Cheap computer parts don’t have to mean poor performance

The price/performance ratio drives many budget-minded PC buyers. The logic is that by buying something that is a bit behind the “state of the art” you can get a reasonable machine for a modest budget. Right now, its best price/performance ratio is with the 64-bit Celeron 420 (Vista compatible), which is one of the last processors to use the Socket 775 LGA architecture. The current sweet spot is 1.6 GHz, but they may not be around much longer as Intel’s Core 2 processors move down the product hierarchy in favor of multi-core designs. Be warned, this is probably the last of the single core processors; this machine has the potential to quickly be relegated to secondary duties.

For this machine’s motherboard, your best bet is the ECS P35T-A, which has more USB ports, a PCI-Express card, and four RAM slots. It has onboard sound, but no onboard video worth mentioning; get a good PCI Express video card, but don’t bother with one that’s a “gamer card”. This machine is not a gaming machine, so save your money and get the cheapest one you can find at the time. That said, I don’t have a specific recommendation, because the “cheapest PCI Express video card” changes literally every 24 hours, and any one of them will be more than you need.

You’ll need RAM, especially with Vista, and this machine can accept DD2-800, which is the current “base price” RAM. (The board was chosen with this specifically in mind. A cheaper board ended up having RAM that was twice as expensive, and it turned out not to be a bargain.)

For drives, consider a 32x DVD R/W drive; they’re at the point where they’re all around $30 or less. For a hard drive, a single 120GB Barracuda is fine for less than $50. A wireless network card for $10, and we’re pretty much set, apart from a case and a power supply (400W is the minimum we recommend for a power supply) and a monitor.

If there’s one place where “cheaper” shouldn’t be your mantra, it’s your monitor. It’s the one piece of computer hardware you’re going to keep when this computer is put away in the attic as woefully obsolete, and it’s the piece of hardware where the extra money spent will give you an immediate and ongoing benefit.