Peter Staack Product Testimonials & Reviews

      TigerDirect.com has a sweet deal on a monster barebones PC kit - Quad-Core 2.66GHz Intel i7 920 CPU, Asus P6T LGA 1366 motherboard (with 1 PCIeX1, 3 PCIeX16 slots, and 6 SATA 3.0Gb/s hookups), 12GB (2x6GB) PC12800 triple-channel DDR3-1600MHz, Seagate 7200.11 1.5TB hard drive with 32MB buffer memory, in a spacious high-airflow black case with a goof 650-watt power supply - for only $900, after a $10 rebate. Pieced together from other suppliers, the same components would cost around $1100~$1200. Toss in a good PCIe 2.0 video card, a 64-bit OS that supports 12GB RAM (I'm partial to Windows Vista Ultimate or Windows 7), and that's a pretty boss system for just over a grand.

      On the low-end, you can get a dual-core 3.73GHz Intel Pentium D, a decent PCIe 2.0 motherboard with onboard NVIDIA GeForce 7050/610i graphics, and 4GB (2x2GB) DDR2-800MHz PC6400 in a fairly-nice ATX mid-tower with 300 watt power supply - for only $199, after a small rebate. Heck... Shopping around, the Pentium D 965 chip alone is $100 ~ $175 at other places. They also have lots of cheap SATA drives, and entry-to-mid-level graphics cards on sale. Not a bad little system, for a pretty sweet price, IMO. If you don't already have an OS, you can get Vista Home Premium fairly cheap, right now. Vista Home Basic and XP are also good deals, if you can find 'em and don't need Premium. As well, several Linux builds might do the trick, and save even more loot.

      If you're willing to devote an hour or two to putting a barebones system together, and load the OS, TigerDirect.com always has these sweet deals on barebones systems. So far, we've also gotten a number of recertified systems, at awesome prices ($300~$600 systems for between $90~$230), that have operated flawlessly 5~10 hours a day, 5+ days a week. The only two times we got a faulty component, their customer service was quick to ship out a replacement for exchange. Yeah, it's not as easy as going to a store, but the savings make up for it. And, it's really not that difficult these days. The last fully-loaded PC I put together was WAY less complicated than putting together the IKEA chair my boss got for his office.