Building a Budget PC based on the Intel E5200 CPU
It looks like time has come to retire my wife’s old computer and build her a new one. Her eMachine has been humming along for nearly five years now but it is starting to show its age. In fact, the upgrade is probably at least six months overdue. Poor thing can’t keep up with all those damned MS patches anymore! Oh and it got blasted by the same lightning strike that fried the hard drive on my old DVR. Her damage was limited to the built-in NIC. I guess I’m off to a little Newegg shopping.
So…what to get? I think the goal is to keep cost down and recycle some old parts like the CD/DVD ROM, HDD (IDE but works like a champ), and maybe adopt a slightly newer 8400GS gpu. That leaves three major parts: cpu, motherboard, RAM. I should also note that this build should last just as long if not longer than the old one and keep up with newer and heavier apps until then.
CPU
Since Intel’s release of the E2xxx series chips, I’ve become so impressed with all the chips that followed it. The price is just right and the performance is pretty damn good especially when you consider overclocking a little! I bought the E2140 a couple of years back for a mere $70 and was able to overclock it to about 90% from its default clock speed. That’s 1.6 gHz to 3.0 gHz with very little effort and just a minor change to the vcore setting. At that level, it performs on par with its more expensive brothers. I manage to run it 3.2 gHz but had stability and heat issues. So what’s the new E2140? Dunno yet but all indicators point to E5200. Newegg has it for $73 with free shipping. The closest AMD offering in terms of price is the X2 5000B but not in performance.
Motherboard
Selecting the right motherboard is probably the most time consuming part of the build. I have already spent at least 3 hours today just looking at spec after spec after spec but I did manage to pick two. The first is the Asus P5KPL-AM/PS and based on the reviews I’ve read, this board should be able to handle the Wolfdale chips pretty nicely. It’s also only $50 and and comes with free shipping. The second option is the Gigabyte GA-EG41M-S2H and it runs a newer chipset but it’s also $25 more and no free shipping. It does have few more features that could slightly “future-proof” it. This one is still up in the air…
RAM
Since both boards only have two slots, I’m limited to what I can get. The Gigabyte though can handle 8GB but it’s probably overkill. 4GB is perfect for Vista 64-bit. And the winner is G.Skill F2-6400CL5D-4GBPQ 2×2GB. It’s only $45 and, you guessed it, free shipping. There’s a few others that run about $30 but I opted to get one with heat spreaders.
Bottom Line
This build will cost at least $167 but no more than $200 and if it lasts at least five years, this will be a hell of a bargain! Nothing is set in stone yet and the research continues. Let me know if you have any suggestions for this build.
My Shopping Cart:
-thegizmophile
February 21, 2009 at 12:38 AM
February 25, 2009 at 1:44 PMMike
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definitely go for used parts when possible since they are at least 50% cheaper than brand new. buy my old nVidia 7600GT at my garage sale (garagesale.bymiketan.com)