Features - HEXUS Christmas Gift Guide 2010: Components for a Budget PC

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Planning a self-build for Christmas? Here's our pick of components for a sub-£500 PC.

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Will the standard CPU cooler fit in that case or does it have a cooling solution built into the case? Is it quiet?

Sorry, but a budget PC with zero gaming credentials shouldn't come in at £410 minus a monitor, peripherals and OS license.

You only need to take a look in your own forums to see far better budget choices.

As with all the these Hexus Christmas Gift posts, the choices, and thus prices, are ludicrously over the top. How you can list items in the thousands (looking at all these features) as Christmas ideas is beyond absurd in my view.

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Originally Posted by Ciber

Will the standard CPU cooler fit in that case or does it have a cooling solution built into the case? Is it quiet?

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On doing a Google, the stock i3 heatsink is 60mm tall, while the case is 90mm tall, so it should fit fine.

I'd remove the BD Drive and fit a £15 DVD-RW. The difference could go on a cheap graphics card with no power requirements.

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Originally Posted by this_is_gav

Sorry, but a budget PC with zero gaming credentials shouldn't come in at £410 minus a monitor, peripherals and OS license.

You only need to take a look in your own forums to see far better budget choices.

As with all the these Hexus Christmas Gift posts, the choices, and thus prices, are ludicrously over the top. How you can list items in the thousands (looking at all these features) as Christmas ideas is beyond absurd in my view.

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This. If I were recommending a budget system to someone, it'd be more along the lines of the below, and even that has plenty of options to cut back - a cheaper monitor, lose the second HDD, scrap the blu-ray reader/DVD writer for a standalone DVD writer if not required (seriously, a blu-ray writer, in a budget PC?), and of course many of the readers on here will be students and therefore eligible to buy the student discounted Windows 7 (Pro, Retail) for ~£35 less than the OEM Home Premium edition here.

http://i56.photobucket.com/albums/g1...dgetsystem.png


USB 3 and SATA 6gbps are all well and good but they're just not requirements in this price bracket - especially not SATA 6gbps. And you can get a USB 3 PCI-e card if/when it is required for peanuts.

Seriously Hexus? > £160 for CPU and motherboard in a *budget* build?

Try an Athlon II X3 + mATX 880G motherboard for not much more than £100. In fact, with multimedia decoding shipped off to the iGPU, an X3 might be overkill, and the Athlon II X2s start at ~ £40.

I'd also question the need for a BD writer: surely a combo drive at half the price would do.

As to the (rather expensive) Antec Minuet: well, it's a beautiful case and I'm a big fan of it, but again I'm not sure I'd be looking at it as part of a budget build...

In fact, the whole thing smacks of mid-range htpc rather than budget: £500 without monitor or peripherals is a pretty big budget...

This is the cheapest reasonable gaming base unit I can think of ATM from Ebuyer:

Athlon II X3 450 ~ £58

4GB DDR3 ~ £43

MSI 870A-G54 ~ £65

Inno3D GTX 460 768MB ~ £115

Casecom 6788 ~ £29

OCZ Stealth Xstream II 600W ~ £52

Samsung SpinPoint F3 500GB ~ £32

LiteOn IHAS124-19 ~ £12

Windows 7 retail ~ £90

The total comes to around £496. The motherboard has USB3.0 and SATA3.0 too.

But Cat, the system in question isn't a gaming system, so you can lop off the GTX 460 for an excellent system for £380. You'd have to change the motherboard to one with onboard graphics, but even with USB3 it's only £4 more than the one you posted.

Do you think my gf would like a new SSD and I7 CPU+MB in her stocking this year?
Of course she would ;)

Some of the best Xmas presents are the ones you buy yourself.
Mine was a PS3 last year :)

Not sure I'd risk the wrath of getting in for the other half (unless there was something else to compensate).