LANCOZA Blog

I recently upgraded my PC. I had a reasonably tight budget of about R6000.00 which meant that it was not going to have a cool graphics card. The motherboard has onboard everything. I bought a 160GB hard drive, 2GB RAM and a Core 2 CPU.

To remain within budget I bought a combo case which included a PSU, keyboard and mouse. I bought the AOpen combo previously so I was reasonably confident of what to expect. The Gigabyte case was a revelation. It is extremely light but this is probably because it is made of the cheapest steel known to mankind. The case is black with silver around the front bezel. My old AOpen case was not painted on the inside which makes sense if you are selling a budget product. I guess on a large scale production line, every drop of paint counts. In the Gigabyte case the inside panels were partially painted. The technical term would be speckled with paint, this seems like a waste of paint to me. In a budget box with no plexi-glass side panel there is no point to painting or partially painting the inside of side panels.

On the plus side, the case has a cool, blue light around the power button which perfectly matches the light around the power button of my beautiful 22 inch wide Samsung monitor.

In line with my budget I bought a LiteOn optical drive. It definitely looks and feels low budget as compared to my Sony writer. I will let you know how it treats me after I write a few discs.

Overall the performance of my PC belies its budget price tag.

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