Can you really build one that cheap?!
Sure can, I'll give you a rough breakdown what I spent, circa end of August:
Major components:
$ 59 Cyrix/IBM P200+ (little higher now)
(Or, Pentium P166 MMX $146 (cheaper now)
Or, AMD K6/166 can be had for $120 now,
or Cyrix M2/166mmx for $90)
$ 94 2x16meg EDO 2x$47 (under $40 now)
$200 3.5g Fujistu IDE Disk ( can be had for $175 now)
$110 Shuttle HOT-565 TX Mobo (can be had for $100 now)
$ 75 Toshiba 16x ATAPI CD-ROM
$ 30 Boca 28.8 internal modem
(I had ordered a $50 33.6 newcom external, but it was out of stock. The only problem I had with 4 web/mailorder places was the modems at cmpexpress.com, which was the only place I'd ever bought anything from previously, always with no problem. They were pretty nice about straightening out my modem problems in the end too, after slipping up a couple times)
plus the little fill-ins:
Case/PS 29
Keyboard 14
Mouse 10 (intellimouse clone)
Video 32 (trident 9680, 2meg)
Sound 22 (Yamaha OPL-Sax)
I got the fill in stuff+mobo from www.carlind.com, not covered by pricewatch. They got a limited selection but they're pretty nice. Stuff like this can be had a little cheaper. If you have a local CompUSA, they always seem to have some keyboard and mouse on sale for free, after mail in rebate.
Right now, you could start with a core Shuttle Mobo+32meg+K6/166 for a cool $300, maybe you have enough recyclables around to fill in, or maybe another $100 for the fill ins as above, sans disk/cd Throw in a $50-$60 100baseT Ethernet card...
I got no love lost for Microsoft software, but PC hardware can't be beat for cost effectiveness. Something about competition I think; I hope AMD/Cyrix can hold on to keep the pressure on Intel.
Cheers, Dan.
P.S. Tom's hardware homepage, sysdoc.pair.com, is too big, always a 30k download when you hit it, but I never had problems with Nav3.0. Keep trying... it's pretty cool too. |
