I’ve been putting together a new system over the past 3 months to replace my well-aged six-year old Pentium 4 based system. The specs on it look something like this: 1.6 GHz, 512 RAM PC133, 40 GB ATA, and a 64 MB GeForce 2 graphics card. Now this system will make a fine linux server, but I need something that can take me into the next decade for everyday use. The next decade is all about the Aero (vista) and XGL (linux) user interfaces. It’s about virtualizing your systems and multi-core machines. So I went out and built a system for under $800 that can deliver all this, here are the specs.
Intel’s Dual Core E4300 – 1.8 GHz – 2 MB L2 – 800 MHz FSB – $169.00
I went with Intel on the processor because the core 2 duo’s are beating out anything and everything AMD has out there. AMD still has a good chip and if these 2 were neck and neck on the benchmarks I probably would’ve gone with you AMD, but my hard-earned money will go to the best performer and the best price. That’s what the E4300 is, and the reviews say it overclocks well. Though I haven’t overclocked it.
GSKILL DDR2800 (2×1GB) $169
Okay so I bought some of the cheapest DDR2 RAM I could find that came in a 2GB kit, but it seems to be performing fine and I have 2 GB of RAM now.
SeaGate Sata 3.0 Gbs – 250 GB – 7200 RPM – 16 MB Cache $74.99
This is where I should’ve spent more money. Disk’s are so cheap now I could’ve gone to 350 GB for $20-$40. Oh well, it beats the heck out of my old 40 GB ATA drive.
Abit AB9 p965 $108
I bough this board on sale. I think it’s $129 normally. Anyways the board is pretty cool. It is an onboard LCD for displaying post codes and some groovy heat sink pipe running through it. The software that comes with it keeps me informed on the CPU temp and allows for easy overclocking. If you want a lot of slots, then go with a more expensive board, but its fine for me. The one problem I ran into is with my RAM. I had to set the voltage up to 2.1 in the BIOS or else I would get one long beep…pause…one long beep etc… Link to a picture of my motherboard
Saphire ATI Radeon X1300T – 256 MB PCIE x16 – 12 pixel pipelines $80
I don’t know a lot about video cards, but this seems to give me a good bang for my buck on paper. I’m not a huge gamer, but this should handle most new games and be a solid card for a few years. I can always upgrade for $100 in a few years.
Samsung CD/DVD Burner IDE 12x $29.99
It was on sale and should do me just fine.
Thermaltake 430W Power Supply $39.99
It’s very quite and works. Has enough power for me. Don’t know what else to say about it. Good reviews.
Cooler Master Centurion 5 $44.99
It’s a nice looking black case, some of plastic parts on it were cheap and have broken. I wouldn’t buy it again, but I’m not upset with the purchase. It comes with one large fan in the back of the case, and smaller fan in the front. Has 4 slots for drives and about 5 for CD/DVD drivers. It’s roomy and cools well.
This puts me at about $716 not including shipping. Virtually the same system goes for $1,179 on Dell’s site. Of course this includes 1 year support and a 19″ LCD. A 19″ LCD can be found for about $179 online. You get XP Home Edition with your Dell system too. XP Home can be found on Amazon.com for abround $100. So I’m still saving over $150 building it myself. Will I build my next system from scratch? I don’t know, really the Dell option is pretty appealing as it took me about 4 hours to get from nothing to a full blown desktop. I had never built a system from scratch before so I learned a lot, which is always helpful in this industry.
Update I actually found Windows XP Pro on newegg.com for $139 and 19″ LCD for $179. So I’m still doing damn good on costs compared to the Dell system.