Recently I’ve talked about some fairly decent components in both the budget and performance range on this blog. In this article I’ll mention a few more in the budget range, as well as some others, and I’ll be doing so with a view to including them in the construction of a budget PC.

The cost of computer hardware has plummeted recently; and whereas a few years ago it might have cost over £500GBP to build a half-decent machine, these days it can be done for a fraction of the cost. In fact I’m going to show you how you can build a decent budget PC, decent by today’s standards that is, for less than half of that cost.

This PC will be reasonably cheap as PCs go; but I don’t want us to end up with a piece of crap that’s slower than a 386-powered machine, or anywhere near that, at the end of the day; so I’ll be utilising components that are well-priced but have a bit of oomph behind them.

I don’t intend to talk you through the process of actually building this box in this article; that’s your pleasure to do all by yourself: I’m just here as your personal shopping assistant, to guide you to getting the best value for a little money.

Choosing the Processor

Let’s start with a processor and build around that: Normally I’d go for an AMD processor to incorporate in a budget-build; but that doesn’t necessarily have to be the way it is: There are a number of well-priced Intel processors on the market at the moment, as well as some budget Intel-socketed boards. We’ll go on to choose a motherboard in a while: First, let’s find a reasonable Intel processor: -

I like the look of the Pentium Dual-Core E5200. – Don’t let the name put you off there. – The Pentium Dual Core range are more akin to the Core 2 Duo range than their single-cored predecessor-namesakes. – The main difference between a Core 2 Duo and a Pentium Dual Core is that the latter has less L2 cache. – But we can live with that to keep the price down. The Pentium Dual Core E5200 is a fast chip, nearly as fast, in fact, as the Core 2 Duo E7200, but just over half the cost at only around £46GBP. Being of the E5000 series, it is manufactured using a 45nm process, so it’ll not be power-hungry. It’s a Socket LGA775 CPU, so that’ll make it easier to find an inexpensive-but-not-ancient board to run it on. – Let’s use that chip in the build.

Picking the Motherboard

Now we’ll need a motherboard to run it on. There are so many to choose from; many are far too expensive for what we’re after though; so let’s have a look at the cheaper end of the LGA775 marketplace:

We want something basic. – Not too basic though, and something that has decent performance. I’m now looking at a couple of Micro Star International’s boards. – I have to say that I’ve never been overkeen on MSI boards, and one of them I’m looking at is probably a bit too basic anyway. I want to keep the cost below or at £100 GBP for the processor/motherboard combination. – Aha! I do like the look of this one: It’s an Asus P5QL/EPU. I used to use Asus boards almost exclusively until I changed to Gigabyte, because Gigabyte were slightly better in my opinion – however this board has what we’re looking for by all accounts: -

It’s a socket LGA775 board that’ll accommodate pretty much any 2 or 4-core chip from Intel with that socket designation. It has 2 PCI ports and 2 PCIe x 1 ports; which should be everything needed for any expansion cards on this budget-build. There’s no RAID controller; but since we’re only looking at adding a single SATA hard-drive; who cares? – Even though it has 6 SATA ports; which could be useful if adding extra drives at a later date. It has no onboard graphics capability; but a cheap and cheerful 256MB  graphics card, which we’ll choose later, will put paid to that. It uses Intel’s P43/ICH10 chipset; which isn’t a bad piece of kit either. The BIOS has overclocking features; but to keep things simple we’ll stick to stock speeds; as the cooling might not be quite up to the overclocking requirements possibly anyway?

On the back panel  there’s a PS2 port to connect a keyboard to – but nothing for a mouse, so we’ll need a USB mouse, which we can run from any one of the six USB ports. 7.1 surround-sound and optical S/PDIF are featured; but nothing else.  – No worries: If FireWire or something is required at any point; we can always utilise the PCI or PCIe x 1 slots and fit an expansion card.

This board will support 1,066MHz DDR2, as well as a 1,600MHz FSB. All this for just £56 GBP makes a total, thusfar, of around £100. – Excellent! Get it from http://www.digital-fusion.co.uk if you want to be sure of the price.

Just in Case

Now we’ll need a case: You choose; it’s your budget machine, so decide how you’d like it to look. I’ll suggest, though, the Casecom Black Midi Tower Case – With 450W PSU 20+4pin with 1x SATA which is available from Ebuyer.com for £26 GBP. Yes, this is the case that I built my Phenom-powered 8GB RAM 64-bit Win 7 box with. – From experience I can say that for a budget box it’s not bad at all. It does utilise a cheap Casecom 450 watt PSU though; so don’t expect much more than 300 watts continuously from it. It powered a triple-cored 65nm Phenom + a 250MB graphics card, along with 2 SATA drives though, and is still working well after 6 months, so it should be good enough for our budget dual-core machine with 45nm technology and running a single SATA drive.

I’m going to assume that you bought that; and therefore the total cost thusfar is around £126GBP Inc VAT.

RAM it in

All-righty: We have a PSU, a case, a mobo, and a CPU – all for £126; now we need some RAM. Let’s use DDR2, 1,066MHz, since our board can run it. I like buying RAM from ebuyer.com; because they sometimes run out of what I have ordered, and give me something far better than I ordered, or better-looking but with the same specs, for the same price… Well it’s happened twice so far. – I’m not complaining.

(I know: Everybody bulk order DDR2 1,066MHz; then I’ll order before they manage to put up an “Out of Stock” notice…)

I see a nice Kingston 2GB kit; (2x1GB sticks) DDR2 1066mhz Hyperx Memory Cl5(5-5-5-15). – And it’s only £31GBP. That’s going to fill both RAM slots on our board; and make a memory upgrade a little more expensive should it be undertaken: However we’re looking at running Windows 7 (RC) Home Premium 64-bit on this PC; and Windows 7 64-bit will work quite happily on 2GB RAM. (Alternatively we could always run Linux on it.) We could use a load more RAM if we wanted; but this is a budget machine; so it would just add to the cost. For now let’s just KISS: Keep It Simple, Stupid – that is, before you start getting any ideas.

‘Nice work: I make the total cost so far only £157GBP Inc VAT. Moving on…

Getting the Graphics Going

As we saw earlier; this motherboard has no graphics capability, so we’ll need a PCIe graphics card: Ebuyer again; and I’m going to suggest the same card that I used in my last personal build; that being the Gigabyte nVidia 7200GS 256MB GDDR2 VGA DVI TV out PCI-E Graphics Card at, currently, £20.03 GBP. Yes, there is something slightly better available from ATI; that being the Sapphire HD 4550 512MB DDR3 VGA DVI HDMI HDCP PCI-E Graphics Card including Low Profile bracket. – But it’s over £16GBP more expensive. Whichever of the 2 you get; the overall cost of the machine minus the hard-drive, including sundries such as a case-fan, leads and adapters, etc, should be less than £200GBP; unless you splash out on fancy accessories, which seems a bit pointless on a budget PC.

I’m going to assume that you decided on the nVidia card; making a total spend so far of £177.03GBP.

Driving up the Cost With a Hard-Drive

There’s no way that you’re going to get a decent brand-new hard-drive for under £23 at this point in time; so it’s a foregone conclusion that this machine’s going to cost us more than £200. It’s still cheap, though; particularly bearing in mind that this is a well-specced box for the investment.

Let’s find a hard-drive: What we’re looking for is something that won’t fill up quickly and will last a while. – Up to 5 years. 500GB capacity seems a good size for a budget machine; so let’s have a look at what’s available: -

This one looks good: Seagate ST3500418AS 500GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 16MB Cache – OEM.

Seagate have been making drives for years; and most of their products, apart from their Chinese-made products a couple of years ago, are top-rate. This one has a 3-year-warranty on it, as well as Seagate’s reputation, so it’s well worth the £35.97.

In Conclusion…

That brings us us to a total cost so far of £213.00 Inc VAT. With sundries added that’ll probably come to a grand total of £225 Inc VAT. – Not a bad price to pay for a perfectly good machine that has pretty much everything that the average user would ever need.

You have all the parts for: –

A dual-cored Intel processor-driven machine, capable of running a 64-bit operating-system, with 2GBs DDR2 1066MB RAM in dual-channel configuration, 256 MB graphics capability with VGA, DVI, or TV out, 7.1 surround sound, 500GB quality SATA hard-drive – All for £225GBP Inc VAT.

If you intend to build this machine for yourself then happy building! Personally I haven’t built it yet; but I’ll probably do so if someone asks me to build them a cheap PC. (For a profit, of course.) Do let me know what you think and how you get on if you embark on the project.

People who aren’t building it but have suggestions/criticisms etc; please do comment below.