The 20,000 Peso PC....

On several occassions, friends have enlisted my aid in building a new PC for them to use at home. More often than not, they only know how much they're willing to spend for it, and what they want to use it for. A typical newbie with very light computing requirements would generally be satisfied by a PC costing around P20,000.00 (roughly 357 USD) to build. Of course, hardcore gamers and power users may spend up to more than P100,000.00 (roughly 1,786 USD) and still not get anywhere near top-of-the-line performance, which for the most part, is considered the holy grail of PC construction.

For purposes of this post, let's talk about an inexpensive, 20K home PC for a newbie who only plans to use it for paperwork, very light gaming, maybe watching a few DVD movies now and then, CD burning, browsing the internet, and email. More or less, here is a typical setup for such use:

CPU: AMD Sempron 2200+ (boxed, with fan) - P3,400.00
Motherboard: ECS K7S7AGL - P2,500.00
Memory: 256 MB PC333 DDR SDRAM - P1,300.00
Hard Disk: 80 GB Seagate Barracuda - P3,500.00
Optical Drive: Lite-On 52x/32x/52x Plus 16x COMBO drive - P2,450.00
Floppy Drive: 3.5" floppy drive - P420.00
Video Card: On board (Xabre 200 64MB DDR) - P0.00
Sound: On board - P0.00
Modem: D-Link Rockwell Conexant 56k internal modem - P480.00
Monitor: 17" DTS - P4,800.00
Case: Generic (includes generic power supply, mouse, keyboard, and speakers) - P1,600.00

TOTAL : P20,450.00

Please take note of the fact that the breakdown does not include the operating system (OS). Microsoft Windows XP Home costs about P5,000.00 if you don't already have an OS.

An AMD Sempron processor is basically a rebadged Athlon XP processor, and as such has almost identical performance. Just subtract 400 points from the processor's performance rating and you will get it's equivalent Athon XP model number. Therefore, a Sempron 2200+ performs virtually the same as an Athlon XP 1800+ (both run at around a 1.5 GHz real clock speed), perhaps even a little faster because of the higher front side bus speed (333 MHz for the Sempron versus the Athlon XP 1800+'s 266 MHz). The Sempron's performance rating of 2200+ was assigned for marketing reasons, as it was intended to compete with Intel's Celeron line, specifically the 2.2 GHz part. Suffice it is to say that the Sempron is not only faster in most benchmarks, but is significantly cheaper than an equivalent Celeron by almost half.

The ECS K7S7AGL motherboard uses a SIS 746 chipset, has built in sound and video plus a full complement of ports including USB 2.0, FireWire, LAN, serial and parallel ports. It has a built in GPU, a SIS Xabre 200 with 64 MB of DDR RAM, which is DirectX 8.1 compatible. This negates the necessity of purchasing a separate video card, which helps a lot in keeping the cost down. Unfortunately it does not have an AGP slot so the graphics capability cannot be upgraded, but that hardly seems to matter in a PC not intended for high-end gaming. Sempron processors are known to work with this board, even though they still aren't officially supported in ECS's website. However, this is nothing a simple BIOS update won't fix.

Combine the CPU and motherboard with 256 MB of PC333 DDR RAM, an 80 GB Seagate Barracuda running at 7200 RPM, a Lite-On DVD/CD-writer combo drive, a standard 3.5" floppy drive, an internal modem, a 17" monitor (no reason to go smaller, since 17" monitors are not that much more expensive), and the free generic speakers, keyboard and mouse, and you have yourself a PC with enough processing muscle and storage for most everyday computational tasks...with the exception, of course, of high-end gaming, and possibly editing of massive video files. In the future I'll post specs and prices for an inexpensive entry level gaming machine if anyone cares for it.

Quoted prices are from PC Express and are more or less considered current.