Building A Really Inexpensive Pc

[darasen 0]

I have been tasked by a buddy with upgrading his PC. His Pc is too old to really upgrade much 2.8 Ghz proc, AGP etc. Sure we could hunt down a slightly better processor maybe add some ram or a newer video card. But, in truth for the same or near enough the same price I am convinced we could basically rebuild his PC. The price tag we are looking at is around 200 dollars US.

First I am looking at what he does have that can still be used. He has a 150 GB SATA hard drive so we will not need to purchase one for now. He has a nice mid ATC case with good fans in it. He also has optical drives currently a DVD-r and a CD-rw. Those will do for now as well though they are IDE.

We can hold on to and use these parts as they are in fine working order and will keep our current cost down. They are also easy to upgrade at a later date. One of the goals I am striving for is to make the PC very upgradeable. The other goal of course is for the machine to really upgrade what the friend has currently. Use wise the toughest thing the PC does is run World of Warcratf and City of Heroes. We would like to be able to run some newer games as well though not heavy duty FPS games like Crysis, more like some of the newer MMOs such as LotR or Champions online. Thus, here are the parts I am looking at for him at this point.

First off I am looking at an Intel e5200 processor. Sure there are faster processors out there and there are certainly cheaper processors out there. Price to performance ratio though I think it is one of the best processors on the market and it fits in the budget.

For the Mother Board there a bunch of options, of course. Given the budget and the goals in mind I am looking for something that offers maximum usability now and upgradibility later. The board I would like is one from Gigabyte. This board is inexpensive (not cheap) yet offers exactly what I need. One of the top considerations is that I wanted a GeForce chipset. The nForce graphics will certianly be a step up from the old ATI (9200?) graphics currently used and the Pcie x16 slot is there to upgrade further. The board also has an IDE controller so that the older optical drives can still be used.

On new egg the combo of the two comes to 141.98 with out shipping. that leaves $60 for a 2GB stick of ram and a new power suplly since the old one won't cut it. Conveniently New egg has a combo deal for a 2 gb Kingston stick of ram and this 500 wattpower supply for $66. So that total goes to $208 with out shipping.

Not the perfect PC yet but will certainly be a good machine plus it is massively upgradeable. The ram can be increased and a dedicated video vard can be added, obviously. With an after market CPU cooler we would also be able to overclock the CPU. The solid Gigabyte mother board gives us that option.

Of course even cheaper would be this barebones kit from CompUSA . A good kit but the MB is not as trong and I know nothing about the 450W power supply in the case.

Your thoughts, what would you do differently? What parts would you suggest? Just remeber the budget is about $200 US it needs to be better than what we have (easy) and needs to be open to upgrades. Provide links where you can.

[xboxrulz1405241485 0]

Well, the best route for upgradability is with AMD since their AM3 processors can work backwards back to AM2 and AM2+. Right now, I think this one is a better build:

 

AMD Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition ($68)

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

ASUS M3A-78CM ($75)

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

Antec 480W Earthwatts ($50)

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

Patriot 2x1GB DDR2-800 ($25)

http://forums.xisto.com/no_longer_exists/

 

It's a bit over the $200 budget at $218, but that extra $18 can really go far since the Athlon X2 7750 has an unlocked multiplier and can break into 3.0 GHz without a sweat and probably without a new heatsink as I've heard the new AMD heatsink for this processor class is very good. Also, once you guys get more money you can up the processor to a Phenom II X3 or Phenom II X4 in the future without having to be forced to buy a new motherboard.

 

All prices quoted are in USD.

 

xboxrulz

[darasen 0]

Thought I would update the post if anyone was curious. My buddy basically decided he wanted to get the PC Saturday and have it ready Sunday. So we went to CompUSA to purchase the parts. It workewd out well for us acyuallt as they had a very good stock and some nice sales.

 

The motherboard we got is an XFX GeForce 8200 I was persnally leaning towards an AMD chipset but this is a very good board with everything I needed and a bit more, plus it was on sale for $70. It has Dual Bios and over clocking feature out the wazoo as well as a PciE 2.0 slot.

 

There also happened to be a sale on Ram so we were able to get 4GB of OCZ 800 Mhz (pc 6200) for a mere $25. I was really happy with this Ram and was not expecting to get such good ram for so cheap, it even has heat spreaders on it. He is using XP and now has the most XP, 32 bit, can address.

 

Finally the Processor we got is the one Xboxrulz suggested. CompUSA had it in stock and it was retail so included the heatsink and fan. It was a simple choice. AMD Athlon X2 7750 Black Edition

 

With the power supply our total (including rebates and excluding taxes) came to $202. Only $2 over and we purchased some great parts in my opinion. ant were able to purchase more ram than I expected and a 2 rail 550 watt power supply.

 

If anyone cares I will make another post later with the install information.