Do you say the same for Fry's Electronics? We have two of their stores here. I had forgotten about them. For me, their a price-only option if I already know what I want.
I've bought a few things there in the past, including two Hyundai monitors that bite. Other than that, a high-end inverter for the car that was on sale and a long power strip. I'm not all that fond of their customer service.
The thing to remember about Fry's is that Fry's and customer service are mutually exclusive. Been that way since they opened their first store in Sunnyvale in the mid 1980s (and I shopped in that location, too).
Now, if you want a nice, powerful system, prepare to spend $$$. The system I built in early February has the following:
E6700 Core(tm) 2 Duo uP. I work for Intel and got it for about 1/2 of the best price I've seen on-line.
ASUS P5W DH motherboard.
Seagate 250 GByte SATA drive
e-GeForce 8800 GTS video card. 660 MBytes RAM, not quite the performance of the 8800 GTX, but for $200 less I can live with it. Still just over $400 on-line.
2 GBytes RAM
I'd have to dig through my e-mail to come up with the sources, but when all was said and done, I bought from 5 on-line sources (including the uP from work) and two local stores (chassis/power supply from one, MS wireless keyboard and mouse from another) and spent just under $1800. You'd spend closer to $2000 as you'll pay about $600 for the uP.
MSFS X with all the realism sliders shoved to the right and it doesn't even breath hard. Running Vista Home Premium. Remember with Vista, RAM is your friend.
Even running as my primary machine, it is ranked 407 in the world on recent average credit on
SETI@home. We've got a dual quad core Xeon machine at work that should work its way up to the top 20 if it is allowed enough time.
Have fun. Computers are like flying, you want speed, spend the bucks.
