I broke down yesterday and ordered a new computer. I’ve got lots of reasons for doing this but the number one was that it’s time – and mine is having a tough time keeping up with today’s tasks. I am currently running a Pentium D 2.8 which is Dual Core, and will work wonders for my parents where it’s heading – but for all the photography pixel-crunching and the odd video and over-all hard drive space – It’s time for an upgrade.
What did I get? Well, I decided to get one that was very much Hackintosh approved.. meaning that I could install and run Mac OSX if I needed to or wanted to as well as Windows 7. I actually found a pretty good guide for a system here at tonymacx86.com. The reason I chose almost the exact same parts and accessories that he did are pretty simple – he built a Hackintosh he called the “CustoMac Pro 2010” for a fraction of the price of the newest 4-core Mac Pro just announced. All that seem too geeky and techy for you? Let’s just put it this way, the one I’m building for around $1000 kicks the crap out of the Mac version which costs $2500… end of story.
It’s an i7 930 (Quad-core top of the line Intel processor) with 6 GB or RAM, support for the new USB 3.0 devices (those are going to be nuts), and lots of other goodies. It’s going to rock once it gets here and I put it all together.. but honestly that’s not what I wanted to write about today.
I wanted to write about the ordering process…
So where did I get all this fancy new gear? Answer: NCIX.com. I’ve dealt with them many times in the past and the experience has always been positive. Most times I would only by an item here, and an item there, never a full load of computer parts. My co-worker here at work advised me to go with them and use their built in price match system to make sure you’re getting the lowest price around. I’d like to tell you how that worked.
Basically you go through and pick all your items – for example the case that I purchased was $129.99 at Ncix.com. Realizing this was not on sale or anything, I then went to pricebat.ca and put in the exact name of the case and searched.
As you can see, the lowest price there is $85.95 at Anitec’s website – if you keep scrolling down you’ll see NCIX.com had it on for $129.99 as is what I put it in my shopping cart for.
So what do I do? SIMPLE! Go to the site that has the cheaper sale price – in this case go to the Anitec site – copy down the price and paste it in the price match session along with the URL. That’s it… it automatically gets taken off your price, then once you check out they will verify it during the order process before it’s shipped. In my case I saved $74 off my total order by doing this.. that’s a lot of money! It a great way for NCIX to retain customers as otherwise I’d be going to the other site to do my business but now I can do it all with one stop shopping. Highly recommended for your online tech shopping needs.
So the only thing that I didn’t buy was hard drive space and another monitor. Hard drives I have plenty of, too many too be honest, but I would like to increase my screen real estate and purchase another monitor sometime. Buy.com has a nice Samsung 19” 720p monitor on for $219.99 but I’d have to do my research and find out the best deal around when the time comes.
Looking forward to obtaining all the items I bought and putting it together, it’s been a long time since I’ve done it so I’m sure I’ll be posting how I get along when the time comes.
Very exciting
Sounds like a good system.
Like the sound of NCIX's price match policy – Still a long way ( & $$$) off new PC purchase but will certainly check it out.
yeah I'd not heard of it before but I must say I was really impressed! One stop shopping for the most part with a killer price match system.