The Benefit of Buying Cheap Computer Parts

Let's go bargain hunting among the cheap computer parts and take a look at the current "best buys" in terms of price and performance for your computer system.

One of the great things about the way the computer revolution has progressed is that the power of computers roughly doubles every two years.  This is great for budget minded computer buyers, or builders, particularly for those building an e-mail machine, or a web surfing machine, or a machine for the kids to write papers on. 

The reasoning behind this is that by going with something that's roughly a generation back, you're getting a computer that's more powerful than anything that was around three to five years ago, for a price that's low enough that it's affordable, because you're buying cheap computer parts from the remainders bin.



For CPUs, the best price/performance ratio right now is the Intel Celeron 420 1.6GHz LGA 775 35W Processor .  Celeron is Intel's "value" brand, and uses processors that don't quite test out to their full clock speed.  It's a full 64-bit compliant chip, and is the least expensive Intel 64-bit chip on the market, meaning it'll handle Vista and all its bells and whistles just fine.  The important thing to note is that it's a Socket 775 processor. 

This is important, because we'll be looking for a Socket 775 motherboard to put it in.  Right now, a 1.6 GHz processor runs under $40, and will probably drop further as Intel's Core 2 CPUs are shoved down the pricing ladder by new processors.  This is only a single-core CPU, and this will probably be the last single core CPU machine you're going to build, so be aware that when new software that can really use multi-core (two processors in the same packet) architectures, this is going to hit obsolescence really quickly, but that's about what you'd expect from a cheap computer part.

Fortunately, there are a range of Socket 775 CPU motherboards still available.  However, for this, we're going to spend a little bit extra.  While it's possible to find Socket 775 LGA mother boards out there for under $20, the ones that are that cheap are for the older Pentium-D processor, and use a much slower variety of RAM, which is harder to find, and more expensive to boot (because of its rarity). 

When you factor in the price of the RAM, we're better off spending $100 on a good Socket 775 LGA board, and buying the cheaper ram – the two that we've had good experiences with are the BIOSTAR TForce TF7150U-M7 Micro ATX Intel Motherboard (which has a built in NVIDIA video card that's good enough for older games) and the ECS P35T-A ATX Intel Motherboard , which has more USB ports, and a PCI-Express card, and more RAM slots – for $10 less. 
 




Both of these take DDR2 800 RAM, which is the most common type available, with 1 GB sticks of RAM (sold in pairs for slotting into your motherboard) sold for about $80.  (By way of comparison, the older RAM was running almost $200, due to scarcity!) 

Both of these cheap computer part motherboards support SATA hard drives; we recommend paying a bit extra for a name brand hard drive; the data you save will be your own.  More or less because it was there, we took the Barracuda 7200.10 160GB SATA Drive , because of the fast RPMs on it and because of the manufacturer's warranty – all for $53.  All in all, not a bad hard drive for a computer built from cheap computer parts.

These are the guts of the machine, and give a good idea of how you can build a budget machine with affordable computer parts. 







Check out our virtual Build Your Own Computer kit.

Return to the top of Cheap Computer Parts.