61–70 of 216 posts
Accessories should be part of the options. You need cables for example to connect the HDs to the MB, DVI adapters for older monitors, etc. Some people may have a spare one, while others will have to make an additional trip to the store.
I pretty much bounce between newegg and tigerdirect when building a machine. Once you have a case and motherboard, everything falls into place based on my budget. I'm looking to start a new build soon. This case is speaking to me. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...
Have you tried http://pcpartpicker.com/ ? I used it for my last build. You can select a variety of different vendors, browse parts compare prices, etc. It does a pretty good job doing the compatibility checks for you as well (I can do them myself, but my heart just wasn't in it this time, so it was handy). I basically assembled my build with pcpartpicker, selected newegg, amazon and microcenter, then bundled it all u…
Edit: Also, the first several builds I made to test the site out all appear to be shipping from Amazon. Not sure if this supports multiple vendors or not.
When I build a PC, the number one feature I want is ECC memory. It can be tricky to find a non-server configuration that supports it (you historically need a "good" bios that is smart enough to enable it for AMD, and you typically need a Xeon flavor CPU + workstation level board for Intel; caveat, it has been 2.5 years since my last build). I was hoping that this tool might make finding non-server parts that support…
Otherwise it looks like a cool way to pick a build, especially since it's been so long since I have looked into building a desktop.
It'd be nice if you could add some mini-itx options for HPTC and/or Steam Machine.
When I build a PC, the number one feature I want is ECC memory. It can be tricky to find a non-server configuration that supports it (you historically need a "good" bios that is smart enough to enable it for AMD, and you typically need a Xeon flavor CPU + workstation level board for Intel; caveat, it has been 2.5 years since my last build). I was hoping that this tool might make finding non-server parts that support…
I'm genuinely curious, why is it your number one feature? I know that ECC provides error correction, but aside from server use, is it really that critical?
If you've decided upon ECC as a must, then it would be great for a system builder tool to then show you options based upon that choice.
- Technology stack?
- How do you keep product pricing up-to-date? Do you have a persistent process that iterates over your known product list, querying Amazon's Product Advertising API (staying within rate limits)? If that's the case would love to hear more details on language and libraries used as I'm working on something similar.
- How do you discover new products to list?
- What storage backend do you use to store historic pricing data? Regular relational database or something more exotic like InfluxDB?
- Any plans on introducing new retailers besides Amazon? If so, how will you correlate products into canonical listings if the product does not have UPC information?
Things like that.
I recently put together a couple of machines from parts, and having not done so for many years, found it extremely difficult to do so. A tool like this, that could highlight compatible CPUs, motherboards and so on, would have been very helpful!
A few (highly specific) features that would be useful:
* For the cheaper machines, there are some very good value case/PSU combos on Amazon (and elsewhere). It would be great to include these in the list of components. I know bargain-basement PSUs have a reputation for being poor quality, but there are reliabile ones out there (I ended up buying three different cheap case+CPUs and they have all been perfect under high load)
* I found it extremely hard to discover which CPUs came with their own heatsink+fan. Any way to clarify this would be very useful.