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Low-budget System - March 2007

hwi-h  PC Advice » Low-budget System - March 2007

Author: Arthur Vijghen 03/09/2007

Low-budget System

You don't want to spend a single dime too much on a system? Our low-budget system should be your ideal configuration.

Configuration

AMD Sempron 2800+ Socket A AMD Sempron 2800+ Socket AM2 Processors
When building a cheap PC the first component you can save a lot of money on is the processor. All available processors at the moment are sufficient for basic tasks like office, internet, playing media, etc. This is why we chose a very basic processor, the AMD Sempron 2800+. We take a socket AM2 model as this keeps our options open for upgrading the system in the future. As the power consumption of the AMD Sempron is slightly lower than that of the Intel Celeron D processors we did not opt for an Intel in this system.
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AMD Boxed Cooler AMD Boxed Cooler CPU coolers
The boxed cooler supplied with the AMD Sempron processors is more than adequate to keep the CPU temperature at an acceptable level. As the standard cooler is pretty quiet as well we do not need an aftermarket model in this system.
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ASUS M2N-MX ASUS M2N-MX Mainboards
A low budget system motherboard needs to have the follwing specifications: Onboard graphics, upgrade possibilities and as many features as possible, like onboard 5.1 sound and RAID support. We found the ASUS M2N-MX, a micro ATX motherboard based on nVidia's 610/MCP 430 chipset. It has 4 SATA ports, support for RAID 0,1, 5 and 1+0, Gigabit LAN, 4 memory slots and the 3D chip is passively cooled. Next to all the features the price of this board is more than reasonable.

512 MB DDR2-667 512 MB DDR2-667 Memory modules
Low budget systems do not need more than 512MB of memory to do all the basic tasks. With Vista on sale now the minimum requirement for this OS is 512MB as well. As we do not have a preference for any make in this PC a single no-name module will suffice.

Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 160 GB Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 160 GB Hard disks/SSD's
The Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 160GB has 16MB of cache and combines good performance with a low price, as we have tested in our Hardware.Info magazine.
Click here for the detailpage of this product.

Samsung SH-S182D Samsung SH-S182D Optical drives
The Samsung SH-S182 is one of the first DVD writers that can write at 18x speeds, and in our test the average speed of this drive was more than 13x. Both quality and writing speed was excellent on all media we tested, and we think this drive has the best price/performance ratio at the moment.
Click here for the detailpage of this product.

Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110 Logitech Cordless Desktop EX110 Keyboard and mouse
The Cordless EX110 might be cheap, it is a high quality set as we are used to from Logitech.

Acer AL1716As Acer AL1716As Monitors
The Acer AL1716As is a very affordable TFT monitor with excellent image quality. The best choice for a low budget system.

Standard case with 350 Watt PSU Standard case with 350 Watt PSU Cases
When building a low budget PC the case does not really matter. A standard case with minimum 350 Watt PSU will do.

 

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