Evil-Dragon
04-30-2007, 04:32 PM
Was browsing through eBay today thinking about building a machine from old used parts. I decided on a budget of £50 to try and build a machine of at least 2Ghz and possibly 512MB of ram. I already had a case, an unused PSU, hard drive, cd-rw drive and some old 133Mhz SDRAM ram. So all in all i just needed a motherboard and a processor really.
Soon it became apprent to me that there was no way that I was going to be able to build a machine for that cheap. Processors on ebay are expensive and so are the motherboards (not to mention they are really tacky mb's!)
I decided to have a quick flick through the prebuilt systems in hope of finding a decent spec in amongst the old 500Mhz P3 and Celerons. Things weren't going well up to the £45 mark, most were pretty slow and not very decent at all. Then i found this little beauty sitting in among the old P3's and thought "What a bargin!"
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=150117226812&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT&ih=005
Now consider this, a P4 2.4Ghz costs in the region of £25 (and then £4 P&P) http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Intel-P4-2-4Ghz-Socket-478-533-FSB-512K-CPU-SL6RZ_W0QQitemZ230121269772QQihZ013QQcategoryZ1429 3QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
A motherboard will cost about £15 with postage costs and then a stick of RAM will cost at least £12 with postage costs.
All in all it would cost you about £56 and you're not even getting an XP Pro license.
I'm pretty chuffed with my bargain, it's pretty small so it's not like a monster like some of my other machines and i get a free XP Pro license to allow me to have a valid license for my other XP machine on the floor (which truth to say is not valid!)
There's another 6 of those machines left if someone else in the UK is interested in a bargain.
Soon it became apprent to me that there was no way that I was going to be able to build a machine for that cheap. Processors on ebay are expensive and so are the motherboards (not to mention they are really tacky mb's!)
I decided to have a quick flick through the prebuilt systems in hope of finding a decent spec in amongst the old 500Mhz P3 and Celerons. Things weren't going well up to the £45 mark, most were pretty slow and not very decent at all. Then i found this little beauty sitting in among the old P3's and thought "What a bargin!"
http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewItem&rd=1&item=150117226812&ssPageName=STRK:MEWN:IT&ih=005
Now consider this, a P4 2.4Ghz costs in the region of £25 (and then £4 P&P) http://cgi.ebay.co.uk/Intel-P4-2-4Ghz-Socket-478-533-FSB-512K-CPU-SL6RZ_W0QQitemZ230121269772QQihZ013QQcategoryZ1429 3QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem
A motherboard will cost about £15 with postage costs and then a stick of RAM will cost at least £12 with postage costs.
All in all it would cost you about £56 and you're not even getting an XP Pro license.
I'm pretty chuffed with my bargain, it's pretty small so it's not like a monster like some of my other machines and i get a free XP Pro license to allow me to have a valid license for my other XP machine on the floor (which truth to say is not valid!)
There's another 6 of those machines left if someone else in the UK is interested in a bargain.