LinkBack URL
About LinkBacks
I finally got round to building my £500 PC project. In the end I opted for the following components:
CPU: Intel Core 2 Duo E6850, Conroe Core, S775, 3.0 GHz, 1333MHz FSB, 4MB Cache, Retail
Price: £115.14
Supplier: Scan
Heatsink: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Price: £14.38
Supplier: Scan
Case/PSU: Antec NSK6580 Mid Tower ATX/MATX Case - With 430W EarthWatts PSU ATX12V 2.0
Price: £59.69
Supplier: eBuyer
HDD: 320 GB Western Digital WD3200AAKS Caviar SE16, SATA II, 7200 rpm, 16MB Cache, 8.9 ms
Price: £40.83
Supplier: Scan
OS: Microsoft Windows Vista Home Premium SP1* 64Bit 1Pk OEM (DVD)
Price: £61.79
Supplier: Scan
DVD Writer: Toshiba/Samsung TS-H653, 20x DVD±R, 12x DVD±DL, DVD+RW x8/-RW x6, SATA, Black, Lightscribe, OEM
Price: £14.09
Supplier: Scan
Graphics card: 256MB Sapphire HD3450 PCI-E 2.0, 1000MHz GDDR2 600MHz GPU 40 Streams DVI-I/HDTV/D-Sub HDCP Ready
Price: £26.43
Supplier: Scan
Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L, iP35 Express, S 775, PCI-E (x16), DDR2 1066/667/800, SATA II, ATX
Price: £56.75
Supplier: Scan
RAM: 4GB (2x2GB) Corsair DDR2 6400 2x256Mx64 non-ECC 2x240 DIMM unbuffered 5-5-5-18 64bit OS DHX
Price: £58.16
Supplier: Scan
Keyboard/Mouse: Microsoft B2L-00045 Comfort Curve 2000 Wired Keyboard, USB 1.1/2.0, 800dpi Optical Mouse, Black
Price: £14.06
Supplier: Scan
Office App: Microsoft Office 2007
Price: £79.98
Supplier: Amazon
TOTAL: £541.30
Firstly, a big thank you to all those that offered advice. The system was very easy to build and took around two hours of build time and three hours to install Vista, updates and a few apps. The system booted first time and was rock solid during the software installation.
A couple of points worth mentioning about the build: the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro HSF almost touches one of the onboard heatsinks and fouls memory slot 0. The memory has large finned heatsnks attached and it is impossible to use slot 0 because of the fan attached to the heatsink. I had to use slots 1 and 3 for the 2 x 2GB sticks. A minor problem but not one I expected.
The drives were easy to install thanks to the removable cage for the HHDs and a simple slot-in for the 5.25inch optical drive.
It was easy to tidy the cables by just shoving them into the area for the drives. There is plenty of space in this case for lots and lots of drives!
The BIOS was easy to set up and Vista 64-bit installed with no issues whatsoever. The system isn't as quiet as I had hoped. Tomorrow I will set the case fan to the slow setting (of three settings). I'm not sure if it's the case fan or the HSF that's making some noise. Still, it's still very quiet as my reference is my P182-based system which is all but inaudible.
The WEI score was 4.4 with the CPU and RAM scoring between 5.7 and 5.9. The score was let down by the graphics performance as i'm using a bottom of the range graphics card.
Reply With Quote
