This article was written on February 16th 2007. I’ve written an updated version of this article, which you can view by clicking here, it contains newer parts and better instructions on how to build your new PC. Please update your bookmarks accordingly and don’t forget to subscribe to my RSS feed.
[Edit 2/28/07] WOW…the digg effect, over 1000 diggs. Thanks for visiting my site. By the way, Dreamhost, my hosting provider has been keeping up…]. Also, thanks for all your comments and suggestions.
[Edit #2] Wow…made it to the front page of Gizmodo (click here to view it).
So with so many people out there saying that you need a very high end PC to run Windows Vista with Aero enabled (and so many misconceptions around Vista, I want to prove that you can build at around $500. At my office, I am running Vista with Aero Glass enabled on an old (4 year) system, I just installed a $58 video card PNY nVidia FX5200 256MB on my P4 2.66, 1Gb of RAM system.
I went out there and priced out a system (from Mwave.com, my favorite supplier), very decent in my opinion. Now you won’t be able to run the latest games out there smoothly, this is just to prove that you can take full advantage of Vista under a budget. All quality parts in my opinion and it all came out to $538.01 not including MS Vista Home Premium (which can be purchased here for $115, shipping and tax. Notice that all the parts aren’t the absolute minimum, nor the cheapest, I’m going for the “best-bang for the buck” factor.
Heres the breakdown of the system (prices don’t include tax)
Motherboard: Intel BOXD945GCCRL – $72.45. DDR2 667 memory capable. SATA 300. PCI-E and enough room for expansion.
Processor: Intel PENTIUM D 820 2.8GHZ – $88.9. Low-end, very fast and capable dual core processor.
Memory: KINGSTON VALUE RAM KVR667D2N5/1G – $75.60. Two of these sticks for a total of 2 GB. Good memory. Reliable (so far for me)
Video Card: MSI RX700SE-TD256E RADEONX700SE – $62.90. 256 Mb. DirectX 9.0. Plenty of power for everyday tasks and some light gaming.
Hard Drive: WD 250GB WD2500KS – $67.50. SATA300. 16MB. 7200RPM. Fast. Reliable. Plenty of space.
Case: ANTEC NSK4400. $61.05. Quality case. Plenty of room. Mini-ATX. 380-watt PSU
Optical Drive: SAMSUNG 18X SH-S183L. $37.90. SATA. Dual layer. Lightscribe. Fast and no messy IDE cable.
So there you have it. A very decent PC, built from quality parts, capable of running Vista (very well).
[Another Edit] – This does come with a PSU, a 380-watt one. And Vista isn’t $400. I suggest getting Home Premium for $115.
40 Comments
what about the cost of Vista?
[edit by J2] – read the article…it says it Windows Home Vista Premium is $115 OEM
So:
- prices don’t include tax,
- prices don’t include Vista,
- prices don’t include keyboard, mouse and screen.
well u can easily configure your PC to use all the features of Vista according to the above specifications…but this will not help any of the gamers..u will suffer frequent fps loss as compared to the same specification on XP…so its worthless buying fx5200 for such an expensive os…so in my opinion spend some more bucks and get nvidia 6+ series GPU
All this and no photo?
…and add another $400 for Vista Ultimate, and you\’re set!
[edit by J2] – Vista Ultimate is $195 OEM
mwave is ok but I like http://www.gamegiants.net the prices are better on most items in your list.
power supply…
i have the Pentium D 820 its good but the core 2 duos are much much faster!
i can make
Amd X2 5200 +
1gb DDR2 667
Mobo
Case
ATI Radeon X1950 GT
PSU
for under $650
(will pwn the specs listed)
[Edit by J2] – The Case has a 380 W PSU…again…read the article
Ooops you did it again !!
NiCE try man ..
Looks cool for Windows Vista..
Sure it will give a good result
I would personally always suggest Amd-Ati-Asus
How hard is actually process of putting together these components? Does it require specialist skills and tools?
Good on you for putting that together. There are soooo many misconceptions about Vista out there, even from people who have never used it or even laid eyes on it.
[Edit by J2] – Thats exactly why I wrote this article. Thanks!
Very interesting! Thanks for posting.
“SATA300. 16MB. 7200RPM.” isn’t that a little bit small? or was this a typo?
sorry
GB101
vista seems to be rather popular with people from this part of the world. over here in asia, vista has been overly critiqued for its unstability.
regards,
The Pandora Effect.
You might want to re-think that case and that power supply.
Maybe if you went more into detail of why you chose each individual part and/or the actual process of building the machine, as your post title says “How to build…” not just ‘What parts to use…’…..
Just my $0.02
Thanks for the part tip off though
.
Great article. I would love to see a real example of a budget Vista PC. Knowing me, I’ll mess up building my own PC.
Why the hell would I want a PC with Vista?
gee only another $400 to install the OS
[Edit by J2] – Damn it people! Read the article! Vista Home Premium is $115 OEM. Business Premium is $145 and Ultimate is $195!
I agree with all your choices with the possible exception of the WD drives. I had 4 of them in a NAS, and found them to run very hot, So hot in fact that I ended up replacing them with 4 seagate 320 gb 300 mb/sec drives. These are running at last 15 to 20 degrees cooler in the same environment.
But you forgot the kicker: $250 for the OS.
<-read the damn article…$115 for Vista Home Premium
Nice try!
personally, I prefer Athlon X2 for maybe a bit more $$, but performs much better than P4 8XXs.
With Vista you need double the amount of money spent for ram while you only get the same performance as you would have on win XP. With win XP, you could get a pc to perform smoothly on normal tasks with 1G ram and an INTEGRATED graphics card (no high end encoding, 3D and games and stuff, of course!). Think of the $$$ you save with keeping XP for the time being!
Vienna would be out by 2009 and Vista (reminds me of Windows ME…). I would just use XP for another two years. By then prices of 2G ram would have lowered and should (hopefully) be equally as good for Vienna.
PS. may have gone a bit off topic about Vista, but just my 2 percent
Argh. This is a little bit frustrating. I think you did a decent job of outlining your objective, what you used and tells us everything we need to know. However, I’m used to building computers, so I can look at these parts and see a half-decent PC, whereas less experienced users might have a harder time understanding this, but I don’t think that was your point.
I just really want to build a great gaming computer with all the speed, graphics, and sound as those 6000-8000 models out there(alienware/the new dell and gateways) I have replaced boards and added memory before but never build a computer from the ground up (os, drivers etc) there has to be a way to get me surfing and playing for less than these corporate giants anyone who can help please email me at sillycracker6288@yahoo.com
Or just buy one… I have a Dell w/ 3.0Ghz Dual-core Pentium, 1GB RAM, 128MB ATI card… ~$660, including Vista Business, Aero runs fine.
@GrayBags101
it says the drive is 250GB, on the blue hyperlinked text. the 16MB refers to the cache size.
I built a $500 rig on vista launch day with:
AMD 3200+ AM2 & Motherboard w/ raid pcix16 and 7.1 audio etc. combo for $89
1 gb DDR2 800 ram $79
Philips DVD+-RW $39
WD SATA HD 250GB $99
NVIDIA 7300GT 256MB $79
CASE w/ 450 watt power supply $49
Total = $434 (way better than your build spec and price runs vista like a dream vista rating of 4.5)
got vista for $110 at frys oem
hmmm, did you checked all the price’s in deal ram?
btw, will it run supreme commander and the next farcry?
Very nice. I found your article linked on Lifehacker. Your traffic ought to be going through the roof.
I try to do the same thing for people I know who are computer shopping – educate them, show them that a PC needn’t cost an arm and a leg.
Sorry for the abuse you’ve gotten in the comments. Reading seems to be a lost art.
Thanks for writing the article. Well done. I’m also sorry for all the ID 10 T s out there. Learn to read people. Don’t just skim.
Hey I tried a mvp asus board ( 939 a64 3200 ) for home premium and its runs fine. THe onboard 6150 is ok too. teh big thing was getting 1 gig ram. 512 was pretty choppy.
Does anyone do cheap am2 nf4 igp boards? they might be a cheaper option.
Where can you get a motherboard/AMD 3200+ AM2 PCI-16X combo for $89?
You did not provide a link.
“Where can you get an AMD 3200 AM2 + MOBO pci-x16 combo for $89″
Any fry’s electronics. they always have great deals.
ECS makes cheap mobos that run well their am2 works flawless. email me if you have more q’s
and it runs all of amd’s am2 processesors from sempron to amd fx-2
I went to http://frys.com/ and i did not see any great motherboard/CPU deal.
you did not leave ur email address.
Best bang for the buck I’ve found was the Mac Mini. $599. Doesn’t burn DVDs though. But it’s much smaller, much quieter, comes with bluetooth and WLAN, and runs Vista Aero Glass like butter. Plus it comes with an extra OS (MacOS) if you want to dual boot.
how is your performance on your office pc with the FX5200? are you using the stock drivers, or forceware version 96.85? that seems to be latest version which supports this card..
im also running a ~4 year old system. athlon xp 1800+, 1GB ram, fx5200, raptor HD, nforce2 mobo (the 7nnxp).
i have to say, yea sure aero glass works for me, but dear God the performance hurts me deep. for one, nvidia’s driver support is DISMAL! they dont support my nforce2 period, and support ends at 96.85 for my fx5200. i had to disable the nforce NIC, because i was getting dropped packets left and right. using the onboard intel gbit nic now with the latest drivers from intel. seems to be working better, but for whatever reason… aol im 5.9 and earlier still just refuses to stay connected for longer than 10 minutes.. whats up with this!
the amount of memory aero consumes is scary. to do anything meaningful such as watch video, i have to disable it.. i like aero though, so i resort to turning it on and off now. even with it on though, i must disable transparency to keep ram usage somewhat sane. with it off, i really wish i could just use my old 3rd party xp themes again… (deviantart.com rocks!)
the stock fx5200 drivers were awful for me, but the forceware drivers arent actually much better. i run a dual monitor setup and have now started noticing that if i leave the computer for a while and come back, every so often i wont get any display.. i have to vnc in from another machine, change resolutions or disable/enable the secondary display to get anything on screen. this is so incredibly annoying!
its rather pathetic in my opinion that a company who’s entire reputation is grounded on their driver support has dropped the ball so miserably with this. here’s to hoping this sad situation will change soon.
i also had to disable many services and features on vista to get somewhat manageble performance. the sidebar was first to go, thinking about disabling windows search now too. quite unfortunate.. there are others like these too.
performance was wonderful under xp, im thinking about switching back but more so hoping things can be improved. whats your advice, and can you offer any tips to improve performance for users with older systems like us?
interesting….i digg it….
Sorry to disappoint you, but I did not plagiarize your article as you’ve accused me in the comments on my post. By coincidence we both wrote very similar posts a week apart, but the difference is I had the post on my todo list for 3 months before I got around to writing it. And if you look into the details: 1) all my parts are from NewEgg and different than yours, and 2) The system I configured cost almost $50 less.
wow great article.
You showed everyone how to build a crap PC.
Lets be fair, anyone with any interest in building a PC will either be enthusiasts, gamers, or novices.
I know that sounds a bit obvious, but…
I am an enthusiast gamer and would not be able to run many games on your system.
I only bought Vista for DX10 and your system could not run Crysis, Bioshock, CS:S, Assasin’s, etc etc etc… And Alan Wake isn’t even out yet.
If anyone is reading this thinking “Wow I could build a gaming PC, or enthusiast PC for $500″ you are wrong.
Very wrong.
The only person who could use this PC daily would be Surfers or teenage girls bitching on myspace.
In my honest opinion, if you have $500 to buy a PC, buy a system, don’t make one.
If you have 2 or 3 times that amount, want something a bit sexier and something to be proud of, while playing all the fourth coming games… Only then should you build.
My specs:
Antec 900 case
Corsair HX620w
4x 1gb Crucial Ballistix @ 8500
Zalman CNPS 9700 led
QX660 cpu
WD 250GB HDD
XFX Geforce 8800 GTX XXX
Logitech G15 Keyboard
Logitech G5 Mouse
and a new QPad XT-R Gamin Pad.
I rates 12,500 on 3DMark06 yet Vista uses 30+% of RAM, PERMANENTLY.
I’m not saying your article is rubbish, it’s not. It shows how Vista doesnt have to be expensive
But readers, don’t take the advice of this guy if you want to buy something that you will benefit from. The above system will be slow. It will hang. You will NOT be able to play much more than CS on it. Not with the resources vista will steal from you.
Also, why have Vista, I use Linux on my other PC, it has better effects than Vista, its prettier, you can run windows programs, its free, no viruses… etc… etc…
Any who, I must fight some bad guys in Zero G now. Night
x
@Matilda.cs:
damn.. i know some of you “self-aclaimed-heavy-pro-gamers” always ridicule the idea of building up a low-end-cheap machine..
i dont think myself as a pro gamer, but my machine is a damn hot baby that could even smoke high-res crysis all the way to heaven! dont wannna brag about it’s spec though.. because i’m not stupid..
like it or not..this technology becomes cheaper everyday.. so there is no point of bragging by listing what you have and all..
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