I’ve put together two new computers recently, one for my mother-in-law and one as a replacement for a system that died here this week. I used some parts I already had from their predecessors (the monitors, keyboards, mice, hard drives, and CD/DVD drives), but even considering that, they were extremely inexpensive — the motherboard (with integrated everything, including a pretty powerful nVidia video card), a pretty fast dual-core AMD processor, and 2GB of memory at my local white-box shop cost me less than my 16GB iPod Touch at Costco. My mother-in-law’s system used the same motherboard and processor, only 1GB of memory, and included a power supply and an unbelievably nice case, for about the same price as the Touch.
Even more shocking was just how silent they were, once I got them together! My niece was visiting my mother-in-law’s house and, when she saw the computer, she had to ask “is it on?” (It was.) 🙂
Computers have come a very long way since I built my first one.
Mac minis are (relatively for Apple) cheap, small, and silent, and they too use integrated nvidia now. I got to admit though that netbooks and nettops have given me some PC-envy, but I have a netbook now too. 🙂 A 16GB iPod touch, by the way, is $299 in the US. That’s probably less than the price of these computers.
Nope — my mother-in-law’s system cost about $250, and replacing the internals of my office system was about $180. Told you they were cheap. :-p
Out of curiosity, what was the computer called? I knew that there were a few nettops for that little, but not stuff with nvidia graphics.
The motherboard is the Gigabyte M61PME-S2P. The CPU is an AMD Athlon-X2 5200 (
2GHz2.7GHz dual-core 64-bit). The memory is Kingston.Oh, I see, you put both of them together. I didn’t read carefully, well, unless your time is worth nothing you have to factor that in I guess. 🙂 Still, a lot cheaper than a Mac mini – though I wouldn’t want to run a hackintosh based on AMD were I to try to make that into a mini equivalent – AMD-based hackintoshes run quite poorly so I hear, because all of Apple’s line is Intel-based.
(Though they did use AMD for the special “developer transition” device that was never released to consumers or more than a small select group in charge of migrating software and OS X from PPC, one of the most secret and surprising to onlookers architecture changes in the history of computers, though of course Darwin, the open-source portion of OS X, always worked on intel as well as PPC.)
Hey, HG, my comments keep asking me for an invisible captcha and then error out without any additional invisible-captcha prompts, only an error message.
Hmm, that one worked. 😉
As I wasn’t interested in making a Hackintosh, I didn’t worry about that. 🙂 And even factoring in my time, it was worth it, because they took very little time to put together.
Not sure what’s going on with the invisi-captcha, but I’m e-mailing you about the rest.
One more comment on the time thing: most of my time was spent getting Windows and the programs and data reinstalled. The hardware took maybe half an hour to slap together. It’s a big improvement over the first few I assembled as a teenager… no enigmatic and unlabeled dip-switches to configure, no squinting at fifth-generation-Xerox’d manuals written in broken English to try to see what pins go to what. Even the systems I put together just a few years ago took a lot more effort. And this is the cheap stuff! 😀
I’ll have to learn one day how to put together a computer. I don’t know much except that you don’t need a lot of tools and the basic parts and what they do.
The “basic parts” are a lot more basic than they used to be — nowadays, you don’t even need add-on cards. Video, audio, USB ports, network interface… nearly everything that most people have any use for is built into the motherboard. You’ll usually get one fast graphics card slot (just in case you want to replace the built-in graphics, or add additional monitor(s)), and maybe one or two other card slots, but you’ll pretty much never use them unless you’ve got special needs (like maybe a USB3 card once they’re available).
The hardest part of putting it together is finding out what to connect where. And these days, that’s pretty easy too, with a good manual or a little experience.