In part 1 of this ‘project’ I described what we wanted to build, a rough budget and what sort of hardware we’d be looking at for the PC that I was building for a friend.
This post I will tell you what we ended up with – Amazing how much things change and how budget doesnt really come into it once you are at the PC shop 🙂
Anyway, here we go. This is what hardware we ended up with (and why):
Gigatbyte GA-MA790GP motherboard – not sure why this particular model, but I have alway trusted Gigabyte and I just wanted to make sure that it had enough SATA and USB connectors. Bonus is thus it has onboard firewire and HDMI (may be normal these and I’m just ignorant of technology).
AMD X4 Phenom2 Quad Core CPU – Now this was not one of the latest and greatest but still a nice CPU (which a good price tag). 10X better than what he had.
HIS PCI-E 1Gig HD4850 Graphics Card – recommended by a workmate. The 512M version was $7 cheaper so … why bother
Thermaltake V9 case – now this is a nice looking case. I wanted to get a Sunflower brand case but they came with only a small PSU, so I thought I’d get my mate a decent case (without PSU) and he could then select what to throw in it.
Coolermatser Real Power Pro 650 Watt PSU – Man, this thing was heavy, and the box it came in had it’s own handle. For the price, it would want to have a heap on connectors and be prety quiet (later we were to find we were not disappointed.
Now, to make a complete PC, we also added a Seagate 1TB SATA HDD. Oh, and 4Gig Kingston DDR2 RAM.
The price? He went a little over budget but I assured him that he would be happy with the setup. He currently has a Athlon 2800 that does some really weird stuff. It’s not his OS but definitely a hardware problem.
Where was I? Price… AUD$1100. About $700 over budget but that was OK. The initial $500 mentioned was only a rough guide.
Here’s a pic of all the goodies 🙂
Next post, let’s take a closer look at the hardware……