also disagree with me, keep your opinions to yourself, this is ONLY a recommendation based on what I own and use.
divinemartyr
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