Entry Level Buyer’s Guide, July 2005
by Jarred Walton on July 20, 2005 12:05 AM EST- Posted in
- Guides
Storage Recommendations
We've had a couple of articles on the topic of SATA-II recently. The first explained what SATA-II really means, with the basic summary being that it is a "made up" name for 3 Gbps transfer rates and does not require NCQ or any other special features relative to the original SATA. The second was a roundup of SATA-II drives, pitting them against older SATA models. The conclusion of the article was that SATA-II helped in some areas, but there was no decisive winner among the contenders. We invite you to read the article if you want more details, but here, we're basically interested in the best feature level for the best price, with performance being a case of "win some, lose some" regardless of which drive you choose.
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Price: $57 shipped (OEM)
Even though SATA-2 is an unofficial spec and doesn't guarantee faster performance, it does win out in several benchmarks and the Hitachi drive is cheaper than any other 80GB SATA HDD. The Hitachi SATA-2 drives also offer NCQ support, though again that can help or hurt performance depending on the application. While some people will want more than the 80GB offered here, most budget users will find the storage to be more than sufficient. If you eventually run out, adding a second hard drive is one of the easiest upgrades that you can make to a PC. Worth mentioning is that not all of the motherboards actually support the faster 3 Gbps transfer rate of SATA-2, but the drives are backwards compatible with 1.5 Gbps data rates, so it's still safe to purchase the newer models, regardless of motherboard.
Upgraded Hard Drive Recommendation: Hitachi Deskstar T7K250 HDT722516DLA380 160GBSATA-2
Price: $87 shipped (OEM)
For our upgraded hard drive, we felt that double the capacity was sufficient. You can get a slightly better cost per GB of storage by moving to the 250GB drives, but few people need that much storage. As with our base recommendation, we ended up settling on the SATA-2 drive from Hitachi. Western Digital makes a standard SATA model that costs $2 less, and Samsung and Seagate have models that are $5 to $10 more, but for now, we're content to go with SATA-2 support at a lower price than competitors offer.
If you want a quieter drive, Samsung is the best choice; the rest of the manufacturers are all pretty similar in noise levels. The best price per GB of storage comes from the Seagate 7200.8 - at least at the time of writing. $119 for 250GB of storage finally breaks the 50 cents per GB mark for SATA storage. Western Digital and Hitachi offer similarly priced models, and the difference between the 160GB Hitachi at 55 cents per GB and the 250GB Seagate at 48 cents per GB may not be enough to get you to fork out the extra $30.
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Price: $22 shipped (OEM)
A few people wondered why we would put a DVD+R into a budget system in the last Budget Guide, and the answer is that you really don't need DVD+R/CD-RW capabilities for a budget system. We're saving over $20 by going with a DVD-ROM on our budget setup, but if you have any interest in burning CDs or DVDs, we highly recommend the upgrade to a DVD+R drive. Anyone who doesn't need recording capabilities can get the cheapest DVD-ROM that they can find, but we're requiring DVD support as we've heard that Windows Longhorn will ship on a DVD rather than multiple CDs. The $10 saved by dropping to a CD-ROM isn't worth the hassle of upgrading to DVD support in the future.
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Price: $48 shipped (OEM)
For the rest of you who agree that the backup/archival uses of DVD+R media alone is worth the price of admission, we have the NEC 3540A burner. An update to the 3520A and 3500A, the price of the NEC burners continues to lead all contenders (though by a slim margin). Our recent DVD+R Roundup uncovered issues with reading and writing several types of media with the latest drives, but we're hopeful that BIOS/firmware updates will solve most of the issues. None of the drives were able to obtain a clear victory, and availability of some of the drives (like the BenQ DW1640) is limited. If you can find the BenQ DW1640, it was the only drive that successfully read back every disc that it wrote - though it still couldn't write to every disc type. As another alternative to the NEC drive, the LG GSA-4163 adds DVD-RAM support for a small price increase of $4. Whichever DVD+R you choose, the key is to recognize its strengths and weaknesses in terms of media - paired with the appropriate DVD+/-R, any of these drives will work well.
Optional Equipment: Any 3.5" Floppy Drive
Price: $8 shipped (OEM)
While not required, there are still times when a floppy drive can prove useful. None of these boards will require a floppy to install Windows XP, but if you want to add a second hard drive for RAID support, it will be necessary to have a floppy drive. We haven't verified whether or not the motherboards have Windows flashing utilities for updating the BIOS, but Award BIOSes can be updated using the WinFlash application, and that's the most common BIOS type. We'd almost recommend that you avoid the floppy just so that we can hasten its retirement, but the decision is yours.
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wilburpan - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
Regarding Dell: before I read the comments I went over to the Dell website and looked over their current offerings. There are cost cutting measures on the part of Dell to bring the price down on their budget systems: PATA instead of SATA, questionable memory, lack of PCIe, their Celeron based systems come with a maximum of 512 MB RAM, and probaby a bunch more that I don't know about.About this buying guide: some of the recommendations take into account future upgradability. I'm not sure that this should be a real priority for a budget system. One thing that has been made clear to me over the past few years is that building a computer is an exercise in balancing all the components. As a result, once a computer gets very old, it is more cost effective to replace the whole thing rather than upgrading a component at a time. Being that this is a budget system, the lifetime of the components would be less than average, as these components have already been on the market for a while.
bob661 - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
Jarred,In the article you mention that you can do 222 with the OCZ Gold at 2.8V but on OCZ's website it says 3.2V. Can you clarify this?
Zoomer - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
What about motherboards based on the RS482?They offer decent integrated graphics at a good price.
http://www.msi.com.tw/program/products/mainboard/m...
xsilver - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
#12gigabyte makes a fanless 6600GT
costs a few dollars more but if you need it
bupkus - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
I just built a system with an OEM 3000+ Venice for $115, Epox 9NPA+ Ultra for #105 and a Gigabyte X300 for about $70 and now I hear the X700 is the way to go for just a little more. I like to play Ut2004 and that's it. Hmm.. time to rma the X300 and get that X700 before it's too late.I'd consider the 6600GT but I dont' want noisy and I get that impression.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
Bah - I caved and listed an optional PSU. I still feel like I keep repeating myself from Guide to Guide, but maybe you readers don't notice it as much? :)10 - PATA is going to be a bit slower and we don't really like the cables. The newer Intel motherboards often come with a single PATA connection (supporting two drives), making it a very poor choice for such motherboards. It *is* an option, but there's a reason PATA drives are getting large mail-in rebates. The same reason such drives often end up in OEM systems: the manufacturers are clearing out old inventory.
Anyway, I don't generally worry much about the mail-in rebate opportunities, as it's basically loaning a company your money at 0% interest for several months. If you can find a good rebate on an SATA drive, I'd prefer that personally, but PATA drives are still okay for some people.
Hacp - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
One question I had was why SATAII? Why not a 40 dollar 80GB PATA100 HD from circuit city or best buy after rebates? I know that those two stores are good for their rebates, and with the 15 dollars you save, you can defenetly upgrade the processor, which is a better bang for your buck in terms of performance.JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
Regarding case and PSU: yes, I realize the PSU is suspect, and I always put better PSUs in computers I build. However, I've also used generic PSUs in budget PCs, and provided the systems aren't overloaded you rarely have problems. At full load, I would guess that the two budget setups will draw 150W or less. If you add in a second hard drive and a more powerful graphics card, you're asking for trouble, but as built they should be fine. Feel free to buy a Fotron Source, Antec, Enermax, etc. - I've suggested it many times and hopefully have made it clear that a nice PSU is never a bad idea.I've got some Dell systems that I use regularly that include Pentium 4 2.8 GHz processors and 1GB of RAM, and they're paired with a (generic) 200W PSU. If Dell thinks a 200W is sufficient for that setup, I'm comfortable with slightly better PSUs for these budget setups.
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As for buying a Dell, that last comment of mine ought to give you something to think about. Dell/HP/etc. often take a good processor like a Pentium 520 and pair it with the cheapest remaining parts that they can find. You'll also get 256MB DIMMs, because no one else wants them these days - upgrading a Dell to 2x512 instead of 4x256 often costs as much as buying 2x512 on your own.
They're still okay, and you can often get a decent LCD with them as well. Upgrading them can often be a frustrating experience, and rarely do they make something an enthusiast would be happy with. If you're okay with that, they're decent systems. I'm not going to do buyers guides picking out OEM systems, though. ;-)
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Finally, I wasn't aware that the low-end Semprons don't support Cool 'n Quiet, but it doesn't matter much to me. They're 90nm parts with 1/2 or 1/4 the L2 cache of the Venice core, so they should run relatively cool already.
I once calculated the cost of running a 60W lightbulb 24/7 for a year and it was only about $37 - 526 kWHrs at 7 cents per kWHr. Cool 'n Quiet on a Sempron isn't likely to save 60W, more like 20W, so the yearly savings would only be around $12. That's enough to upgrade to the next higher Sempron, of course, but if you're looking at the yearly costs it becomes easy to justify buying a much faster PC - at least for me.
Hacp - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
Why not buy a dell? Because Dell offers less performance, few overclocking features, a huge premium for upgrades(ram and dvd rewritable for example), and even crappier graphics than the integrated/turbocached stuff that anandtech is reccomending. Some of the choices are questionable in the article though. The power supply is a major concern.xsilver - Wednesday, July 20, 2005 - link
really #6?didnt know that!
wont it be benefitial to upgrade then as in the long run the cost of a lower power bill will make the cpu pay for itself?