Thanks to all for your comments and hints on other suppliers to
consider; in particular I shall have a further look at
www.vadim.co.uk
to see what it would cost to configure a machine to my liking.
To explain the "pocket money" bit further: my wife and |I have an
agreement that *her* state pension and pension from BT are *her* money,
to do with as she wants, and *my* state pension and the money I earn
from oddments of consulting are *my* money (hence "pocket money"; the
"housekeeping" is the pensions from my two former employers.
I spent an hour or so earlier this week, poring over the information on
the Evesham, Hi-Grade, Mesh and Novatech web sites, to build up a table
comparing the exact configurations of an Intel quad core system from
each. It was quite revealing, and if anyone would like a copy I can send
it to them - mail me off list. There were fairly clear gaps in the
pricing, with the Hi-Grade system coming in cheapest at around £2150,
then Evesham and Mesh very close together at about £2450, and Novatech
at a bit over £2710 (the higher price of the Novatech is probably
accounted for by the higher spec of the graphics card: 2 x nVidia
8800GTX, whereas Evesham and Mesh both use single nVidia 8800GTX and the
Hi-Grade uses a twin nVidia 7950GX2.
It'll be a little while yet before I get paid, so I shall have time to
do some more digging around (and do another column on my comparison
table for a system from
www.vadim.co.uk)!
Happy Christmas to all
Ian
--
Ian Park
17 Pyle Hill
Newbury
Berkshire
RG14 7JJ
Tel: +44 (0)1635 821420
GSM: +44 (0)7785 300290
email: ian@???
