I am building a budget PC for a relative ( my first build) and am trying to keep the costs as low as possible while maintaining a useful system that will work for a few years. It's only used for email, web surfing, MP3s, and some typing so nothing serious is needed. It's MicroATX because of limited space in the house, will this make the build considerably harder? Here's what I have so far, any known incompatabilities? $50 "Famous Brand" 17 inch CRT $40 256MB Viking PC2700 Ram $40 IN WIN BT-Series Beige MicroATX Desktop With 240W PSU and 80mm fan (good case? enough power?) $35 Rosewill CDRW/DVD-ROM combo drive $1.5 Additional 80mm fan (necessary? will it fit?) $62 80GB Western Digital HDD $4 PS2 kEYBOARD $3 ps2 mOUSE $6 3Com 56k v.92 PCI modem $50 GIGABYTE "8I845GVM-RZ" i845GV Chipset MicroATX Motherboard onboard video and audio,ethernet (anyone know anything about it? good brand?) $70 2.4Ghz Intel Celeron processor (retail) w/heatsink $76 WinXP home OEM $5 Cheap speakers $34 Works suite 2004 OEM (w/word, works,encarta etc) With shipping it's about $550 total. Anyone know of any incompatabilities or problems I will run into? Anyone know anywhere I could save a bit more money? I am very worried about heat, if I can't get the second fan in will the heatsink and included case fan be enough? I figured it might be seeing as it's such a low spec system. Any help is greatly appreciated. Thanks, Eric
hi going on your hardware list see your going for celeron cpu i would advise the amd line of cpu,s my tip for you to build your own system is to buy all your hardware at your local pc store saving shipping costs iv made al list of hardare cost uk prices..usa is probably even cheeper 1 TOWER+psu £15 2:mainboard £27 3:cpu athlon xp 2000 £40 4: ram ddr 266 256mb £20 5: 80gb hdd £42 6 :cd-rw £19 7:windows buy second hand win 98se £10 8: 17inch vdu (monitor) £35 total £218 and thats just an average price search your local town to get an even lower estimate
1 check your motherboard to see if it needs just the ATX power connector or do you have to have the 4 pin squre connector or the 6 pin retangular connector attached to the board. if it needs either the square or the rectangular connector plus the ATX & your power supply only has the ATX then you need a new P4 powersupply which costs about $45Can. which is almost the price of a tower with P4 poqwer supply installed with USB on the front of case besides the USB on the backside. besides P4 boards usually want 300 watts or more. 2 went setting up the harddrive, set it as master & cd burner as slave on same cable. if on 2 seperate cables with harddrive as master, mother board probably won't see the drive on less you take the little white jumper from connector that designates Master Slave Cable Select on harddrive
CORE ASUS A7V400-MX ($70) AMD Sepron 2400+ ($85) KingMax 256MB PC3200 ($60) WD 80GB 8MB 7200RPM ($90) Basic Case + 400W PSU ($35) Mouse and Keyboard ($20) Liteon 52x32x52x16 ($55) Basic Case Cooling (two 80mm fans) ($10) Core Cost: $425CAD ($340USD) More Stuff (prices provided by you) WXP Home ($75) Basic Speakers ($5) Works ($35) Net Cost: $455USD You'll prolly want a bigger PSU. 1. The Celeron is discontinued and replaced by the Celeron-D 2. The AMD Sempron will eat the Celeron-D alive 3. The 845 chipset is decrepit. 4. See my above configuration Dont worry about heat, for basic systsems like the one you've spec'd and mine, heat is the smallest concern as OCing isnt an option
I was interested in MicroATX because of space constraints which was why I was sacrificing power for the PSU. Reading more about the AMD processors I think I agree they are probably superior, I've always bought dell PC's so I'm used to Intel which was the only reason I went for an Intel CPU. Can anyone give me a rough comparison of the AMD numbers in gigahertz (i.e. is an Athlon 3200 = 3.2 ghz P4?) Thanks
amd xp speed is about 80% of a p4 speed, ex. 2600xp motherboards posts as a 2gig even tho the board recognizes it as a 2600xp
2600xp runs technically at 2.6 ghz. AMDs run more processes per cycle than intels do. This means an AMD can be running at say 2.17 ghz but really be equal to 3 ghz.. Simple.
