Build your own mac

[plinden]

You've got to be kidding me! My dad's 1.8 GHz P3 Laptop is horribly slow with Windows XP. It's a joke compared to my G4 iMac with 800 MHz. Once you turn on the computer, you have to wait a couple of minutes for the PC to be ready to do anything. You'll click, nothing happens, and you'll sit there for a couple of minutes until something moves. ...

I helped my friend purchase a $900 Dell PC about 6 months ago... a 2.8 GHz (I believe) P4 with 512 MB of RAM and a GeForceFX 5200 and Windows Home edition. Well, even his decent PC is a choppy mess. Windows, icons, buttons don't respond when they're expected to. ...

I haven't read to the end of the thread, so this may have been mentioned already. If so, sorry.

I'm not a Windoze fan, but often it's unresponsive because of spyware and/or viruses rather than underlying responsiveness. I suggest you download adaware (www.lavasoft.de) and Spybot (security.kolla.de) and AVG antivirus (www.grisoft.com) and make sure your dad's and friend's PCs are clean.

I still haven't got my PowerBook so I'm using my 2 yr old 1.8 GHz P4, and it's still pretty snappy, but I have 1GByte RAM, have turned off the eyecandy (i.e. configured it for performance) and I keep it clean of all (known) spyware and viruses.

(added the following)
As someone else said, also make sure all drivers are up-to-date, and go to www.pcpitstop.com and have it analyse the PCs. Also, run sandra (www.sisoftware.co.uk)

Sorry - this shouldn't really be in a build-a-Mac thread.

But, as to why anyone would want to build a PC/Mac rather than buy? I am tempted to build my own PC, just for the hell of it. But right now I'd rather save my cash for a PowerBook.

 

[MacDaddie0]

Not true. Around 1.5 years ago, I built a PC for gaming with the following spec's for $1200:

Antec Tower Case with 350W Power Supply
Asus A7N8X Deluxe Motherboard
.. with Dual Ethernet ans Serial ATA RAID
AMD Athlon 2600+ CPU
512MB Corsair DDR333 CL2 RAM
60GB 7200rpm Drive
Asus DVD-ROM
PNY 128MB GeForce4 Ti Video Card

Those components are all good brands and it actually boots faster than my PB 1.33 and iMac 800. I still love the Mac for its usability and stability, however, the notion of the Macintosh line being priced comparatively to PC's is not true. Of course, you are also paying for the OS when you buy a Mac, but that only remove $130 from the equation. I still think Mac's are overpriced, but I will still continue to purchase from Apple because I feel that's where my money is best spent.

Sure you can make a $1200 Windows PC, but not a workstation level machine for that price.
Try HP or even Dell's workstation specs and see what you get for $3,000.
At least compare with the specficiations closely as possible to what Mac has.

 

[musicpyrite]

That was a wast of time, LOL.

No it wasn't, don't be so close minded.

 

[rueyeet]

Most of the apple components that I've seen would add up to about the same price as just purchasing a new Mac.

I'd agree with that. I was toying with the idea of building my own Cube with all nice upgraded components; the idea was: Why buy a used Cube just to rip out and replace all the components? Why not just start from the components?

First, because of the logic board thing: Apple is the only manufacturer of Mac logic boards, which means you can't really get a new one (like you can get a nice new motherboard from third parties on the x86 side). So you're starting with a used board from the outset, and usually an older one.

Two, you've got to assemble a set of components that will be compatible with that particular logic board. There are those that say that this is easier because the set of compatible components is smaller than on the x86 side, but it does take quite a bit of research to nail down. And then there's all the usual PC-building cross-compatibility double-checking to do.

In my little project at least, the price of getting and assembling all the separate components turned out to be a good few hundred dollars more than just buying an existing Cube and applying the same upgrades. And of course the price of either option could have paid for most, if not all, of a new Mac. Granted, the Cube's a collector thing, and probably a more complicated proposition, but still.....it seriously turned out to be more money and trouble than it was worth.

 

[Haberdasher]

Sure you can make a $1200 Windows PC, but not a workstation level machine for that price.
Try HP or even Dell's workstation specs and see what you get for $3,000.
At least compare with the specficiations closely as possible to what Mac has.

Depends where you purchase. Try newegg.com or ibuypower.com.

1300 was my tricked out Athlon 64 (note the 64 bit... ) and included a nice little speaker setup too.

 

[crazzyeddie]

If you want to, you can in fact do this... although it takes a little more work than a standard PC. You can buy generic PPC motherboard/CPU combos from http://pegasosppc.com/index.php. Then, after installing Linux, you can run Mac-On-Linux, which will run OS X at basically native speeds.

 

[MacDaddie0]

Depends where you purchase. Try newegg.com or ibuypower.com.

1300 was my tricked out Athlon 64 (note the 64 bit... ) and included a nice little speaker setup too.

As mentioned before, try to get price on dual xeon, dual athlon 64 or something close to dual G5 2.0 powermac with DVD burning, 1000bits ethernet, firewire 800, etc...