Cheap But Solid-Reliable PC to be used only for Accounts

[Andaho]

A friend's PC has had 2 faulty hard drives in the last 2 years (both maxtor 80GB), on the old machine they use only for quickbooks (they have a seperate one for browsing the web for downloading spyware and viruses).

2 Hard drives to fail in the same system like that seems too much coincidence, so time to gut the box and get a new everything, especially PSU and mobo which may have caused the hard drives to fail in the first place.

Can anyone recommend cheap but high quality mobo/cpu/ram/psu on a really low spec!

I'm a little concearned about getting a cheap CPU - Any reason why they might be lesser quality?

Should I be considering Intel celeron or AMD sempron?

[aidanjt]

Asus P5K-VM Micro ATX (Socket 775) PCI-Express DDR2 Motherboard (£93.99)
Intel Core 2 Duo E2140 "LGA775 Conroe" 1.60GHz (800FSB) - Retail (£44.64)
GeIL 1GB (2x512MB) PC6400C4 800MHz Ultra Low Latency DDR2 Dual Channel Kit (GX21GB6400UDC) (£29.36)
Antec NSK1300 ATX Cube Case - 300W PSU (£58.74)

Sub Total : £192.96
Shipping : £8.95
VAT: £35.33
Total : £237.24

Steer well away from celerons, the E2xxx range is around the same price but beat the pants off the cellys in performance.

[Andaho]

Thanks for the suggestion but that's far too powerful a system - like I said - this will ONLY be used for running quickbooks! so they want to spend as little as possible but have a solid reliable system.

Steer well away from celerons, the E2xxx range is around the same price but beat the pants off the cellys in performance.

celeron is half the price - so if it's half the power, that's fine for this sole accounts machine.

[aidanjt]

Too powerful?.. That's about as low spec/high quality as you can get. Silly cheap as well.

[peterb]

He could buy enterprise grade disks, which are higher build quality (and usually designed for 24x7 opeartion) - They cost about twice as much as there equivalent home/workstation cpunterparts. He might want to consider RAID 1, although that is no substitute for taking regular backups. Depends if the system is mission critical 24x7 or if backing up the data on a regular basis privides sufficient protection. Bit of risk assessment required.

[aidanjt]

celeron is half the price - so if it's half the power, that's fine for this sole accounts machine.

It's much less than half the power, celerons are just plain horrible, Intel need to hurry up and kill that line off. And unless you can buy a celeron for less than the price of a half decent scientific calculator (which should tell you something).. It doesn't even make financial sense. And again, what you want here is reliability, not super-skin flinting, I spec'ed as such.

[Andaho]

backing up regularly is sufficiant - he was actually going to buy a £219 acer box from comet and I told him I can get him better quality and more suitable for his requirements.

I think from reading a little the "AMD AM2 Sempron 3800+ Manila Core, 2.2GHz, 256KB Cache, Retail" will be a good CPU to go for... what mobo to go with that though - for best reliability on the budget - I'm confused with all the different types of AM2 mobo on scan.

[aidanjt]

http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=622461

That'd do, has onboard video. £44

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I assume that he has an XP install disc??

I specced the following PC from Scan:

Intel Celeron 430 Socket 775, 1.8GHz, 512KB Cache, Retail £24.57 £28.87
LN18798
Gigabyte GA 946GMX-S2, i946GZ, S775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 533/667, SATA II, uATX, On Board VGA £31.79 £37.35
LN11094
1GB Corsair Value Select, DDR2 PC2-5300 (667), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 5-5-5-15 £16.87 £19.82
LN19151
Asus TM982 Black MicroATX Case with 400w aPFC PSU £27.50 £32.31
Pioneer DVR-112D 18x DVD±R, 10x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, IDE, Ivory, OEM £13.99 £16.44
1 LN17593 Pioneer DVR-112D 18x DVD±R, 10x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, IDE, Ivory, OEM
LN9709
160GB Samsung HD161HJ SpinPoint S300, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, 8.9 ms, NCQ £27.69 £32.54
If you change any quantities, please re-calculate your basket
No Interest Finance Options
now available from £300.00

Spend £121.00 more, and take advantage of
Scan Finance packages.

Tell me more about Scan Finance


Net Total £142.41

Carriage £9.93

V.A.T. £26.66

TOTAL £179.00

If you have free postage it will cost around 168 quid.

I know people who are accountants and hard disk space and RAM are probably the most important things to consider!!

[Lucio]

Personally, I'd steer clear of the Semipro chips, one of the few things onboard cache is useful for is performing calculations so if he wants to do any data analysis on the figures stored it might come in handy.

[aidanjt]

Personally, I'd steer clear of the Semipro chips, one of the few things onboard cache is useful for is performing calculations so if he wants to do any data analysis on the figures stored it might come in handy.

At least Semperon chips are half-decent, Celerons are just ridiculously rubbish, even for machines with a tight budget.

[Andaho]

cananyone comment on this: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Produ...oductID=576196

I've never heard of the NF405 chipset before

[aidanjt]

It's just another nVidia nForce series MCP. Looks like it's aimed for the budget board market.

[Andaho]

Think I'm gonna go for this:

AMD AM2 Sempron 3800+ Manila Core, 2.2GHz, 256KB Cache, Retail £32.90

512MB Corsair XMS2, DDR2 PC2-5400 (667), 240 Pin, Non-ECC Unbuffered, CAS 4-4-4-12 £12.91

80 Gb Western Digital WD800AAJS Caviar SE, SATA300, 7200 rpm, 8MB Cache, 9 ms £27.73

Gigabyte GA M61SME-S2, NF405, AM2, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 400/533/667/800, SATA II, ATX, On board VGA £33.95

Asus TM982 Black MicroATX Case with 400w aPFC PSU £32.31

350W FSP ATX-350PNF aPFC PSU £25.84

TOTAL £165.64


I think I should sell him a decent PSU, so I'll keep the 400w from the case for myself for a non-critical machine.

[acrobat]

All the ones suggested look nice.

Although, I would get two hard disks, and keep them mirrored, either by using raid, setting up a regular backup using some software, or by just manually copying and pasting any important stuff onto the second one regularly.

Maxtor disks are pants, so its no surprise to hear about them dying. Avoid them like the plague. They also run hot. So yeah, get something like what CAT-THE-FIFTH said, and then put a pair of hard disks in it (anything other than maxtor is fine). And also, keep them as well cooled as possible, and they should last a long time - unless you get really unlucky.

Ideally, if the case has an intake fan on the front, near the hard drive cage, then the fan which sucks cool air into the PC, will also keep those disks cool too.

[aidanjt]

Maxtor disks are pants, so its no surprise to hear about them dying. Avoid them like the plague. They also run hot.

QFT, it's no wonder Maxtor were bought out, they were beyond horrible.