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Opinions on Budget Build

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Jorlain

Member
Joined
Jan 29, 2008
Putting together a budget build for my mother as a (although somewhat late) Christmas gift. The computer will mostly be used for browsing, email, burning cd/dvds, (I omitted a DVD-RW since I have a few laying around) and light MS Office work. She'll be doing a small amount of gaming, but nothing that warrants a dedicated graphics card (mostly hunting/fishing/casino games that don't require much at all).

Just thought I'd run this past you guys to make sure I'm not spending money needlessly (as in, you know of a better deal for something). Being as this is a budget build, I'd like to keep it cheap as possible, but I'd like to at least get her a dual core. She's running an old P4 on a 468 I believe currently. OS isn't an issue - I've got plenty of licenses for XP and later that I haven't used yet.


Case - Rosewill Wind Knight Case - $49.99 + Free Shipping

Motherboard - ASROCK AM3 - $79.99 + Free Shipping

CPU - Athlon II 240 Regor - $58.00 + Free Shipping

RAM - G.SKILL 2x1GB 1333Mhz - $53.99

HDD - WD 250GB Blue - $47.99 + Free Shipping

PSU - Corsair 400CX - $49.99 + Free Shipping

Subtotal - $339.95
Shipping - $5.99
Total - $345.94

Not too shabby for a dual-core system. I had considered going the LGA 775 route with an E5200, but I'm not a big fan of EOL products. I figure with at least going AM3, there's a possibility for upgrades down the road should it be required, which is why I also selected that motherboard since it's one of the cheaper boards with 4 DIMM banks. (And the HD 4200 video)

Thoughts, opinions, critiques?

Thanks guys!
 
I'd say your setup is about as good as you can get on newegg. Only way you could get a better is if you had a frys near you. They seem to always have smoking deals on the cheap cpu setups assuming the mobo works for you. I was going to say maybe get the samsung 500gig f3 for 54 bucks but it's oos. Fast drive and double the space for a few bucks more.
 
Unfortunately, there's not much around me unless I wanted to drive down to Minneapolis. About the only thing we have here in town is a Best Buy, so options are pretty much limited to the internet if I want any type of decent deal.

But thanks for checking it over!
 
If you intend to get a discrete GPU down the line you might want to a go a little higher on the PSU

Other than that it looks great :)
 
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The case is pretty much unusable. It has zero cooling capabilities and would be very hard pressed to fit much inside of it.

While that ASRock motherboard looks like a decent board, unfortunately it doesn't include onboard video, and I'd be pretty hard pressed to find a graphics card for $20.

The hard drive could be an option, though I'm thinking the extra 8MB of cache might be worth $9 on the WD Blue.

As far as the RAM goes, it is cheaper. But I would think that doubling the bandwidth of the memory would be worth the small amount of price increase.

But thanks for your input!
 
If you intend to get a discrete GPU down the line you might want to a go a little higher on the PSU

Other than that it looks great :)

She'll never need anything heavy-duty. A 4650 or a 220 would be more power than what she'd ever need (probably), and a 400-watt would run that fine. In all honesty that 4200 onboard is more than likely already worlds ahead of the PCI Geforce 6200LE that I have in her current PC.

But thanks for your input! :)
 
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