aspen - Windows XP

This machine was built to replace a nine year-old machine that is used mainly for home office tasks, email and web surfing. It was designed to be as low-cost as reasonable, ideally below $900 for the entire system. This was countered by the goal of it being very reliable and stable, so the owner does not have to deal with technical problems.

Again, the excellent book Building the Perfect PC was used, as was the site hardwareguys.com. Components were looked at for quite a while. The following components and manufacters were settled on:

Case: In my limited experience building computers I've used only Antec cases. They seem to be at an optimal price point for my needs. I had planned to use the Sonata II case, but it went out of stock at Newegg the morning I was going to order it, so on a recommendation from a friend, the SLK2650-BQE was chosen instead, and was about $25 less than the Sonata II.

The case was very easy to work with. Because of the removable 3.5" drive bays and screw-less 5.25" bays, there is little that one has to do inside the case itself. However, a warning page was inserted between the PSU and the case such that the PSU had to be removed to get the paper out.

Nice touches from Antec: a lot of screws and standoffs included, four standoffs already seated, a very clearly-written manual, nice finish (matte, not piano black).

Motherboard: I chose ASUS based on recommendations and my own experience, and I wanted it to be socket 754 with the nVIDIA chipset and on-board graphics (to save costs). ASUS has only one motherboard matching those criteria, the K8N-VM, which is a microATX. That decided, it was tempting to get a small form factor case, but that was not a requirement for this system, and they were a fair amount more expensive than the comparable tower cases.

Installing the motherboard was simple, especially because of the great manual from ASUS.

CPU: Apparently AMD beats Intel handily at the lower end of the spectrum, so the Sempron line was chosen. Oddly, the 3000+ was a bit less expensive than the 2800+, so that was chosen.

Installing the CPU was trivial. The heat sink, however, was very difficult, and required a lot of force and many attempts in order to get it installed. Previous installations were not this difficult for me. However, I've always installed the motherboard into the case first, then the heat sink and fan; this apparently is more difficult than installing the CPU, heat sink, and fan on the motherboard first, then installing that into the case.

Memory: Crucial was chosen, although not much thought went into this. It gets very high marks, and didn't seem much more expensive than other contending brands. The motherboard has only two memory slots, so I chose a single board of 512 MB, with the idea that it can be upgraded later. 512 MB supposedly is near the minimal requirement for Windows XP, but I've found Windows usable with that amount, for purposes similar to those of this machine: email, office applications, and web surfing.

Installing was trivial, but I was confounded when the machine started up and reported 448 MB. I figured that one chip had gone bad (this was during a separate issue, so I was looking for potential causes of the problem). Later, when reading on-line, I surmised that the memory reported is that not used by the on-board graphics. This was proven correct, by changing the BIOS settings of the memory used by the graphics to 32 MB and seeing on startup the machine report 480 MB of RAM.

Hard Disk Drive: The folks at hardwareguys.com praise Seagate over Western Digital, but I chose the latter, with a size of 80 GB, based on my own experience (although I'll probably continue migrating toward Seagate). I strongly considered SATA, but opted for PATA because of previous problems. I've since read that to use SATA on ASUS K8N* motherboards, there can be no IDE drives on the primary channel. Installation was easy, thanks to the removable drive bay, and the rubber grommets further keep noise down.

Optical Disk Drive: Also based on hardwareguys.com, I chose the BenQ DW1650 BK, a DVD-RW. Installation was literally a snap, as the Antec case does not require any screws to mount 5.25" drives.

Video Card: To reduce cost, I relied on the onboard graphics of this motherboard. Graphics were decent at 64MB, but increasing the RAM allocated to graphics up to 128MB improved text quality. I don't have much experience with LCDs, and my main machines all have CRTs, primarily based on quality of text. Although the text was acceptable, a graphics card is a suggested upgrade for the future, especially if the text quality becomes an issue.

Power Supply: The power supply, which is included with the case, is an Antec SmartPower 350W. That's plenty of power to run this setup, and it has plenty of cables. I noticed that the fan noise is slightly higher than the PSU on my previous build, an Antec TruePower 380W. On a budget system, the SmartPower is more than adequate, and it would be hard to justify the higher cost of the TruePower.

Monitor: As noted above, I have little experience with LCDs, so I chose the Samsung 740N based on recommendations at Newegg and on personal experience with Samsung components. Rendering was choppy (noticable redraws) at 64MB, but at 128MB, it was quite smooth. I still contend that CRTs are a better buy for users working for extended periods of time, unless space is at a premium.

Speakers: It's a budget system, with minimal requirements, so I chose the Altec Lansing VS 2220, a 2.0 speaker set. I didn't play around with these much, but they certainly sounded fine.

Printer: The printer chosen was the HP OfficeJet 4315, mainly for its abilities to scan and fax, as this is for a home office. I didn't set up this printer during the build, since it made more sense to set it up on site.

Overall, this machine seems capable and sturdy. I took some components a notch below those recommended at hardwareguys.com, but only one notch. The case was very impressive, especially for its low cost ($75.99 at Newegg). I'm very tempted to get another and transfer my main computer to it, although I'd like to know what the differences are between it and the other SLK models. I'd probably prefer a TruePower PSU instead of the SmartPower.

512 MB might seem insufficient for a Windows XP machine, but even with 128 MB allocated to graphics, it still performs well. For $100 more this machine could have had 1 GB of memory and a 128 MB video card, which was tempting, but I wanted to leave enough room in the budget for a higher-end printer, if desired.

About Windows, well, I'm no Windows fan. As Linux gets so much better, I got the feeling that this may be one of the last Windows installations I do. I was very tempted to install Xandros or Linspire as a near alternative to Windows, and only reservations about support issues kept me from trying one of those instead.