.. When we last met our intrepid hero..

So far, I’ve had two builds for a friend in California and two for myself. I also have a friend in the American Midwest who is on a fixed income and her system recently gave up the ghost, so she’s currently borrowing a system from a family member. So I decided it couldn’t hurt to see what I could come up with for her.

BUILD 5: Low-budget home use system

For this build, I was looking at a non-gamer system. This is for a person who primarily uses it for surfing the Internet, chatting online, and so forth. At this point, almost any system is an upgrade. That being said, there are a few things I wanted to do for this build.

The first was slip in an SSD for improved boot times. Windows 7 has a minimum requirement of 16 GB for a 32-bit installation, or 20 GB for 64-bit. The primary job of the SSD is a boot drive for Windows and handful of other applications – Google Chrome, for example, I regularly hear her bemoaning the load time on her system. A large drive isn’t necessary, simply one that will hold the necessary software. Everything else can be installed to a standard hard drive.

The second was a Blu-Ray drive. This was so she’d have a way to watch movies on her system. Yes, I know most come on DVD, and this will support it, but there will be the occasional one which is best viewed – or only available – on Blu-Ray. For an extra $30 it doesn’t hurt to have the option available.

The third was adding 8 GB of RAM instead of 4. Part of this was a simple price difference observation – 8 GB, especially as a matched pair of 4 GB sticks, is less than twice the cost of a 4 GB stick. The Team Group memory I used in the $600 budget system was $37, and the memory I used here was $65 – I’ll cover that later. The other thing is that with Windows 7, having more memory is less of a headache when it comes to certain applications. Norton Internet Security, for example, loves to use as much memory as it can, and having 8 GB gives it room to move and still leave you room for your applications. The last is that the video processing will be done by the CPU, and having more RAM will improve the video performance. This situation is similar to a laptop that has shared memory for video – if you have 4 GB on the computer, and devote 512 MB (half a GB) to video, you only have 3.5 GB for the OS and your applications.

So what did I come up with? Two different systems, one with an Intel chip, one with AMD, for the same price.

First, the CPUs. I was able to find a CPU by both Intel and AMD clocked in at $50. The AMD chip was the Richland series A4-4020, a 3.2 GHz chip on the FM2 socket. Intel has a Haswell Celeron, G1820, listed as 2.7 GHz on the LGA 1150 socket. Both are dual-core CPU’s with onboard graphics, which as I said before will be used for supplying the video to this system.

Then the motherboards, at $80 each. Note that both builds, including price, are identical except for the motherboard and CPU. Both are full-sized ATX boards with four memory slots. Going to a micro-ATX borad with only two memory slots would be ok but I prefer the manoeuvrability that a standard ATX board gives – and the price difference is generally only about $20. In this case, the AMD A4 chip gets plugged into a Biostar Hi-Fi A85W FM2 board, and MSI’s B85-G41 PC Mate is matched with the Intel Celeron.

G.SKILL again is providing memory for this system, through the Ares series. A 2 x 4 GB kit of DDR3-1600 will get plugged in (F3-1600C9D-8GAO) – this is the same memory that was in the second build on the first blog for my friend in California. It’s a good buy for the money, again $9 less than two 4-GB sticks from the Team Group – see the first build for California, and from a much better-known brand name.

A standard hard drive won’t be needed, since the person this one is being built for already picked one up – a 1 TB Seagate, if memory serves me right. The price was about what the Western Digital drives have been going for, and Seagate’s drives are generally considered a little better quality. Thus the money – $70 – can be put toward an SSD drive instead. For that we have a 60 GB Kingston SSDNow drive (SV300S37A/60G), which should be enough for putting Windows and a couple other necessary applications. If more money is available, a larger SSD would be much better – 100 GB should be plenty.

As I mentioned earlier, a Blu-Ray drive is a good idea. The same LG drive for the $800 build for California and my own $1000 build – model UH12NS30 – shows here as well. For $50 it’s a pretty good drive. I’ve been pretty happy with LG optical drives for a few years now, being a good budget-friendly reasonable quality make. Sure, you can get better drives, but they’ll cost a fair bit more relative to LG.

Now it’s just down to the case, power supply, and in this case a copy of Windows. This time we go to Cooler Master for the HAF 912 Blue Edition case at $60. The HAF case has been well-received as a whole for being a good quality inexpensive little case, and in fact it keeps coming up regularly in conversations around “good cheap cases”. The power supply is the same EVGA one I mentioned in the very first build (100-W1-500-KR, 500 watts, 80 Plus Certified), and at $45 you can’t do much better. And then Windows 7 64-bit with Service Pack 1 at $100, which will be the same across the board.

By the time all was said and done, it was $520 plus whatever taxes and shipping cost, and not even a penny difference between the AMD and Intel versions. Not too bad for a tower with Windows already added and an SSD.

And for next episode? Stay tuned as I come up with not one but two builds that cost less than $500 each – one based on default pricing, one based on current specials – that include monitor, keyboard, mouse, and Windows! These are as low as I dare try going – any lower and I question the quality of the components.

So long and thanks for all the fish!

<windows.tada>