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The New
Slugging away on obsolete hardware, is not exactly my thing. However, having a system that isn’t going to crash on a regular basis is just as important. Similarly, price is an issue. For this reason, what follows is a kind of guide. A culmination of one friend’s search to get a new system on a very tight budget.
Naturally, you could always pick up a second hand box from any respectable place. More often than not though, they’ve been built by one of the big vendors: Apple, Dell, HP Compaq, eMachines, Gateway, or IBM (now Lenovo).
A used box has its pros and cons. For me, the biggest con is that they often involve proprietary components that are quite difficult to replace and/or upgrade. Typically, these are the chassis, power supply and motherboard. On the other hand, if you don’t want the hassles of figuring out if your parts will “fit together”, then second hand may be the way to go.
Another consideration here is purpose. What you will use it for. A full desktop environment? No X11 or only need TWM? For former, you’re probably looking at anything Pentium II and up. For the latter, a Pentium or even an i386 should work. As you can guess, I’m thinking of Linux here. Anyway, the guide.
Sometimes maturity should win out over youth. The bleeding edge isn’t necessary if you’re just serving up files or researching and writing an article. Stable, supported and simple. All prices were taken from my local computer store at the time of writing.
Example 1: the barebone
Why get a second hand older P4 or a later P3, when you can start new?
Asus Terminator C3Price: $139.00Reviewed here.
Distinguishing feature: onboard CPU (Via C3 800MHz)
The good: small, quiet, consumes a fraction of the power of your typical desktop while retaining most of the “plugs”. USB, SATA, parallel, serial, Firewire, PS/2, onboard video, sound and ethernet There’s also some optional stuff that may or may not be available, like a CD–ROM drive and S–Video. Also, it comes with a floppy drive.
The bad: small form factor allows for few upgrades. One free slot for a PCI card, not PCI–x.
Kingston 512Mb ValueRAM DDR400 (CL3)Price: $69.00Their Value series prices are almost as good as the no-name generic variety. HOWEVER, it’ll always be worth the few extra dollars to invest in some brand name memory. A system with defective memory is not the kind of problem you want to deal with later on. Incidentally, the system maxes out at 2 GB, so you may want to get a 1 GB stick if you can afford it.
Western Digital Caviar SE 80Gb – 7200rpm – 8Mb Cache IDE Hard Drive – WD800JBPrice: $53.00SATA is supported, but you’ll need to buy SATA cables too. So to save some $ try the old PATA. Mind you, with one free optical bay, a second hard drive can be added using a cheap hard drive tray. However, a better investment with a few extra dollars, would be a bigger hard drive.
LG Beige 18x DVD Writer GSA–H22NPrice: $39.00You could just get a CD–ROM drive. On the other, the dropping prices of regular DVD media, with the onset of Blu–Ray and HD DVD, make it more sensible to have a drive you can burn stuff on. Besides, LG has a good line of low cost internal DVD burners.
optional: PCI video cardPrice: approx. $25.00Onboard video represents shared memory. This can be a problem if your memory is so tight that it’s compensating for a slower processor. Hence, you probably want to devote that free pci slot to a video card. Most other things can simply use the existing USB and/or Firewire ports.
Example 2: start from scratch
Again, taking a much more mature platform over cutting edge. Also, keeping with a smaller form factor. If this wasn’t a budget system, a regular tower chassis with a fullsized motherboard would be a better choice.
Antec NSK1300 mATXPrice: $102.00Always nice to have a chassis that comes with its own power supply unit.
Asus K8V-VMPrice: $59.00Highlights include the “everything onboard” variety. The manual.
AMD Sempron64 3000+ (Socket754) Retail VersionPrice: $59.00
Kingston 512Mb ValueRAM DDR400 (CL3)Price: $69.00
Western Digital Caviar SE 80Gb – 7200rpm – 8Mb Cache IDE Hard Drive – WD800JBPrice: $53.00
LG Beige 18x DVD Writer GSA–H22NPrice: US$ / CDN$
optional: PCI or AGP video cardPrice: approx. $25.00
— toshiya
Posted by toshiya on Nov 10 2006 under Hardware |
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