Earlier this week I finally placed an order for my new PC with Falcon Northwest. They were one of the few US PC manufacturers with a decent reputation on resellerratings.com who were also willing to ship to Bermuda. They'll also pay $200 of the shipping cost each way should I ever need to return it to them for repair. I'm still praying I won't ever need to do that, though, given the $600 cost each way.
Anyway, kudos to them, and to their helpful sales guy for answering all my questions, getting my Bermuda address into their US-centric ordering system, and enabling me to pay with my Bermuda-issued debit card instead of having to go through the hassle and expense of organising a wire transfer. If this machine pans out well they could have my business for years to come.
The specs:
- Intel Core i7 920 processor (2.66GHz)
- 6GB of RAM
- NVidia GeForce GTX 280 graphics card
- Western Digital Velociraptor 300GB primary hard drive (10krpm), plus a bog-standard 750GB, 7200rpm secondary hard drive for my media.
- Vista Ultimate 64 bit
I wasn't going to go for the i7 processor initially, not really wanting bleeding-edge technology in my machine. But as it turned out, it was cheaper than the Core 2 Quad Q9550 that I'd originally specced out, and it meant I could go for 6GB of RAM rather than the original 8GB that I had been considering (the i7 is optimised for use with three sticks of RAM rather than the standard two), saving me an additional couple of hundred of dollars.
Expected ship date is sometime during the week beginning 17th November, and it'll take several days to get here. Can't wait.
