Building A Pc On The Cheap

[Mr Motivator]

I need an extra PC for work, I've only got a laptop at the mo which is pretty fast etc but it's full up with stuff and I'd like to wipe all the shiz off and keep the lappy as a secondary pc, just what a laptop should be.

So I'm going to build one. I've found a pretty helpfull site which I'm going to follow along, but I'm going to need some guidance and I know that some of you fellas love a bit of geeking.

First off I could do with some recomendations, I'll probabaly buy everything from NovaTech as I live near it.

I don't play games, ever, they are boring to me. I use a lot of CAD software, but other than that, the only things that I will be using it for will be web browsing, Word, Excel, Powerpoint. I have an XP pro disk and office 2007 so I'm sorted for that.

So, bits I need;

PC Case - One of NovaTech's cheapest - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-BELUS £27.61

Hard Drive - Cheapest 250gb, more than enough - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?HIT-HD250S - £29.36

CD/DVD - Is this what I need? Will it do CDs aswell? - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?SAM-H653B - £13.51

Proceessor - AMD thingy, 2.2ghz, probably good enough - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?AMD-XM242O - £28.20

Processor Cooling Fan - Will this fit the above processor? - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?AC-ALPINE6 - £6.87

Motherboard - Am I right in thinking this will do the job? - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?MSI-K9N6PG - £30.55

Memory Modules - 2GB, will this work with my bits? - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?CSR-VS672 - £19.99

Power Supply - The comes with the case

Video Card - He'll do? - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-FX2128 - £18.80

Keyboard & Mouse - Got a mouse already, keyboard - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-USBKB2 - £3.47

Screen - Got one already

Software - Got most of that

Cables - I DUNNO!

CPU Cooling compound - http://www.novatech.co.uk/novatech/specpage.html?NOV-GREASE - £1.45

Cost so far - £179.81 Is that a pretty good price for what I'm getting? Would it be cheaper to just buy some sort of package?

Any help aprechiated.

[Spikenipple]

How's this?

[Danny]

I suck at this game. But id much rather have my one.

[Krisboats]

Danny's is the best, only i'd drop the processor down to an e2180 and pick up an arctic cooling freezer 7 pro (lga775) for £12 so you can speed the chip up to around 3ghz (mines at 3.3 currently). I'd also go for a larger hard drive because they seem to get filled quite quickly these days. I'd probably switch the RAM as well to the 2gb set as unless your running a 64 bit operating system the maximum RAM allocation will be 3.3GB.

The prices on that place are a bit high though. I mean the OCZ 2gb ram set is £39 and i just picked up a 4gb set off OCUK last week for £31.

[Spikenipple]

Well obviously it's a higher spec but it's well over £100 more than both mine and the OPs lists.

I was window shopping the other day and it's amazing what spec PC you can build for even £600 these days. It might just be me but there seems to be a bigger price gap between the absolute cutting edge components and the mid-range than there ever used to be. Good thing for people who want a fairly fast casual-gaming pc methinks.

Edit: Bear in mind I made that list with absolute minimum price in mind. Although I could lose another £30 or so by going for 1GB ram and a smaller hdd.

Edited November 1, 2008 by Spikenipple

[Krisboats]

My current list gets the pc to a much better spec whilst only being £50 more expensive.