"Hard drive prices have continued to fall. Memory
prices have been going down. CPU prices, driven by the inexorable
flood of new higher performance processors, seem to be on the
downfall too.
Very few things can't be had for less than they costed 2 years
ago. This applies to video cards, sound cards, network cards and
even dvd-rom drives. Fueling this drive to lower price points has
been, at least here in the US, a competitive and cut-throat
industry for parts. Places like http://www.pricewatch.com let you
see what the real deal is. And you take your business there.
So what would we define as a monster machine? I defined a
monster machine as being one over 1 Gigahertz for the cpu, at least
1 Gigabyte of RAM, at least 40 GB of hard drive space, a dvd-rom
drive so that I can watch dvd movies on my linux box and the other
usual assortment of items like a keyboard, mouse and speakers. The
motherboard I wasn't too worried about what type it would be. I
just went with the lowest cost one I could find that I felt was a
fair quality. Maybe that's a bad decision. I'll find out soon."
