Affordable Computer Parts

Most of the time by looking at any price list from a PC store you can tell which are the most appropriate components to buy, in order to balance out price and performance. Sometimes you have to do a little research before you make the purchase.

When we talk about affordable computer parts logically all high-end components have to be ruled out. The reason for this is very simple, usually the components with the highest performance and/or capacity cost at least twice as much as similar components with 20-30% less performance and/or capacity.

Desktop processors are very fast these days. Intel is leading the industry in performance, but when it comes to efficiency, price and power consumption, then AMD takes the lead, although it wasn’t able to to make high-end processors yet. Right now the best Intel has to offer is the six-core Core i7, which of course is extremely overpriced at $1000, while AMD’s six-core solution is available at around $250, although in benchmarks it’s even slower than a quad-core Core i7. AMD’s Six-core Phenom II X6 1090T obtained 8293 points while the six-core Core i7 980X scored 11356 in benchmarks made by Tomshardware with PCMark Vantage. Bottom line, you give $750 only for a 30% performance increase, not to mention the fact that for the Core i7 you need a new LGA 1366 motherboard with X58 chipset while AMD’s Phenom II X6 works fine with many AM2+ motherboards with an updated BIOS (DDR2 also supported).

Hard drives follow a very similar rule. A 80GB hard drive costs around $36, 500GB – $54, 1TB – $70, 1.5TB – $90 and 2TB – $110. While the 80GB hard drive seems to be amongst the most affordable computer parts, it’s basically throwing out money, because for an extra $18 you get 6 times the capacity (and higher speed too). As for the price/GB indicator, the smallest (80GB) drive offers 1GB for 45cents, the 500GB one for 11cents, 1TB – 7cents, 1.5TB – 6cents, 2TB – 5cents. This clearly demonstrates that 1TB drives are the most affordable. Because 1TB, 1.5TB and 2TB drives have very similar cost/GB we can conclude that the industry is preparing to launch bigger hard drive very soon, as a matter of fact Seagate has already launched an external 3TB hard drive that’s based on only one unit, although this may be a little taller than normal physically and still needs to be improved.

Motherboards are less important in affordable computer configurations, because if you don’t want to push the limit then any cheap model will do (try to buy something at least 20% more expensive than the cheapest model).

There are two video cards out there that are absolutely worth buying, one of them is also affordable. The Radeon 4650 equipped with 1GB of DDR2 memory is a budget solution for multimedia and casual gaming at decent framerates. It has a $50 price tag.

The other one comes also from ATI (AMD), the Radeon 5750 with 1GB GDDR5 offers exceptional performance at a fair price, only $124. It obtained 358 points in a Tomshardware benchmark, while the single-GPU leader, the Radeon 5870 scored 718 points, but costs more than $360, three times as much as the 5750.

As I recently discovered high-end memory modules aren’t really a necessity. Even high-end computer systems show little performance difference between 6 pieces of individual (but identical) modules and two identical 3-module high performance kits. Please note that simple individual modules don’t offer any real overclocking.

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