Hardware Buyers Guide: Late September 2012

Ideal for family members doing no design work, gaming, or other demanding tasks.
This PC is oriented fully around function over form, and has nothing but the best value low end hardware.
Expect a low price and a cheap feel to the case.


The case I picked I have used to build this kind of system for a good couple of years. It's pretty flimsy, but at a little over £20 including a PSU you cant really complain!

This build will use next to no power so I have no grovels about using the bundled PSU either, as I said I've built several in this case over the years, and have yet to hear of 1 failure.

AMD?!?!? I hear you cry. I recommend an AMD system as their CPU's aren't bad at all for the price, they just don't perform as well as the Intel ones. For this environment its not worth the extra few pounds to get an i3.

Also, should you ever need it, the onboard AMD GPU is actually pretty damn respectable. This means you wont load up the CPU playing HD content.

The Motherboard is nothing special at all, but its very cheap. Note it does not support SATA3. This means your SSD will run slower than it could do, but ill explain my reasoning later. Also with a PCI-e 16x slot, if you needed to upgrade to a dedicated GPU in the future, the option is there.

The RAM is a single stick, so if you decided you needed more, you can double up very easily.

Finally "Why have you put an SSD in an office system? And if your bothering with that then why in gods name have you only picked a SATA2 board?".
Let me answer these for you.

1. In the environment this system is designed for, 64GB is plenty. With office and windows installed you will still have over 45GB free. Millions of documents.
2. It costs the same as a cheap hard disk.
3. To get SATA3 doubles the motherboard cost - it's just not worth it for this system!
4. You don't need SATA3 to get the benefit that would be apparent in office use. Your random reads and writes will still be through the roof, and most of the system boot time is scanning devices anyway, which an SSD doesn't speed up. Using an SSD here will mean documents open in a flash and no time is wasted logging on or opening your favorite programs.

So what you have here is a decently spec'd office machine that will be lightning fast to use, all for under £170. Not too shabby.