One of the things I enjoy doing is specing up and building new PCs. Unfortunately due to a lack of funds on my part I rarely get to do the later. However when I get the necessary money I intend on building a PC that I’ve specked up. This will probably be around November time. The main use I’ll have for the PC will be video playback and acting as a small home server. Anyway for those of you looking to build a small budget PC I thought I’d share what I’m looking at.
CPU
First of all the CPU. The CPU I was looking at using in the build was an AMD Athlon 5350 2.05GHz AM1 Quad Core. This is a 64bit processor with APU abilities allowing it to output 4k resolution. From what I can gather it is able to run lite games and stream video. The main reason I was looking at this CPU is to do with these abilities coupled with the fact that it only costs £41 and only needs 25W power to run.
Motherboard
The mobo I was looking at was a ASRock AM1B-ITX. This mobo has HDMI and VGA output that I require incorporates the integrated graphics. It allows up to 16GB of DDR3 Ram and is ITX form factor. This means that I can keep the size to a minimum. The only real downside of this board is there is only 2 Sata ports. However at a cost of £22 it seems ideal.
RAM
For what I’m needing a 4GB ram chip seems plenty and the Kingston ValueRam of 4GB with 1600MHz speed is perfect for the price of £30.
HDD/SSD
The hard drive that I’m intending to run will be the most expensive part of the build. I already have a spare 64GB SSD that will be ideal for the OS but the HDD will have to be purchased. As I said before I want the build to act as a home server of sorts but I want to keep the power usage down. Therefore I’m opting for a WD Green Desktop 4TB SATA 6Gb/s 3.5″ HDD. This costs £111 but if you want to keep your costs down I suggest using a much cheaper 2TB HDD.
Case
You may be thinking that I’ve missed the PSU but I haven’t. The case I’m looking at is a Powercool Q5 Black ITX Case. This case is tiny but has enough drive space to allow me to fit my drives. It also comes with a built in 180W PSU that is 80+ rated. It also only costs £40.
Final cost
When all this comes together the final cost of the build is £246. If you opted for a smaller HDD you could probably bring this down to less than £200. That’s pretty sweet for a PC with those specs and such a small size.
Anime Tech and Touhou 