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Comment by aggieben | Hacker News Reader

Eh...you can build something as good and cheaper than this if you carefully monitor Fry's ads.

Here we go: today's Fry's ad in The Dallas Morning News:

  $230 for Q6600 + ECS GF7100PVT-M
  $200 for 1TB Seagate SATA300/32MB, 7200RPM
  $60  for 4GB PC6400 DDR2
  $70  for Antec uATX Minuet 350 case
  --------
  $560

Throw in another $60 for 4 more GB of memory, and you've got what he's got, but with a bigger disk and much, much smaller case (it probably won't be as quiet) and for only $620 instead of $900.

4 GB of RAM is $60? When the hell did that happen?

Fry's sells defective components back to customers in the hope they'll be too lazy to return it (they do have an extremely liberal return policy, though -- it'll just go back on the shelf for someone else to buy).

I've never had a problem with components from Fry's. Just gotta choose the right brands. Patriot and Kingston are decent brands that usually gets sold in good sales (I think I got a couple of nice Kingston 2 GB sticks of for $35 each recently). Sometimes you'll see a great deal on Crucial as well.

I should also add, that your theory doesn't even make sense - the kind of people who buy components from Fry's are exactly the kind of people who will return stuff. What they are doing is just typical retail loss-leading sales in hopes that you'll buy that new DVD-burner* with a higher markup while you're in there.

* or whatever

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