So I had to order some parts for the Avon customer (which will now be referred to as Charlie as she allowed permission to use her name). Ordered two WD 1TB Caviar Blue hard drives, two XFX PRO550W power supplies, and two sets of Mushkin Enhanced Blackline 2x4GB DDR3-1600 kits for both her pcs. Hoping it will be here before the weekend so that she can start having a stable system.
The situation takes a scenario from my page about power supplies. The builder thought he'd put in a GTX550Ti (which is a great entry level gaming GPU) into Charlie's systems in order to jack up the price of the computers. However, he didn't take into account how much wattage a 550Ti draws and as such only put a cheap 350W power supply into the two systems. Because of this, Charlie is having a bunch of BSODs, freezing etc simply because the wattage is being stretched past the peak wattage of the power supply. Not only this, but there was no headroom to any upgrades in the systems at all in the future. As such, I've planned to upgrade them to a 550W power supply so that it can take the extra hard drive in the system as well as give them some headroom so that they can do a bit more upgrading in the future if necessary.
Not only is the power supply too low of a wattage, but the RAM was also a bit cheaped out on. Instead of using premium RAM that has heat-sinks on it, the builder decided to use Kingston Value RAM (which isn't bad if you're on a REALLY tight budget). Considering how much was paid for the system, I definitely think that having better RAM and a larger hard drive would have been more important than jacking up the price with a graphics card that will probably never see past 20% load. The reason behind getting heat-sinks on RAM is because less heat is less wear on the parts. Not having a heat-sink on the RAM causes the chips to stay hotter longer and as such, wear out quicker. If you are on a tight budget and just need something right away that you PLAN to upgrade later, you can always get value based RAM so that you can have a system that is operational, however I would suggest against value based RAM if you plan on owning the system for more than 3 years. It's not necessarily going to mean that after 3 years RAM without heat-sinks will fail, but I have seen from personal experience that RAM without heat-sinks does get unstable a fair bit quicker than premium RAM with heat-sinks installed.
Lastly, because of the need of storage, I have planned to upgrade Charlie's systems to have a Western Digital 1TB Caviar Blue storage drive in the system (as well as the 500GB that is already currently installed in the computers. Even though Charlie expressed her NEED for as large of storage space as possible to the builder, he instead only put a 500GB drive in (when a 1TB isn't that much more in price). I was fairly disappointed when I heard how she needed a lot of storage but instead only got a 500GB and then a graphics card that is more than she'll ever use.
What I would have done if I built the system from scratch is build an AMD FM1 system instead first off to save cost which still having excellent performance (as the most expensive A8-3870K is almost the same price as the i3 2120). I would have put premium RAM in, a motherboard with four DDR3 slots (to allow for more upgrades in the future if really necessary to put extra RAM in), a lower end graphics card (such as a 6570 that only costs 60 dollars) to save on price as she doesn't plan on doing any hardcore gaming, and an aftermarket heat-sink on the CPU (as both systems are currently sporting stock cpu heat-sinks) to allow for easy cool overclocking.
She was also charged for a Logitech Z506 speaker setup (which she voiced that she did not need). Considering the price of the speaker setup (which usually goes between 90-100 dollars), I would have instead (if still needing speakers) hooked her up with a set of Logitech LS21 speakers or Creative A220 speakers.
Here are the current specs of her two systems which are built identical(pre-upgraded by me):
In Win EM013 Chassis
ASUS P8H61-M LE Motherboard
I3-2120
Kingston Value RAM 2x4GB
Western Digital Caviar Blue 500GB HDD
EVGA GTX550Ti Graphics Card
Would have also liked to see in her system a more updated chipset (such as a Z68 or Z77 chipset) on the motherboard as H61 is fairly old now. But soon hopefully everything will be cleared up on the system and resolve several issues Charlie is having at this time on the two systems (assuming Windows was installed correctly and all drivers are installed correctly).
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