There's little difference between cooking and building your own PC as you need to hand pick all the best components available at the stores, very much like buying fresh vegetables from the market. With a little knowledge, you can choose to use high-end components to tailor your system for special purposes. For example, you can use high capacity hard disks to increase your storage space, if you are going to use the system for graphics and multimedia.
However, we will not discuss component selection in this article. The purpose of this guide is to get newbies started with the knowledge to build their own low-cost system. We have tested this particular configuration at our labs and found it to be pretty suitable for most applications.
Anyway, without getting into too much discussion about what's good and bad, let's get started. Here is the full list of 'ingredients' needed to 'brew' your own PC.
Components
|
Estimated
Price
(as at 30 Sep 2000)
|
Intel Celeron
566MHz processor
|
S$ 129
|
Microstar
Socket converter (MS-6905 Master)
|
S$ 20
|
Microstar
MS-6182E motherboard
|
S$ 175
|
64MB PC-100
NCP SDRAM
|
S$ 80
|
Western
Digital 17.2GB 5400RPM hard disk drive
|
S$ 135
|
50X Samsung
CD-ROM drive
|
S$ 60
|
1.44MB Floppy
drive
|
S$ 20
|
BrightCom
56K Internal modem
|
S$ 30
|
Aztech AMS
2.1 Speakers
|
S$ 45
|
Logitech
Keyboard & Mouse
|
S$ 25
|
ATX Casing
|
S$ 50
|
Microsoft
Windows Millenium
|
S$ 175
|
Total
---------->
|
S$
944
|
In the table above, you can see that you're getting quite a lot of good components for less than S$1000. I have included a licensed copy of the latest Microsoft Windows Millenium operating system into the cost as it is an essential part of a system. You will not go very far without an operating system. Although the price of Windows may seem expensive, it is required to get you started since there's little you can do without an operating system. Well, if you know Linux, you can probably get Linux for a fraction of the price, but you may not have the variety of softwares available for Linux.
All the parts you need to build your own PC.
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