{"id":202,"date":"2006-01-16T22:30:53","date_gmt":"2006-01-16T21:30:53","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=202"},"modified":"2006-01-24T21:31:15","modified_gmt":"2006-01-24T20:31:15","slug":"dell-outlet-pc","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/?p=202","title":{"rendered":"Dell Outlet PC…"},"content":{"rendered":"

I ordered a new PC via the Dell Outlet<\/a> last week. <\/p>\n

I went for the outlet option because my existing AMD Athlon 1200Mhz desktop (midi-tower) was starting to groan at the slightest bit of hard work. Even a rebuild didn’t seem to help it. I’ve since found out that the northbridge chipset fan has given up the ghost<\/a>…which is interesting because this particular motherboard was swapped out because the original motherboard also had a dodgy northbridge chipset fan. After my first motherboard was swapped out, I went out and bought a Zalman heatsink<\/a> for the chipset – looks like I’ll be fitting it after all.<\/p>\n

So my search for a replacement base unit started late 2005 and saw me looking at the likes of Mesh, Evesham, eBuyer, Vadim and a handful of others. I really fancied a AMD 4400 X2 (dual-core) processor with a couple of gigabytes of memory, a decent sized hard drive and a couple of graphics cards. However, all the machines that I spec’d up were coming in at well over \u00a31,000. Even dropping back to a single graphics card and a smaller hard drive didn’t shave much off that price. <\/p>\n

Then I noticed the Dell Outlet – granted Dell [currently] only deal with Intel, so my hopes for a AMD 4400 were dashed. I had a frank conversation with myself (yes, yes, a sign of madness I know) and realised that what I needed was a reliable machine that was fast enough for my needs – it didn’t have to be all singing all dancing. So I browsed through the options at the Dell Outlet – they’ll let you reserve a machine (by putting it in your shopping cart) for 15 minutes prior to purchase, after that, it goes back on to the shelf for others to see. Initially I lost the machine I wanted, I guess somebody else put it in their cart after I had let my 15 minutes expire. Luckily, it came back on the market and I was able to order it.<\/p>\n

The Dell Outlet was the solution: I found a current-build Dimension 9150, Dual Layer DVD writer, 2 * 1024MB (533DDR2), 250GB SATA hard drive, 24-bit SoundBlaster Live and a 256MB ATI Radeon graphics card, keyboard and mouse…all for \u00a3530. I was able to re-use my existing monitor, 5.1 speakers (keyboard and mouse too). Delivery was rapid, from order to delivery, the turnaround was less than six days (I ordered late on a Friday night, the delivery was the following Thursday – four working days.)<\/p>\n

Yes it’s an Intel, and yes it does run hot, but with a processor heatsink that is the width of the unit (pretty much 6 inches) it’s nowhere near as hot as the Mesh with the faulty fan! Now things are happening (or not as the case may be!) even faster! And it’s oh so quiet.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

…so far so good<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-202","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=202"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/202\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=202"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=202"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.craigmurphy.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=202"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}