Hypothetical New PC

[sedrosken]

I originally mentioned this in my Windows 8 on early Pentium 4 topic but...

How cheap do you think I could get an i3 based system for?

I looked on Newegg... I'm actually leaning more toward an A8-5600K.

Attractive price, considering my almost nonexistent budget. I don't currently have this "money" you guys mention all the time, but I am going to see about getting a summer job. In my state, you can apparently get a job at 15. I always thought the earliest one could start working legally in the US was at 16, and not a day younger.

 

[sedrosken]

Okay, following Chewy's advise, I will put a hypothetical price bracket on for size. Let's say I have about $450 to spend on a box. Would an A8 be a good choice? Would I have enough left over to put a half decent SSD in there so I don't die waiting for Windows or whatever else to boot? Also, for a decent monitor, how far would I be going over the aforementioned budget? I'll live with only having 4 GB RAM if I have to - I just need to make sure I leave half my DIMM slots open so I can upgrade when I can. The integrated Radeon 7560D seems nice, but if it goes through system RAM it's a deal breaker - - I'll probably still go with the A8, but I'll end up dropping in a discrete GPU.

Just saw a 5-star combo or whatever it is, a bunch of stuff including APU, mobo, HDD, PSU, and case, and it's price was a whopping $353. That's including 8 GB RAM. Drop the HDD off and put a decent ssd in there and I'll make a note of that when I have the money.

 

[ddrueding]

Merc is typically the man for the super-cheap solid builds, and I suspect he will still steer you towards an i3. I'd probably look for a hybrid drive over an SSD if there was budget for it.

 

[Bozo]

Intel NUC. I built one with 2GB of ram and a 60GB SSD for about $380.00.

 

[CougTek]

You could do worse than a Lenovo TS140 for 384$ (without the hard drive). It has a quad-core Xeon E3-1225v3 (Haswell). Just 4GB of RAM, but it's still enough to install a modern OS and run a few applications. All you need to add is a hard drive.

 

[jtr1962]

Also, for a decent monitor, how far would I be going over the aforementioned budget?

What are you using now for monitor? I'm asking because unless it's a CRT, most monitors which are less than about a decade old aren't much worse than most of what you can buy nowadays on a small budget. Until recently when 4K monitors started appearing, I didn't see any compelling reason at all to think about buying a new monitor. The ones I'm using ( LG L2010P 20" 1600x1200 and ViewEra V192SD 1280x1024 ) are more than adequate for now. Anything newer wouldn't offer more vertical pixels, at least in any size I could afford which would also fit on my desk. When 4K monitors in 23 or 24 inch size get under about $250, I'll start thinking about buying a new monitor. If money wasn't a concern, I would buy this right now. Then again, maybe they'll have 4K OLED monitors in the not too distant future.

 

[sedrosken]

What are you using now for monitor?

I am using a scratched-to-crap Dell SE198WFP 19". Max res is 1440x900. Of course, I mainly use the laptop, as it's more powerful than the rinky-dink old Pentium 4. It's display is at 1366x768. Good enough for what I do, but I don't like buying things that aren't future proof. Also, as I said, the SE198WFP is really scratched, though you can still see what you're doing.

 

[Mercutio]

i3-3220
4GB Crucial DDR3
120GB Kingston SSD
Foxconn H61 ITX motherboard
ITX chassis + PSU

$350

That's more or less the exact PC I'm building for office systems right now. It's a modest machine and I'd prefer a nicer motherboard (Gigabyte or Asus H77, maybe, but those are twice as expensive) AND a better chassis/PSU, but that machine ranks very highly in terms of price and performance. You could move up some with the motherboard in mATX (probably still H61) but there's no $50 mATX case with included power supply that I'd actually be happy getting.

 

[sedrosken]

Lawd that's a cheap mobo. I thought for a relatively recent one you would be talking something like anywhere from $100 to $150 on the shallow end.