Customizable OEM PCs?

Z

Zinn

Guest
I know that most OEM PCs are customizable to a degree (ie. what parts do you want in it stock, and you can never upgrade)

I was wondering how many companies use mainstream parts with mainstream or slightly modified (ie. logo) BIOSes. It would be cool to get an OEM PC with some sort of overclocking ability and just forgo the warranty. I'm getting a new place soon and am interested in an HTPC... one that I could tweak would be fun, I just don't have time to put together yet another computer.

Does Falcon Northwest or Voodoo PC use tweakable BIOSes and decent parts? I saw the review with the overclocked Pentium D, so I assume at least Velocity Micro could...

does anyone know?
 
Yeah, the lower the tier generally the more customizable, they just can't afford custom stuff. With my little business I don't plan on ever changing Bios or anything, stock and quality w00t :p.
 
I went to Best Buy in North Richland hills and opened up the cases to the new eMachines and Gateway A64 939 machines just to look see. I see an emachine and Gateway, side by side, both with MSI "retail" xpress200 mATX mobos in them. They are flashed with bioses (i checked) that don't give you the tweak settings of course, but you can flash them back to retail MSI (but you would lose the OEM cpoy of the operating system p[ossibly). There are weak links though. The power supplies have 15A on the +12V, and the HDD is IDE not SATA, and the OS recovery has no disk (though you can burn one with a DVD-R). The kicker is it uses IGP of course. If someone (perhaps someone might be looking on this forum for a nice HTPC but don't want to build it themselves) were to get one of these i would get the Gateway, because it's identical to the emachine (the lower cost gateways are designed and made at eMachines factories) and because it has Windows MCE, and it's close in price to the eMachine. All you might want to do is get the rosewill PSU that you see on the front page @ newegg (for mATX and resembles Inwin PSU's) to replace the one they gie you once you add a 6800GT/X800XL AIW to the machine. It's not such a bad deal really because you get S939, PCIe, WMCE, and an MSI motherboard, DVD-RW-R, DVD, Card reader.
 
TheCreator said:
you don't have 45 minutes to build a PC?
Click to expand...
Ugh you're right... I think the only reason for me to buy a pre-built would be the warranty/support. Voiding this overclocking and paying extra hundreds for the pre-build is kinda rediculous, although it would be nice to tweak on later when the warranty runs out if not at first...

Yeah now that I think about it more I would never do this... I was really just wondering about the BIOSes and parts manufacturers use.
zone_86 said:
I went to Best Buy in North Richland hills and opened up the cases to the new eMachines and Gateway A64 939 machines just to look see. I see an emachine and Gateway, side by side, both with MSI "retail" xpress200 mATX mobos in them. They are flashed with bioses (i checked) that don't give you the tweak settings of course, but you can flash them back to retail MSI (but you would lose the OEM cpoy of the operating system p[ossibly). There are weak links though. The power supplies have 15A on the +12V, and the HDD is IDE not SATA, and the OS recovery has no disk (though you can burn one with a DVD-R). The kicker is it uses IGP of course. If someone (perhaps someone might be looking on this forum for a nice HTPC but don't want to build it themselves) were to get one of these i would get the Gateway, because it's identical to the emachine (the lower cost gateways are designed and made at eMachines factories) and because it has Windows MCE, and it's close in price to the eMachine. All you might want to do is get the rosewill PSU that you see on the front page @ newegg (for mATX and resembles Inwin PSU's) to replace the one they gie you once you add a 6800GT/X800XL AIW to the machine. It's not such a bad deal really because you get S939, PCIe, WMCE, and an MSI motherboard, DVD-RW-R, DVD, Card reader.
Click to expand...
This is useful to know.
 
The t6212 (emachines, ATi S939 board) works very well as a gaming rig. You can throw a gf 6600 or a x800 XL in without changing anything else. Adding a 6800gt makes things much more interesting. Sometime they have issues, even with upgraded Antec 480watt PSUs.... I think its primarily a heat issue as those cases have no easy way of moving in fresh cool air.
 
My brother has ^^that eMachines, and it's an ok computer after we threw a 6600GT in it. It DOES tend to run a bit hot, especially with the included utter-crap back exhaust fan. Sticking something real on there, changing the temps for the fan speed in bios, and enabling Cool-n-Quiet helped a lot.

I am curious about this bios flash, because I would like to fool with the memory timings and get it off of the 2T commande rate. Can anyone confirm that this works and tell me what bios I would need? I can't test it for you guys as it's not my PC...he'll let me fool with it, but only to a point. Thanks for any info!
 
zone_86 said:
I went to Best Buy in North Richland hills and opened up the cases to the new eMachines and Gateway A64 939 machines just to look see. I see an emachine and Gateway, side by side, both with MSI "retail" xpress200 mATX mobos in them. They are flashed with bioses (i checked) that don't give you the tweak settings of course, but you can flash them back to retail MSI (but you would lose the OEM cpoy of the operating system p[ossibly). There are weak links though. The power supplies have 15A on the +12V, and the HDD is IDE not SATA, and the OS recovery has no disk (though you can burn one with a DVD-R). The kicker is it uses IGP of course. If someone (perhaps someone might be looking on this forum for a nice HTPC but don't want to build it themselves) were to get one of these i would get the Gateway, because it's identical to the emachine (the lower cost gateways are designed and made at eMachines factories) and because it has Windows MCE, and it's close in price to the eMachine. All you might want to do is get the rosewill PSU that you see on the front page @ newegg (for mATX and resembles Inwin PSU's) to replace the one they gie you once you add a 6800GT/X800XL AIW to the machine. It's not such a bad deal really because you get S939, PCIe, WMCE, and an MSI motherboard, DVD-RW-R, DVD, Card reader.
Click to expand...
It's generally known that the RS480 mainboards do lack bios options, most reviews of these boards state that, there are also no known hardware monitoring applications for these boards, but bear in mind, these machines are for people that just want to turn on the machine and not mess with it.

Generally the same people that think AOL is the internet, and that a computer tower is called a CPU..

MD
 
As an addendum to my above post:

The hardware monitoring problem (lack-thereof) i had heard about in another forum, not just this board but other boards that are express200 based. Additionally, there seems to be some issues that are common that crop up concerning SATA implementation and or SPD ram issues with boards that can be tweaked (EG ECS express200). Seems to run @ 800HTT/166DDR (not that it affects A64 adversly anyway). From the review that Kyle and company did on the shuttle box with the same chipset it seems that this chipset needs some driver tweakage and the SATA issues - and i would suspect some memory issues as well probably need a second gen or revision (or better drivers) to 'work things out'. This all in the face of ATI's crossfire due out soon ... ATI needs to do some work on this chipset it seems since Crossfire will be ATI specific. Most of the people that i know of who are running this chipset with aftermarket boards (3 that i know of) are not running with top-end ram or VGA cards. Only 1 with the ECS boards has a 6800 ultra in it and he get's BSOD's at times. Most of the OEM PC crowd that are using the Gateways and eMachines (in the CNET forums) are using onboard IGP and not PCIe cards (only a few with 6200-6600GT's). So although i gave some info about what's inside the box would not purchase one myself if i intended to make it double as a budget hi-po game box.
 
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