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Building A Low Cost PC (Part 1)
By CPU-zilla
Category : DIY Guides
Published by Jimmy Tang on Friday, 13th October, 2000


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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