Whee - new PC for me too!

[Jeffbx]

It's been 4 years since my last desktop PC, so when my M-Fing Raptor died again last week, I decided it was a sign that I was supposed to replace my entire machine. (Raptor died once about 3 years ago, got replaced, and the now replacement died. Replacement must have been a refurb because now it's out of warranty).

I tossed around the thought of building my own, but went with a Dell instead because of the cost (plus I like to have single vendor support in case something dies).

I snagged an XPS 8300 from the outlet:
i7 2600
460 Watt Power Supply
16X DVD +/- RW Drive
1.5 TB SATA II Hard Drive (7200RPM)
THX TruStudio sound card
Dell 1501 Wireless (not that I'll use this)
Dell USB 6-Button Laser Mouse
Windows 7 Home Premium 64
1024MB ATI Radeon HD 5770 GDDR5
6 GB DDR3 SDRAM 1333MHz (3 DIMMs)

$594 + tax came out to $630 shipped. Same machine new comes out to just about double that, so I'm pretty happy with the deal I got. I'll probably pop in another 2GB just to get them in pairs, and I'm seriously thinking of getting a Crucial 128GB SSD to replace the boot drive. That's my only bottleneck right now...

[cruelpupet]

Are you sure its not a trichannel board for memory?

Also, I thought the same thing about SSDa, but there have been a lot of issues with them randomly dieing.

[Jeffbx]

Yeah, I thought it was tri-channel when I saw the amount, but it's 2x2 slots, and it has 3 slots filled. Dumb.

I've been on SSD on my work laptops for about 3 years now & I'm pretty happy with them so far. I see more of a benefit for the battery than for the speed, but I figure I can't be too much worse off with an SSD in my desktop than with the stuipd Raptors that keep dying.

[Devhux]

The only boards that support triple-channel memory are ones using the X58 chipset (and the old i7 9xx CPUs). Granted, now with the performance that Sandy Bridge processors like the i7 2600 have, there's almost no point to buying an X58 board anymore.

Odd that Dell would throw 3 DIMMs in there.

[Jeffbx]

Odd that Dell would throw 3 DIMMs in there.

I thought so too, but I have to say (especially these days with 64-bit OS's becomming the norm) that people buy more & more based soley on the numbers they see. It's hard to explain to someone why spending $750 on a Thinkpad T420 with 4GB RAM & 500GB HD is a MUCH better idea than spending $750 on an HP Pavilion with 6GB RAM & 1TB HD.

I don't think Dell is TOO guilty of this - I notice in the customization tool for this machine you can select 6GB, but it's 2x2 + 1x2. No idea how this one ended up with 2GBx3 - maybe whoever configured it did it over the phone or something...

I broke down & orderd a Crucial 128GB SSD for it, too. The thing that convinced me was that the machine has two 6Gb/sec SATA ports, but it shipped with a 3Gb drive. The Crucial has a 6Gb interface, and it's my first new machine in 4 years, so that was apparently all the justification I needed. So OS & apps will go on the SSD, the 1.5TB it shipped with will become the data drive, and I have a 2TB external for backups.

[cruelpupet]

Make sure you put the swap file on the hard drive and not the ssd