cheapest possible pootah

[TdC]

Hi folks! For a student mate blessed with a minuscule budget I require a pc. He currently runs an aging P4 1.8GHz, with *cringes* 256Mb of SDRAM (the old kind, not ddr). This pc can no longer cut it given what he has to do, and he asked me for some upgrade advice. I refuse to let him buy a couple of sdr dims because they have reached the rarity area of the market price wise.

Thus I challenge you to put together the cheapest of the cheap pootah. The fellow has a windows XP license and some hard drives what he will want to keep. Also, his current computer lives in a Dell Optiplex case, so perhaps he can recycle that too I don't know.

Ideas on a postcard please

 

[ford prefect]

Good question. I have a couple of these old Dell Optiplex boxes gathering dust in the loft. I used to use one as a smoothwall and the other as a test linux webserver. I have been wondering what to do with them for a while.

 

[TdC]

got any 512MB sdram?

 

[Bob007]

mobo 16x pci-e slot for future addition of g/card, on board graphics for now. 34.99

ram crap ram, will do job, buy 2. 8.24/ea

CPU 1 Cheap ass CPU will do job, single core, 64bit. 19.47

cpu 2 cheap dual core, bit old, but functional. 33.56

HDD sata, 8mb cache, errr it spins and stores data. 25.36

PSU Wouldn't recommend a cheapo supply, find out how much he has to spend after everything else, get him to beg/borrow/steal* and double it, buy the best you can in that price bracket. Not something i'd go cheap on.

Totals.

CPU 1 £93.30 + PSU + PnP
CPU 2 £112.19 + PSU + PnP

This is if you recycle case and rom units from other.

*Bob doesn't endorse stealing to build a new puter. its just not hip.

Err have a couple of 256 SD ram sticks pc133 here if they any good. They worked when they came out the system, since then they sat in static bag waiting for me to do something with them, if you have a couple of empty slots, they might do a patch up for now.

P.S. if PSU you have is OK. You can grab stuff like Molex to sata power cables and 20 - 24 pin power converters again reducing the overall costs.

 

[Bob007]

Something else to consider is the barebone sections.

Big Pockets Barebone PC section

DABS Barebone PC section

E-Buyer Barebone PC section

 

[Jupitus]

Be very careful if using the DELL case and thinking of keeping that PSU as DELL did produce machines which had 'ATX' like power supply leads that weren't actually ATX compliant...

 

[Kryten]

I'll second the ATX compliance - as they're not, outright. The optiplex cases won't even house a standard ATX motherboard in most cases, depending on the model. The newer ones are BTX mostly and the older P4 1.6 to 2ghz models were often proprietary - mostly designed to shield the user from exploding capacitor

Cheapo case and power supply will be around 30 quid, but at this level I would probably recommend the barebones or prebuilt route. A thumbs up again for the likes of BigPockets for these, 130 quid will often get a basic (but new model) Celeron or Pentium 4 D machine. It's very possible the old hard drives may not be usable in one of these however, not all of them, quite rightly, have IDE connections on the motherboard.