PC Buildoff

I finally have it. After months of research, driving cheap deals, inter-city purchases, I finally own a good enough machine to brag about. First of all, a big thanks to Abhishek Saigal, Abhijit Gupte, Hari Piparaiya and Sumant Gupta for sharing their very valuable comments and opinions with me. They helped me get back in sync with the murky world of PC Hardware. Here goes...

The pride of the configuration and the last item to be purchased is the above 19" wide screen black beauty. Viewsonic is slowly developing a repuation for making the most excellent of screens and this one is no different. Though you can get Viewsonic 19 inch widescreeners for less than 10k in the market, I spent a little bit extra to get one with a video response of 2ms and the option of both Digital (DVI-D) and Analog inputs.

Viewsonic VX1932wm - Rs. 10750/-
http://ap.viewsonic.com/in/products/productspecs.php?id=317

I picked up this wireless desktop beauty for scrap prices in Singapore. They must have had some problem with price labeling for sure. Despite a lot of negative feedback about battery problems with wireless systems, it's been two months now without any glitches.

Microsoft Wireless Desktop 4000 - 65s$ = Rs.1800

http://www.microsoft.com/hardware/mouseandkeyboard/ProductDetails.aspx?pid=057

This Zebronics ATX cabinet is the perfect combination of beauty and price. I suspected that the inbuilt 400W might not be enough juice, but its still holding.

ATX Cabinet Zebronics Diana - Rs. 1750/-
http://www.zebronics.net/gamingcabin.asp





AMD Athlon Dual Core 64 X2 running at 2.2 Ghz and 512KB L2 Cache each. This entry level dual core processor suffices the needs of a power user like me and as far as comparisons with Intel are concerned, the only thing going for Intel was longevity and with most systems being recycled in 3-4 years or so, the much cheaper AMD made more sense.

AMD 4200+ (For Pricing see next item)

http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/ProductInformation/0,,30_118,00.html

Again an entry level motherboard. It comes with an onboard 100Mbps Ethernet card, Integrated Realtek Soundcard and Nvidia chipset for onboard graphics and other riff raff. Very small and very cheap.

ASUS M2N-MX SE - Rs. 7150/- (Processor and Motherboard combo)
http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=3&l2=101&=345&l4=0&model=1647&modelmenu=1




Since the motherboard comes with only two memory slots, I went in for a single stick of 2gb ram to avoid future upgrade pains. It did turn out costlier than going in for two 1gb sticks.

Transcend 2GB RAM DDR2-667 (333Mhz) - Rs. 4950/-

The standard choice for most. I was tempted by the offerings of Western Digital but low stock availability at my vendor turned the tide in favor of Seagate.

Seagate Barracuda 250GB SATA (3gb/s, 8mb cache buffer) - Rs. 2800/-

http://www.seagate.com/ww/v/index.jsp?vgnextoid=aace27fc60322110VgnVCM100000f5ee0a0aRCRD&locale=en-US

The king of its kingdom. 20x DVD +R and -R, 8x DVD +R DL and -R DL Nuff said.

Liteon DVD RW LH20A1P - Rs. 1550/-
http://us.liteonit.com/us/index.php?option=com_content&task=view&id=203&Itemid=67

The second item I picked up from Singapore. The difference in picking the same from India is that it would be a thousand bucks costlier and a different brand. In hindsight I should have gotten it from India as I am missing out on the warranty in case something goes wrong. Since the 8600GTS is just an overclocked version with better cooling and I am not very big on FPS, this one made more sense. It comes with Dual DVI and TV out. Also, I no longer have to share video memory with my system.

Asus Nvidia EN8600GT (256MB DDR3) - 191S$ = Rs. 5304/- http://www.asus.com/products.aspx?l1=2&=6&l3=514&l4=0&model=1812&modelmenu=1







Luminous UPS 750VA - Loan from uncle! - You Rock!

Total Damages = Rs. 36054/-

P.S. All prices are from august end and would surely have dropped further since then. If you avoid certain extravagances like the 19" WS, wireless desktop, graphics card, single 2gb ram stick, etc. a much cheaper and yet a contemporary system can be easily made.

The old mould:

Monitor: Samsung Samtron 55V 15" Colour CRT
Keyboard: TVS Gold PS/2 Mechanical Keyboard
Mouse: Logitech PS/2 Mechanical Scroll Mouse
Cabinet: Mercury ATX with 300W SMPS
Motherboard: Intel Desktop Board D845HV
Processor: Intel Pentium 4 1.5Ghz
RAM: 512MB SD RAM @ 133 Mhz
Display: Big 128MB Nvidia GeForce FX 5200 (1024 x 768 x 60 Hz)
N/W Adapter: Realtek RTL8139 PCI
Optical Drive 1: TSSTCorp CD/DVDTS-H552U
Optical Drive 2: Samsung CD-R/RW SW-252B
Hard Disk: Samsung SV4002H 40GB
UPS: Powersafe 600VA