MacLuddite

Afters years of waiting, stalling, procrastination and not wanting to spent the money on a PC, I finally do what needs to be done. Research, budget, order parts, assemble parts, curse, laugh at the state of “standard commodity parts”, curse some more, achieve satisfaction for making it through the trenches, and then Boot Camp is released. I have impeccable timing. Boot Camp isn’t a perfect solution, but it’s damn close for most people. But wait, this is about the PC project. The final parts list was as follows:

1. Antec P180: $125
2. Zalman 460 Watt Power Supply: $100
3. Asus A8N-SLI Premium: $160
4. AMD Athlon 64 4000+: $340
5. Ninja Scythe Cooler: $50
6. Corsair XMS 2GB Memory: $200
7. XFX 7600GT Video Card: $175
8. Samsung 16X DVD Burner: $40
9. Samsung Spinpoint 80GB Drives (x2): $100
10. Sony MPF920 Floppy Drive: $10

This is not a Dell, or a low budget office box. In other words, it needs to last, and have better than average performance. I’ll go over a few reasons for the particular choice of components. As previously stated, the P180 is a quiet case with good airflow for cooling. The Zalman power supply is quiet and well built. The Asus A8N-SLI Premium is one of the few motherboards I could find that is passively cooled. I don’t want to upgrade the box any time soon, so I needed a decent chip that will have enough power for the foreseeable future. The Athlon 4000+ seemed to fill that need. I would of preferred to go with a dual core solution, but could not justify the cost. Corsair memory was chosen for it documented compatibility with the Asus motherboard. The 7600GT video card seems to have the best price/performance ratio right now. The Samsung hard drives and DVD burner were chosen for their low noise during operation. The total, not including shipping was $1,300. This is a lot more than most people will spend on a run of the mill PC, but I feel it’s representative of what it actually costs to build a quite quality computer.

As a comparison, an iMac with a built in 17 inch display is about the same price, just as quiet and takes up considerably less space, but it lacks expandability (PCI cards, additional hard drives). Other weaker aspects of the iMac would be the video card (Radeon X1600), speed of the DVD burner (8x vs 16x), and the amount of memory that ships with the machine (512MB). To increase the memory to an acceptable level (1.5GB) would run about $175. I think those are more than acceptable trade-offs from an average consumers perspective. Remember the $1,300 price of the PC does not include a monitor or any software. A decent 17 inch DVI monitor will set you back about $200. You would need to add another $90-$150 for a copy of windows, not to mention some equivalent of the iLife apps.

At the moment there is one remaining issue before the machine is integrated into my daily workflow. The fan on the 7600 video card is a joke. Besides being obnoxiously loud, it honestly looks like it came out of a Cracker Jacks box. Would it kill nvidia to spend some money on a decent reference design cooling solution for their cards. Seriously, we’re talking pennies here once these go into production.

For those interested, there are more photos of the completed PC in the photos section.