The recent 'podcast' on TR had information about the Zotac barebones system, which seemed interesting enough, and the price is nice and below 300.00 (considering no HDD/OS/Ram). I just put together a little 380 on dell's site and came out with 470.00 total (133.00 "Instant Saving" ohhh ahhhh".. right.
Considering that neither of these come with a monitor, and we wouldn't need one.... I'm trying to figure out what would work best for my client. In my opinion, I have to repair Dell's far to much to recommend them. However, this particular guy has used dells forever and really thinks the sun shines out their ass. I've had tons of luck with their servers, rock solid.. but their desktops are a different story.
I assumed that with a barebones system they would be paying around $250.00 for the system (high estimate), $50.00 for a HDD, 60.00 for a 2gig stick of ram and the rest they already have. Thats not counting shipping which is likely to ring in at 60.00-70.00 to Alaska.
Anyone had luck (reliability and performance) with a particular barebones system? These ones here would be used for very basic things like email, websites, ect.
I've got a little MSI Wind 100 Nettop at the house that is a bit underpowered with its Atom 330, and I was really ticked to see the Southbridge cooler literally shaking and rattling, something I had to fix before using it.