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Building A Budget PC For £115 ($175)

Goftrey

Goftrey

macrumors 68000
Original poster
May 20, 2011
1,853
76
Wales, UK
Hey everyone, I posted a thread on building a budget PC for £170 a few months back. I decided not to go ahead with it and have since purchased two PowerPC Macs and bought and sold a Dell laptop.

After looking back and doing research on various parts, components etc. I've decided to come back to the build and go through with it.

So far I've bought a Mobo, CPU, HDD & RAM. I'm still in the process of picking up a case (with PSU) and an optical drive.

The reason I'm building this 'cheap as can be' PC is to run basic Windows programs that I can't run on my eMac or my PowerBook, and for the fact I want to build a PC having never done so before, unbelievably.

Here are the specs;

Gigabyte Skt-AM3 M68MT-S2 Rev 1 Motherboard with Nvidia GeForce 7025 intergrated graphics (256 MB)
AMD Sempron 145 CPU single core 2.8 GHz
4 GB DDR3 Kingston RAM
80 GB Western Digital Hard Drive (purchased as cheap as hell just to get the thing on it's feet, will upgrade to 320 GB or 500 GB in future.)
CiT 2002 Midi Tower Gaming Case With 80mm Fan & 450w PSU
Windows 7 Ultimate (And Windows 8 In The Future ;) )

Although to most of you this build may look like a piece of ****** but to me, someone who's most powerful computer is a 2 GHz Core2Duo with 2 GB RAM I think I'll appreciate it more than most.

Any thoughts on prices of parts, speeds I'll likely be able to get and what I'll be able to squeeze out of it?

I'm a 14 year old teenager who has a paper round so I won't be able to stretch my budget any more as I'm also chucking half of my cash in a retro racing bike renovation... As you do. :p

Thanks guys.
 
It's fine for basic Windows problems, I just wouldn't expect to do any heavy graphics/video editing or gaming on it.

How are you getting all that for $175 when Windows 7 Ultimate costs that alone?

Assuming you're not pirating Windows 7 and are actually paying for it, then don't waste your money on Ultimate. There is likely nothing in Ultimate that you'll use, stick with Home Premium, or at the most, Professional.
 
yg17 said:
It's fine for basic Windows problems, I just wouldn't expect to do any heavy graphics/video editing or gaming on it.

How are you getting all that for $175 when Windows 7 Ultimate costs that alone?

Assuming you're not pirating Windows 7 and are actually paying for it, then don't waste your money on Ultimate. There is likely nothing in Ultimate that you'll use, stick with Home Premium, or at the most, Professional.
Click to expand...

I don't pirate, I actually support the developers, even when it's Microsoft ;)

I got that $175 figure from the hardware, and thanks for the reply :')
 
Goftrey said:
I don't pirate, I actually support the developers, even when it's Microsoft ;)

I got that $175 figure from the hardware, and thanks for the reply :')
Click to expand...

Ah OK - just make sure you include that cost in there. Windows 7 Home Premium OEM retails for about $100 in the states, not sure what it costs on the UK.

Check this chart out. I highly doubt there's anything in Ultimate not in Home Premium that you'll use.
 
yg17 said:
Ah OK - just make sure you include that cost in there. Windows 7 Home Premium OEM retails for about $100 in the states, not sure what it costs on the UK.

Check this chart out. I highly doubt there's anything in Ultimate not in Home Premium that you'll use.
Click to expand...

Thanks for the chart, it's really helped, I've never really looked into the different versions of Windows in depth...

I'll have to look into it, everything in the UK is more expensive so wish me luck, but Home Premium to me looks like the way to go!
 
Just received the Mobo, the RAM, the thermal paste and the CPU today... All's looking good so far! Still waiting on the case, the hard drive and the monitor though...
 
Goftrey said:
Just received the Mobo, the RAM, the thermal paste and the CPU today... All's looking good so far! Still waiting on the case, the hard drive and the monitor though...
Click to expand...

Better make sure the heatsink that came with the CPU doesn't already have thermal paste on it.
 
yg17 said:
Ah OK - just make sure you include that cost in there. Windows 7 Home Premium OEM retails for about $100 in the states, not sure what it costs on the UK.
Click to expand...

It sells for around £70-75 online.

Because the OP is still at school, Windows 7 Professional is available for only £38.50 from authorised stockists.
 
If you are on a budget and you just want to build this as a hobbyist or for browsing the web, have you considered trying Ubuntu Linux? It's easy to install, doesn't cost anything and with some tweaking I bet it would run better on that hardware than Windows 7. Worst case is that you don't like it and you install Windows anyway - but it's cost you nothing.

The only issue (perhaps) is if you need MS Office. Then you will need to go with Windows. A lot of people will tell you OpenOffice is just as good, but I'm not entirely convinced (it is free though).
 
r1ch4rd said:
If you are on a budget and you just want to build this as a hobbyist or for browsing the web, have you considered trying Ubuntu Linux? It's easy to install, doesn't cost anything and with some tweaking I bet it would run better on that hardware than Windows 7. Worst case is that you don't like it and you install Windows anyway - but it's cost you nothing.

The only issue (perhaps) is if you need MS Office. Then you will need to go with Windows. A lot of people will tell you OpenOffice is just as good, but I'm not entirely convinced (it is free though).
Click to expand...

Yeah thanks for the suggestion but I've gone Ubuntu for a while and didn't like it at all... Even if I didn't need this to run windows applications I would still cash out on Windows as I'm really not too keen on Ubuntu...

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jav6454 said:
Posted yesterday and got the parts already? That was quick...


NVM... I saw that you had those parts already.,...
Click to expand...

I bought them all Friday evening from Amazon, I posted the thread on the Sunday :)

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OllyW said:
Windows 7 Professional is available for only £38.50 from authorised stockists.
Click to expand...

Woah! Tell me more, I didn't know I got a discount... Great! :D
 
Goftrey said:
Windows 7 Ultimate
Click to expand...
Other than the fact it is not worth it as most of the features will most likely be left unused, I don't think it would even run smoothly on the specs you have picked out.

Save money and go to W7 HP, if there turns out to be features you want I am sure you could find them 3rd party :)
 
Quick update...

I've amazingly been offered an (old) PC & LCD monitor for free as one of my friends is moving abroad and their PC isn't coming with them. So I'm going to strip it down and stick my system in that case and use the monitor too. That's saved me ££'s.

Another great thing is that I managed to persuade my Dad to upgrade to Windows 7 on the family PC so I chipped in to get the family pack (3 licenses) so I've now put Windows 7 Home Premium on my system by borrowing the PSU from the family computer and its running like a dream! See the pics below...

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photo1.jpg


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