A Budget PC build - your thoughts

[pritch]

I have three colleagues, yes three, with Dell laptops that are playing up at the moment. The youngest of these is just 5 months old and already requires a new mobo and PSU. The first Dell technician who arrived at her place had been given a DOA part. Now the mobo is in, but due to that security crap on Dells her hard drive won't work with it. That has 6 months of work she's been doing for me on it, including the latest draft of her final report.

My boss's laptop, 3 years old, I don't know what's wrong with that yet. All I know thus far is it prompts for choice of safe mode or normal boot, then does neither. She's bringing that in for me to look at next week.

The third and final laptop, belonging to colleague and good friend, is at least 4 years old, and was throwing an exception on boot which I traced to a broken netsh.exe which was fixed via recovery console and chkdsk.

She has very sensibly decided she no longer wants to rely on this machine as her primary, and has listened to me and accepted that for her type of use, a budget desktop is the way forward, and perhaps junk the heavy old laptop for a netbook or tablet.

I much prefer building desktops to fixing old laptops, so I'm looking forward to this one.

She is a light user and requires a basic machine, and though it is possible to buy a budget desktop for £190 on ebuyer at the moment, I have recommended a custom build with branded components I trust to perform. Thing is, my machine comes in at £286, and though it's what I would do, I cannot be certain that spending the extra £100 is what she should do.

Herer's ebuyer's £190 machine;

http://www.ebuyer.com/251310-zoostorm-desktop-7873-1036

And here's my possible build with all parts sourced from ebuyer for now (forgive the pasting from Excel);

Black Micro ATX Case - No PSU 1 £14.03 £14.03
Coolermaster 450W GX PSU 1 £37.98 £37.98
Gigabyte GA-G41MT-S2P G41 Socket 775 DDR3 Onboard VGA 7.1 Channel Audio mATX Motherboard 1 £35.36 £35.36
Intel Pentium E5700 3.00GHz Socket 775 2MB L2 Cache Retail Boxed Processor 1 £45.33 £45.33
2x Kingston 2GB DDR3 1333MHz i5 Memory Module CL9 1.5V 2 £10.53 £21.06
Western Digital WD3200AAJS 320GB Hard Drive SATAII 7200rpm 8MB Cache - OEM Caviar Blue 1 £74.99 £74.99
Asus HD 5450 SILENT 1GB DDR2 DVI VGA HDMI PCI-E Graphics Card 1 £26.68 £26.68
LiteOn iHAS124-19 24x DVD±RW DL & RAM SATA Optical Drive - OEM Black with Nero Essentials 1 £13.98 £13.98
Xilence Red Wing 80mm Quiet Fan - 3&4pin connection 1 £2.97 £2.97
All in 1 Internal Card Reader Plus One USB2.0 Port Black - 3.5" Bay 1 £6.57 £6.57
Tenda W311P Wireless-N150 PCI Adapter 1 £7.49 £7.49
Hanns-G HH221DP Full HD TFT LCD 21.5" DVI-D Monitor with Speakers 1 £92.99 £92.99
£0.00
£0.00
£0.00
Total £379.43

We'll need the monitor regardless, so take off the 92.99 to get to £286 with my build. We'll um, worry about an OS when we get to it. But this is going to run 7.

What do you think? What might you do differently? One thing I'm really thinking about now AirRaid mentioned it is Socket 1155 and whether it's worth moving to that in a budget build at this stage? I think it's going to add at least £50 for comparable performance from a mobo/cpu combination though and I'm conscious about building her only enough machine that she needs, rather than getting carried away myself.

But this machine has to last a few years at least, so... is it worth going to 1155 now etc.?

Over to you

[Mr. T]

Very nice build! The HDD is expensive but that's the way they are gonna be for awhile (Thailand floods). I like how u got brands in the right places eg nice PSU.

[AirRaid]

Holy shit, I didn't realise how much HDDs have jumped in price. I got a 1.5TB drive in February for under £50.

[Mr. T]

AirRaid said:

Holy shit, I didn't realise how much HDDs have jumped in price. I got a 1.5TB drive in February for under £50.

It has only happened in the last month as Thailand (and the factory that makes ~60% of WD's HDDs) has flooded.

For an extra note, buying quality is worth it. You will have to go thru this all over again when her crap noname PSU craps out if you cheap out.

[Sharessa]

320 GB for 75 pounds seems pretty ridiculous, though. Last time I was shopping for hard drives, you could get a 2-3 TB drive for that much.

[Shaikoten]

Wowza. The HD prices are ridiculous now. I got a 2tb USB drive for $80 last month. Looks like you can spend that much on an 500gb this month. Bad time to need more gigs.

PS: Just looked at newegg further. There's a lot of difference in pricing, at least on American sites. You can get a 1TB for $80 or as low as a 80gb for $80. You should shop around, as not all prices are going to be that ridiculous everywhere you go.

[pritch]

Ah, that explains it. Yeah I was wondering just wtf was up with the hdd prices when I jumped on the site the other day.

Kinda glad I shoved a new drive in my nc10 before that happened.

In fact, the WD Caviar drives still on the shelves at Best Buy are only ~£55, so perhaps it's an idea to pick one up off the shelves now...

[pritch]

Hmm, equivalent Sandybridge mobo and a Pentium G520 is only another £20... tempting given it would give her more upgrade potential in the future.

[Xaser]

I'm not exactly the best to ask regarding this sort of thing, since my philosophy is usually "don't skimp so it'll last you a while," but definitely grab a Caviar if they're still around £55. They've served me well.

[CODOR]

I'd go for the LGA1155 board and processor for the same reason pritch advises. LGA775 seems to have reached the end of the line (I replaced a Celeron-based office PC with a low-end AM3 board and dual-core CPU a few months back since it was cheaper than upgrading to a decent Core 2 processor alone).

I lucked out with hard drives. It was just a couple weeks ago I replaced my file server's drives with 4 1.5TB drives in a RAID 10 array. I lose two drives' worth of space due to redundancy, but it still ended up costing less than a single 3TB drive would today...

[AirRaid]

CODOR said:

I'd go for the LGA1155 board and processor for the same reason pritch advises.

pritch wrote the OP. :p

I said the same thing (as noted in the OP), though. At this stage I think buying into an old architecture is a little silly. Even the most budget of the 1155 chips are pretty fast.

[CODOR]

AirRaid said:
pritch wrote the OP. :p

Heh, thread reading fail :-P

(I blame the beer I had with supper)

[geo]

Does that graphics card come with the PC or is it something you're buying? That seems to be some high quality graphics. If there is a rebate beware... I never got my rebate from that company.

[fraggle]

Where exactly do you work, that one of your colleagues is only 5 months old?

[Sharessa]

Haha, I was thinking the same thing.

[pritch]

Syntax error

[DooMAD]

The only thing I'd do differently is not use ebuyer, fucking useless company. Sadly I haven't done much hardware purchasing lately, so I can't really recommend anyone else.