Time to Copy Hanselman (or Why It Sucks To Build A PC in Amsterdam)

About a month or two ago, Scott Hanselman talked about wanting to build a new developer rig. He worked with Jeff Atwood to come up with a list of components to solve all his needs. My needs are a bit different but the requirements in a PC are fairly similar and I am getting a bit tired of working with my old box (a 2.4 GHz P4) or loading personal projects on my work Thinkpad T41 so I decided to copy him and build a new PC. Its been a while since I did this. My last machine was a Dell but while it is fairly quiet, its downright noisy compared to the one I built myself in an Antec Sonata case. But last time I built my own PC I was in the US and more importantly in San Francisco. This was going to be my first opportunity to build a PC in Amsterdam.

Although I had a list of components from Scott and Jeff, finding places to buy this stuff was going to be a challenge. In the US I used sites like pricewatch to find the cheapest source for components. Here in the Netherlands I found a similar site called Tweakers.Net which has a pricewatch section. There are also reviews and other info on here, but its all in Dutch which means I am not going to be able to get much out of that stuff. After lots of searching, I ended up buying the majority of the components from EMPC along with a few other items from Komplett.

One of the problems with buying things here online is that paying is often very inconvenient. Many of the online stores don’t take credit cards. In fact, there are lots of physical stores here that don’t take credit cards. I don’t know if this is across Europe, but the Dutch seem to be scared of the whole idea of the credit card. Sure, they can be bad if you are stupid with them, but they can be oh so convenient. Instead, many require that you do a electronic funds transfer from your bank to theirs. EFTs in the US are a pain, but here they are fairly easy. The downside is that the receiving party may not recognize the funds for a day or two, delaying the shipment of your stuff.

To make things worse, it seems that most of the computer component retailers are simply middlemen getting components from bigger distributors rather than holding on to any stock themselves. This means that there is yet another delay of a few days while they order the components from their suppliers before they can send them to you.

So the best you can hope for from many of these vendors is to get your stuff about a week or more after you pay them. Now this isn’t the case with all of the vendors out there. Komplett accepted credit cards and it seemed that they had stuff in stock because they ship very quickly. They cost a few Euros more, but its a tiny price to pay to get what you paid for. I ordered from Komplett a couple days after I ordered from EMPC. The order from Komplett came on Thursday while I am still waiting for the EMPC order.

So what did I get? Well the list is almost identical to Scott and Jeff’s list:

The total for this came to about 1300 Euros which is far less than I paid for my last couple of machines and will blow them both away. In fact, after this I may have to try to figure out how to get rid of them. I knew what to do with them in the US but I have no idea what to do here.

We’ll see if my PC is as fast as his after I get it built. Hopefully I will be able to get to that after a Workflow class I am teaching next week.