Daily Archives: May 22, 2008

Best Deal?

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The thing about buying on the internet is not the upfront cost by the taxes, shipping and duties.

Buying american could be cheaper but duties are usually about 10% of total cost. Shipping is around 50$ too. Most times there are no taxes though.Buying canadian means taxes (gst) and shipping.

So to find the best deal you need to take that into account. Unless you are getting 20% off an item and saving 50$, stay canadian. When canadian, find a free shipper, there are tons of deals.

All that to say that the price I have on the PC specs is on the front maybe 40$ more expensive but I only pay gst and get free shipping. An alternate site was cheaper but had 75$ of shipping. It really pays to shop local…

New Computer

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So I need to upgrade the box.  It’s a 4 year old case with a few upgraded parts.  AMD Athlon 4000+, 2gigs of RAM, X700 card.  The card is the main issue but the chipset is itself over 2 years old.

Here’s what I’m looking at:

Diamond Viper Radeon HD 3850 512MB Dual Slot GDDR3 PCI-E Dual DVI-I HDCP HDMI HDTV Out Video Card

Antec Sonata Iii Black Atx 16IN Mid Tower Quiet Case 3X5.25 2X3.5 4X3.5IN 500W 120MM Fan

Corsair XMS2 Dominator TWIN2X4096-8500C5DF 4GB 2X2GB PC2-8500 DDR2-1066 CL5-5-5-15 240PIN Memory Kit

Arctic Cooling Alpine 64 AM2 S754 S939 S940 2000RPM 36CFM Heatsink Fan

ASUS M3A32-MVP Deluxe AMD 790FX AM2+ 4PCI-E16 CrossFireX 2PCI SATA2 RAID Sound GBLAN Motherboard

AMD Phenom X4 9750 Quad Core Processor Socket AM2 2.4GHZ 4MB Cache 125W Retail Box

Comes out to about 920$ (before tax).  It’s definitely a noticeable chunk of change but it would give me a new box for another 4 years, SLI support (well, Crossover as it’s called with ATI) and Phenom support (AM2+ chipset).  I alread have the HDD + peripherals.

Whatcha think?