Cheap and cheerful spec?

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Soldato
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I'm looking at possibly building a new PC for my brother, though it would have to be rather cheap. And to help with this, I'm considering seing if there is anything worth salvaging from the Dell, but I know that they use different standards, or something, so you can't easily upgrade them?
Because of this, I'm assuming the Mobo, case and PSU will be out straight away? The graphics card will be straight in the bin (MX440 :o ). CPU is a 2Ghz pentium jobby, and ram is cheap enough at the moment to get some good stuff.

Ah, I seem to have talked myself out of salvage since it would be pointless, so whats the cheapest he could get a basic system for? He does some gaming on it, bit of school work. No video encoding or things like that.

Ooh, CD and hard drive? salvagable or no?

I quickly came up with this, though I haven't been keeping up with the graphics card market recently, so don't know what to finish the system off with. I may try and flog him my X1950XT, as I'm going to be looking to sell that and upgrade to a DX10 card in the future.
So, thoughts? Better components?
 
You could probubly get a better mobo, Gigabyte or Asus. But the E2180 is a winner. They will overclock like a dream with absolutely no effort. DDR2 is cheap as chips as you say too. Grab the CD drive from the Dell, ans maybe the HDD if its SATA. You will also need a PSU that isnt in your spec.

for a graphics card you really need a budget to be able to get some decent recomendations, but for light gaming the x1950 may be fine. You can alswyas upgrade later
 
It'll be better to have a budget but something like this will be better:


Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L Intel P31 (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard
£39.99 (£46.99)

Intel Core 2 Duo E2160 "LGA775 Conroe" 1.80GHz (800FSB) - Retail
£37.99 (£44.64)

GeIL 2GB (2x1GB) PC2-6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX22GB6400UDC)
24.99 (£29.36)

Antec NSK 4480 Mini Tower Case (Silver) - 380W Earth Watts PSU
£44.99 (£52.86)

PNY GeForce 9600 GT 512MB GDDR3 TV-Out/Dual DVI (PCI-Express) - Retail (GH9600GN1F51XPB)
£84.99 (£99.86)

Hitachi Deskstar 7K160 160GB SATA-II 8MB Cache - OEM
£25.99 (£30.54)

Sub Total : £258.94
Shipping : £10.95
VAT : £47.23
Total : £317.12


I'd prefer a Gigabyte P31 over a Foxconn P35 but that's just me, who knows maybe that Foxconn is actually a very decent mobo.

The Geil is a lot better than the OCUK one for just £1 extra. Same with the Hitachi HDD, it's worth the £1 over maxtor for the faster seektime alone. As for optical drive salvage it from his DELL unless he wants a DVD-RW. His old HDD can be used as well even though almost all modern mobos come with only 1 IDE port that supports only 2 PATA devices.

The case is a good one with PSU although only 380W it will still handle it fine, but you'll likely need a new PSU for future upgrades.

Overall it's a pretty decent gaming system, very overclockable too even with stock Intel cooler, should do 3Ghz no problem then you have a very nice, easily the best value for money system anyone can buy.
 
indeed.. the P31-S3L is a good li'l budget board, I have a e2180 sitting at 3.2 on mine, and it'll do much more if I could handle the temps :)

The only thing to be aware of is that you'll struggle if you ever want to upgrade to 4GB of ram.. it's not going to happen on that board unless you use 2x2GB, rather than 4x1GB. It's a P31 chipset limitation thing, rather annoying as it's forcing me to upgrade mobo :/
 
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