May 29th, 2007

Can you build a decent PC on a budget of $500?

Posted by Adrian Kingsley-Hughes @ 7:02 am

Categories: Components, DIY PC, Hardware

Tags: Audio, PC, Microsoft Windows Vista, Video, Microsoft Corp., Adrian Kingsley-Hughes

Can you build a decent PC on a budget of $500? Let’s find out!

Rules of the game

I’m being realistic here. I don’t expect to be able to build a monster PC that’ll be able to handle 3D games or render video for $500. If building a PC on a budget of $500 I’d be looking at a PC that can hook up to the Internet, handle email, word processing and spreadsheets and play and burn DVDs. However, even on a budget as low as $500 you don’t need to cut corners and skimp - by buying the right components you can still expect reliability.

So, let’s see what we can get for $500. All components here are sourced from Newegg.com and prices are as listed today (5/29/07). Price will not include OS (I’ll get to that at the end).

Motherboard - ASUS M2NBP-VM

The trick to building a cheap PC is to get the foundations right. You need a motherboard that’s got it all integrated - audio, video, network. The ASUS M2NBP-VM has it all, and at a good price.

This board handles our audio, video and network, saving us a bundle on the overall end price of the PC. The audio and network support will be adequate for most needs (the audio support offers 6 channel output and the LAN supports 10, 100 and 1000Mbps) and if you later decide that you want to dabble in a little gaming, you can always fit a separate PCI-E card into the x16 slot instead of the onboard NVIDIA GeForce 6 GPU.

The board also supports 4 sticks of RAM up to 8GB, 2 x PATA channels (ATA100), 4 x SATA channels (RAID 0/1) and for the price you get 2 x USB 2.0 and both D-Sub and DVI video output. Nice.

Price - $74.99

Next –>

Pages: 1 2 3 4