Friday's Fry's: X2 3800 & ECS K8T890, $280?

Couldn't find much in the way of reviews for that board but here's the ECS site:

ECS K8T890

The CPU is $295 @ ZZF shipped so you're getting the processor cheap and a possibly decent board thrown in for free. Not an NForce 4 chipset though which is very popular now.
 
Thats a very good deal. The x2 3800+ i bought from zzf for $295 arrived yesterday, except i went with a much higher end mobo. The mobo gets moderate reviews from the 'Egg and probably wouldnt be great as a gamers board. But if you could get them both and sell the mobo that would be an even hotter deal on a [H]oooooooot processor!

edit: Newegg link
 
Frys would make a killing in the Hampton Roads, Richmond, and Arlington areas.
 
Good in Phoenix

When I bought my 3800 X2 on BF I got 65$ for my ECS nforce-a939 on e-bay
 
maademperor said:
WHY wont Fry's come to the East Coast :mad: ?
Click to expand...
There is a Fry's on the east coast.... in Atlanta :( . Wish they had one in Charlotte.

Great deal - I would love to pick this up. Hope all of you with Fry's nearby that want in on this get one.
 
Can't. They charge you full price for the CPU if you do. Which, knowing Fry's, is easily $50 more.

If you return the board, they either charge you full price for the CPU... or they just say NO, not unless you return the CPU too.
 
cherrypik said:
What MB upgrades are they offering? And for how much more?
Click to expand...
Maybe no upgrade. Sometimes there are different combo deals at the desk in the components department. It will be on colored papers. The easiest thing to do is just buy the combo at fry's, sell the motherboard if you don't want it and buy another motherboard elsewhere. That's how I usually get cheap CPUs.

----
CPUs have a 15 day return policy and motherboards have a 30 day return policy. I used that loophole once by returning the motherboard after 3 weeks, but they have become a lot more strict now. Fry's usually won't take back an item from a combo anymore. The receipt for this combo will probably show something like:

4737029 Combo blah, blah, blah
4571397 ECS K8T890A $50.00
4521607 AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ 229.99
 
pxc said:
The easiest thing to do is just buy the combo at fry's, sell the motherboard if you don't want it and buy another motherboard elsewhere. That's how I usually get cheap CPUs.
Click to expand...
Exactly. Their high end mobos are a bit overpriced, which kinda forces you to buy something else online.

You very often see people come in, buy the combos and just ebay them.
 
pxc said:
Maybe no upgrade. Sometimes there are different combo deals at the desk in the components department. It will be on colored papers. The easiest thing to do is just buy the combo at fry's, sell the motherboard if you don't want it and buy another motherboard elsewhere. That's how I usually get cheap CPUs.
...
Click to expand...


Considering I am going to be building a new PC soon and I want a cheap dual core processor, I'd be all about doing this. However, like so many other good Fry's deals, I'm boned since they don't have a Fry's in the Denver area.

Of course it would be a miracle if anyone ever price matched these deals. It'll never happen. I'll have to find some other way of getting a great deal. :rolleyes:

 
KungFuJoe said:
There is a Fry's on the east coast.... in Atlanta :( . Wish they had one in Charlotte.

Great deal - I would love to pick this up. Hope all of you with Fry's nearby that want in on this get one.
Click to expand...

Fry's is experimenting with the East Coast. Currently the one in Duluth (it's in Duluth, which is in Metro Atlanta) is the one I work at and according to the #s I've seen, we're the worse store in alot of different ways (mostly internal). Our management sucks, least a good 70% of it does.

Suggestion: Purchase it from Outpost, Outpost runs these Combos all month long, the actual store runs it for 3 days. Also, Combos hurt stores, and actually get us in trouble because they make the sales NO commission and we actually get in deep shit for "willingly" selling them.

If you ever go to the one in Duluth look for: Aaron, I'm a Sales Associate now and if you mention [H]ard I may give you a discount on something ;).
 
hey, I work across satellite from the fry's in duluth. go there all the time. looks like I know who to ask for now. :D basically this deal is a free mobo that you can use as a granny rig or ebay for a little cash.
 
Was this only good for friday 2/03/2006 or is it good for the whole weekend?
 
Click the link at the top. Look at the top left of the picture.

Prices are good till Tuesday 7th.

Doubt they'll have many left in stock (X2 3800s) after sunday though.
 
DriveEuro said:
Click the link at the top. Look at the top left of the picture.

Prices are good till Tuesday 7th.

Doubt they'll have many left in stock (X2 3800s) after sunday though.
Click to expand...

When they had the Black friday sale the salesman said they had plenty. I can guerantee you the motherboards will not be the limiting factor and you can put a lot of 3800 X2's in a small space.
 
bit on the deal. picked it up on friday evening on the way home from work.

on the upside, same processor/mobo combo would cost $376.99 + tax (where applicable)/s&h.

on the downside, the AGP port is actually an AGP-express port (can someone explain the difference between the two?) , and the list of supported video cards on their website (http://www.ecs.com.tw/ECSWeb/Support/k8t890-a.aspx?MenuID=95&LanID=9) is very short...

if i don't get cold feet and return this, the mobo will go on ebay.
 
agp-express looks like trouble.

I wouldn't risk my x850 in there, not that it's even on the approved list.

looking at the other lists, it seems like support is... limited.
only the last 2-3 of the 6 mobos with agp-express support even an ATI 9800
and none of them support anything faster then a 5950 ultra from nVidia...
(based on a very quick perusal)
and the warning pretty much sums it up
"* Users are strongly recommended to use the VGA cards listed in the QVL; otherwise, the VGA card might be damaged, the system becoming unstable, or unbootable!"

other reviews on the Egg seem to echo the same sentiment.

for example - google cached this from Hexus
"The 915P-A implements all the platform features that Intel brought to the table for the Pentium 4 recently, but what stands out is the graphics card support. ECS, as well as supplying a PEG16X slot for graphics cards, supply what they call an AGP Express port. It's basically a pair of bonded PCI Conventional slots (32-bit, 33MHz) to which an AGP graphics card can connect electrically, and run in PCI mode. That means the graphics card can't take advantage of features that AGP provided over PCI in the first place (remember, AGP is an extension to basic PCI in terms of functionality, not a completely new standard), but AGP cards can run in PCI mode since the electrical slot connector is there.

There's no AGP interface on the Grantsdale MCH, which is where the main difference lies, ECS's engineers coming up with a somewhat novel way to allow electrical AGP compatibility using the PCI interface present on the ICH6. If you look at the rear of a 915P-A, you'll see the traces from the PEG16X slot running to the MCH, while the traces from the AGP slot run to the ICH6, that houses the PCI interface.

So while AGP Express might insinuate something even more capable than 'regular' AGP, it's actually a lower performance implementation of AGP. Traffic from an AGP graphics card in the AGP Express slot has to travel via the ICH6 and its Intel Hub Architecture link to the MCH, before communication with the CPU can take place. Also, the AGP graphics card in a 915P-A can't use all the features of AGP that make it attractive as a graphics card interconnect.

You can't do DIME, a part of the AGP spec that allows the graphics card to access main memory, bypassing the CPU. There's no mapped and locked section of system memory for the graphics card to use as its own, known as GART. And the graphics card in the AGP Express slot has to share bandwidth with all the other PCI devices that communicate with the ICH6, since PCI is a bandwidth-sharing architecture. No one device can lock the bus for itself, in a strict sense. It can lock it for a single bus transaction, or set of transactions, but it can't lock it exclusively. At some point, if another PCI device needs the bus, the AGP Express slot will have to yeild and allow that traffic.

So it's not optimal, but if you're not heavily taxing the PCI bus, performance might be acceptable."

there's more...

HEXUS

enjoy.
 
Leon2ky said:
If you ever go to the one in Duluth look for: Aaron, I'm a Sales Associate now and if you mention [H]ard I may give you a discount on something ;).
Click to expand...

Bought mine from Aaron today at the Fry's in metro ATL. Got the X2 3800+ doing 2.2Ghz on air with an XP-90 cooling it in a DFI NF4 Ultra-D board. Will be taking it up higher soon...

Sorry I couldn't get you any commish bud!
 
I got my X2 3800 Processor and the Motherboard combo on friday at Fry's in ATL. Right now I'm doing 2750 (10x275) at 1.5 volts prime stable on my EVGA nforce4 SLI motherboard. I'm using the Zaleman CNP9500 cooler. The ECS motherboard sucks. Anyways, I'm happy with my processor.
 
Finnster said:
I got my X2 3800 Processor and the Motherboard combo on friday at Fry's in ATL. Right now I'm doing 2750 (10x275) at 1.5 volts prime stable on my EVGA nforce4 SLI motherboard.
Click to expand...

Wow, that's just freakin' nice find. I'll assume that's 2 primes? Throw in some 3dmark or rthdribl so it crashes and some of us don't feel so envious, eh? :D
 
I'm still torn on whether to go for this.

Basically I have $800 I could spend on a new system. I could pick up their 2GB of corsair DDR400 along with it, I have a 300GB Maxtor Maxline III already, but I really want this thing to be quiet and tuckable into a corner, some small case with expansion with silence.

There's that Gateway GT5028 system that's on sale for $770 at BB and it states it's Micro-BTX so the thermals are good.

If I end up seeing a deal for an ATI All-in-wonder 2006 PCI-E (The X1300 one) I'll jump.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top