gordon you are going to find that their is no perfect system out their.
you will also not find a good price on a seperate 500 pentium 3 chip.
the reason is this, intel encourages companies like gateway and del to only
use pentiums by discounting the price on the chip to them.
so if a company only uses intel parts they get great priceing on the micro
processor.
of course that gives you 3 choices.
pay the big bucks.
second choice is not to buy the 500 mhz chip, instead get the 350 pentium 2
processor that only cost 200 dollars.
you will not see that much of a differance.
then when the 500 mhz is cheaper buy it then.
the third choice is to buy a system that is integrated and add a sound card.
many integrated systems have decent mother boards.
just do not ask for a home p c when going to gateway.
ask for business model.
or get the compaque maid to order pro signia line.
they offer the matrox 200 g with 8 or 16 meg of memory.
their only down fall is not enough
options on sound cards.
nor do they offer scsi.
by the way gateway will install a scsi card if you buy a scsi harddrive.
just ask them for a model with no integrated video, they do have it.
in fact del, gate way, and micron all use very high quality mother boards,
usually they use intel boards.
while you must remember intel has some boards with a lot of junk in them, they
also have some with plenty of slots.
like their seattle model
which i think has 4 p c i slots and 2 i s a slots.
prior to using intel mother boards those 3 used the micronics mother boards,
also some of the best boards around.
plus they test and insure compatibility with matrox according to their web
page.
of course both the intel and micronics line are strick intel shops, meaning no
over clocking capabilities on either board.
so upgradeing any faster down the road is less likely out side of the original
range of the mother board.
personally my solution to that is buy a dual processor mother board.
of course that means down the road going to n t and the cost of jfw for n t
must be part of the equation.
of course eventually we are all headed that way.
so my advice is buy integrated system and add the high quality parts you want.
here are some in store models that work with jfw, like the compaque desk pro
have matrox 200 g video cards.
so ordering from a c d w where they install everything for free.
one can buy a jfw system ready to go out the door.
all with high quality parts.
so you could order the modem and sound card together and they would install
it.
my modem suggestion is to buy the 3 com p c i speaker phone modem, its the
only p c i that i know of that is not a win modem.
also get the live value from creative labs. because it works great with jfw and
software speech.
plus it has a jack for head phones.
bill
p s if you want extra info, write me privately
[EMAIL PROTECTED]
i am also building a system, but i do not always recommend it to others, it all
depends on how much hand holding is needed.
plus as you already found out one can not build a 500 mhz killer system cheaper
than buying one.
bill cameron
bill cameron
At 02:19 PM 3/24/99 -0500, you wrote:
>Hi steve:
>Where are you getting the components from? I'm about to do the same thing,
>and am finding that p500 chip to be a lot mor expensive when buying it
>separately then when buying an integrated system. I don't want to buy an
>integrated system because most of them are using cheap motherboards with
>the sound cards and modems built right on them. And, they don't have enough
>expansion slots.
>Gord
>
>-
>Visit the jfw ml web page: http://jfw.cjb.net
-
Visit the jfw ml web page: http://jfw.cjb.net
