Puzzleology

Building a Desktop

(Posts about Europe will be completed…later)

I’ve been milling around with the idea of building a desktop to serve as a media center and as a web and file server. Now that I’m back with a little time on my hands, I decided to do it. My reference was a $620 Dell Inspiron 570 MT with an AMD Athlon II X4 630 (2.8 GHz), 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3-1033 SDRAM, a 1TB SATA 7200 RPM HD, an ATI Radeon HD 5450 1GB DDR3, a 16x DVD+/-RW drive, and a 19 in 1 media card reader. Including tax and shipping it comes out to about $700.

With some (read: lots of) help from my friends, I ended up getting this configuration:

*Motherboard: Asus M4A78T-E ($114.99 – $20 mail-in rebate)
*Power Supply: Corsair CMPSU-750TX ($109.99 – $20 mail-in rebate)
*CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 630 (2.8 GHz) ($99.00)
*Case: Rosewill Challenger Mid Tower ($39.99 + $9.99 shipping + $3.30 tax)
*Memory: G.SKILL 4GB (2x2GB) DDR3-1333 SDRAM ($81.99 + $6.76 tax)
*Hard Drive: Western Digital Caviar Blue 1TB SATA 7200 RPM HD ($74.99 – $10 promo code + $5.36 tax)
*Optical Drive: LITE-ON Black 24x DVD+/-RW ($19.99 + $1.65 tax)
*Media Card Reader: Koutech IO-RCM621 ($19.99 + $1.99 shipping + $1.65 tax)

Total: $581.63 – $40 mail-in rebate = $541.63.
(For some reason Newegg calculated the shipping to be $11.92 instead of $11.98, so the total was six cents less…oh well.)

So in the end I saved about $160. Not bad! I probably could have saved another $10 getting a 650W or $20 with a 550W power supply, but I stuck with the 750W in case I ever decided to upgrade the video capability of the machine.

Onwards to building!