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Is it just me or is this the damn Apocalypse? I can't seem to find any hardware in stock for low-medium builds. TR's own MARCH 2012 system guide motherboard "Asus P8H67-V" is out of stock and looks almost like its discontinued. I'm seriously getting pretty fed up with the **** excuses by hardware manufacturers claiming yield issues and other setbacks. I get the honest feeling that the majority of the issues in the industry are coming from a large mass exodus of experienced business men being replaced by none other than my own generation of in-experienced wannabes, any truth to this? Its like none of them know how to meet a deadline and they are all in such a rush to push out the next thing instead of refining the existing products.

Hell finding anything smaller than a 21.5" LCD is near impossible. Go ahead and look at newegg's 20" monitors, or 19", sure there are a few of the crappy res 18.5" (The newer size) and a good bunch of them without even DVI or HDMI. You pretty much have to go from 18.5" to 23" and the price jump is enough to make your head spin. Its hard to find that perfect middle ground as customers think there 17" 4:3 is still good enough. Then they get a bit confused as they don't notice any quality difference in videos and are upset. In order to get into the 1920x1080 range you either buy a 23" or a more expensive (around 180-200) for a 21.5".

The whole thing has me seriously pissed to be in the business of building/selling computers as it leaves me with little to no wiggle room to make my customers happy or meet a decent price mark. I feel like I can offer them an ITX system that's way to under-powered (not the skt 1155 ones) or a normal mid-tower for right under a grand. Ouch man.

Some of that is channel-clearing by the mob makers, as we already saw with the P67. With Ivy Bridge and its associated chipset being the new hotness, the motherboard makers don't want to be in the last-generation business a minute longer than necessary. Presumably they will get around to releasing budget offerings once they've got the highest-margin models out and soaked up the early-adopter / reflexive upgraders.

As for smallish monitors, have you looked at Amazon?

Here are some comparable motherboard alternatives for under $130:
P8H67-M Pro/CSM
P8B75-M/CSM
P8Z68-V LX
P8Z68-M Pro
P8H77-M/CSM
P8Z68-V LE

Can you get cheap enough with a Pentium G850?

I just bought a 20" 1600 x 900 Acer monitor for $89 shipped from Newegg for my Uncle. I was pretty shocked at how slim and how NICE the monitor looked. I don't have an IPS monitor, but I do have a 'higher end' TN from Samsung. The Acer monitor has VGA and DVI input to it as well.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6824009317

Despite what the photos show and some reviewers saying there is no VESA mounting, the unit I received DID have VESA mounting. The color reproduction was very good for a monitor of that price, and the backlight was surprisingly even.

Good looking monitor find. As for motherboards being right under 130 doesn't quite cut it for what id consider a budget rig. I'd like to see sub 100 offerings that don't get 1 or 2 eggs based on having horrible quality issues. I recall being able to build a system on a 75 dollar board that was rock solid, i guess those days are gone. The only thing that has gotten cheaper is ram, but give them time and the dram manufacturers will do what they always do, claim a shortage and hike prices up overnight before releasing DDR4.

So go AMD for low-medium builds. Still plenty of options for sub-$100 AM3/AM3+ motherboards, and there's even a reasonable selection of low-mid Athlon II and Phenom II CPUs still in the distribution channel if you don't want to go the Bulldozer route.

I agree with JBI and go the AMD route,70-80$ for a decent 880g mb ad a relatively cheap 960t phenom that just might unlock into a 6 core chip:) But then you a bit limited on upgradability cpu wise.Now that i went back to look at you original post it seems your in the business of building computers for people,Perhaps start building AMD rigs for your cheaper systems.They run plenty fast for probably 90% of your customers.
With HDs being the biggest bottleneck in computers for a long time now and SSDs coming down so much in price.Call up some of your old customers and offer adding a SSD to there computers.Humm now that i think about it if a SSD can make a crappy computer snappy and quick it might make you loose a lot of sales of new systems.But SSD upgrades might make you additional income,You know your customer base better then any of us.
As for the monitors i just cringe even thinking about a tiny 20 inch panel.Sorry to say 4/3 panels are going extinct,16/9 took over like a virus with the invention of the hdtv,1st just a few then BAM ,they are everywhere.I do not mind them but a lot of professionals do not like them.Good luck to ya finding the monitors you need.109$ 21.5 1080p acer for 109$ at newegg http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 24-009-306 also 20" 1600/900 for 99$ http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6824009317 you can find a few 21.5" 1080p monitors for 129$ acer,etc.
I also looked at dell thinking they might have some cheap small monitors but they are a ripoff
Microcenter sells the 2500k for 179$ and i think 50% off a motherboard on top.Thats one hell of a deal.In store pickup only.Opps your in alaska:( no microcenter on the top of the world.I do envy you though,would love to live there.So beautiful but also Wild.

$140 Intel Pentium G850 + Intel BOXDH61BEB3 or ASRock H61M/U3S3

JAE, nice find actually . Although its only a dual core , should do fine still yet. Comes with USB 3.0 which is nice for an add-on chip since the H61 doesn't include one natively. However, sort of sucks that it does not have a USB 3.0 header, I guess its good that the Corsair cases come with a splitter to plug front port USB 3.0 into USB 2.0. Otherwise, the board looks fairly decent, and no real downsides to what my custom needs, only 2 DIMMS isn't a big issue as this particular customer isn't likely to ever want to upgrade, and with the cost of ram being so minimal, I'm bound to drop 8 gigs into this to avoid future headaches.

For $38 more you could get the Core i3-2120. That might be better applied to upgrading the monitor.

just brew it! wrote:

So go AMD for low-medium builds.

$135 ASRock A75M-HVS + AMD A6-3500 or $120 A4-3300 or $172 A8-3850

Of course, Trinity CPUs and socket-FM2 motherboards should be along to replace Llano and FM1 in a month or so.

Here are a bunch of benchmarks including the Intel Pentium G850:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4524/the- ... 20t-tested

Have you ever considered reselling OEM systems, instead of building your own? The large OEMs have owned the budget market for a long time. Instead of catering to and supplying an enthusiast crowd, they focus on what SMBs are looking for.

There are a few reason I don't resell OEM.

1.) They generally have cheaper parts in them which fail more often than I'd be comfortable selling to my customers.
2.) The profit margin for something that is already marked up by someone like Dell is going to be pretty low, especially when your customers can buy the same thing online.
3.) Upgrade path.... minimal.

Don't get me wrong, OEM machines can have their place, but for the most part I steer clear of them.. with the exception of some of the higher end Dell servers. Its nice to have their warranty sometimes, but still... have you ever dealt with dell support to get the parts? They aren't bad about deciding to send you replacements, but they send the wrong stuff VERY often and the call takes 1-2 hours guaranteed before they are done with their script to send you your parts. In the end, its just not worth it.

Although I will say that this particular Dell looks tempting to have about 2 on stock for customers that prefer Dells. With only 1 year of warranty, some of them may get a bit nervous but an extended warranty is possible worst case scenario.

http://www.neweggbusiness.com/Product/P ... 6883155365

$379 bucks for an I3-2120 with Windows 7 Pro... not bad. Still the quality comes into question. I just had my first hardware issue with one of the systems I put in place for a customer (20+ builds later). I'm in the proccess of troubleshooting but I'm 99% sure its a flaky power supply. I went against my better judgement and got the Antec NSK case with a PSU in it. Then again this particular clients place is EXTREMELY dusty and they haven't wanted me to come over and clean out their systems... until now.