Usually, when we do a Build It story, we piece together a rig for a very definite purpose. Typically, the idea is to choose an aggressive price and show our readers how a little careful shopping and part selection can come together to make an impressive…something. Perhaps it’s a
In our forums, the feedback to some of our past Build It features was positive overall, but a common question kept resurfacing: What if I don’t want a PC optimized for a single purpose? What if I want to edit digital photos, perform offline 3D rendering, play games, record TV, watch DVDs, rip and listen to music, and maybe do a little home recording?
Well if that’s the kind of PC you’re looking for, this article is for you. Obviously no inexpensive PC is going to have what it takes to do everything, but we’ll take a stab at it anyway.
Here are some of the guidelines we followed in pricing out our $1,500 do-it-all PC:
- Shipping and sales tax (or VAT if you’re outside the US) are not considered. There’s too much variation and unpredictability.
- These are all US dollars, from US sources. In particular, we took prices from major online retailers that we would trust with our own money.
- We included the cost of the operating system (Windows XP Home Edition). If you want to use a free version of Linux, then you can knock $74 off the price. Given the broad multimedia capabilities of this machine, Linux is probably not the best solution, though.
- We included the costs of monitor, keyboard, and mouse, and speakers. Many who are upgrading could use these peripherals from their previous PC and save over $100. You may even consider speakers optional for a rig like this.
- Performance is definitely a secondary concern here – we’re looking for basic online functionality more than anything. Still, we tried to build a modern PC, not a three-generations-old eBay special.
These are our choices. If you like a particular component better, by all means, swap in your selection. We did try to find the best cost/performance component we could lay hands on, though.
Giving ourselves $1,500 to work with doesn’t make our job as easy as it sounds. In order to ensure this PC can do as many different things as possible as well as possible, we had to spend a bit more money on some components than we would for a purpose-built PC.
Building a PC for $1500 is easy. Choosing components that satisfy our requirement that it cover all the bases, however, was a bit more challenging:
| Component | Brand / Model | Our Price |
| Processor | Pentium 4 3.0GHz | $218, |
| Active Cooler | (included in P4 retail box) | N/A |
| Motherboard | Intel D875PBZ | $99, |
| Memory | 2X 512MB (1GB) Kingston DDR400 | $174, |
| Case | Antec SLK-3700 BQE | $63, |
| Power Supply | Antec 350W (included with case) | N/A |
| Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 160GB SATA | $112, |
| DVD-ROM / CD-RW | Asus DRW-0402P/D | $94, |
| Graphics | ATI Radeon 9600 Pro (256MB) | $140, |
| TV Tuner Card | Hauppauge WinTV-Radio | $70, |
| Monitor | 19″ Samsung 950b | $155, |
| Speakers | Logitech Z-5300 5.1 | $130, |
| Audio | Sound Blaster Audigy 2 ZS | $85, |
| Floppy | Mitsumi floppy and card reader | $35 |
| Keyboard | Microsoft Natural Multimedia | $20, |
| Mouse | IntelliMouse Optical | $15, |
| Operating System | Windows XP Home | $82, |
| Total | $1492 | |
You’ll see that there are a few items on the list here that you won’t find in most of our Built It articles. The Mitsumi floppy drive and 6-in-1 card reader and Hauppauge TV tuner card stand out, as does the decent set of 5.1 speakers and the DVD burner. The trick here was to find the right balance between performance and extended capabilities, while keeping under budget. We’ll examine each of our choices in more detail.
For the same price, we probably could have a socket-754 Athlon 64 chip, perhaps a 3000+. This may have bought us a little speed on individual benchmarks, but we had a very good reason for choosing a Pentium 4 in this configuration. Our machine is meant to watch and record TV, rip CDs, watch DVDs, do offline 3D rendering, edit photos–you name it. Frankly, the Pentium 4’s HyperThreading feature makes it a much better multitasker than the Athlon 64. When you load up the CPU with very intensive tasks, HyperThreading lets you continue to perform other tasks without the system becoming quite so unresponsive. To see what I’m talking about, look at the We wanted to build a system where you could record a TV program, transcode video to go onto a DVD, or render a 3D scene—CPU-intensive tasks which can take a lot of time–without making your computer unusable. At the possible cost of some performance in each individual task, we opted for better multitasking performance. For comparison’s sake, we’ll build a similar system in the near future with an Athlon 64 chip. Motherboard Frankly, we splurged a bit here. There are cheaper motherboards out there, but $100 or so for an Intel 875P board is a good deal and the 875 chipset does buy you a couple percentage points of performance. If we absolutely had to shave off another $20-$30, we could have gone with a different brand and chipset. Memory This PC is built for all kinds of memory-hungry applications. 3D gaming, video editing, and photo editing can all eat through 512MB in a hurry. We were still on a budget, so instead of going for slightly faster RAM with a CAS latency of 2.5 or better, we opted for more memory and higher latency. A gigabyte of RAM in our system with a CAS latency of 3.0 will do a lot more to improve real-world performance than 512MB with a lower latency. Case and Power Supply We’ve used Antec’s SLK-3700 in many of our systems since it’s such a well-built and cost-effective case. For this one, we spend a few more bucks for the Storage Though you can get an 80GB hard drive for practically nothing these days, we’re going to need a bit more storage for all that digital media. A 160GB Serial ATA Seagate drive should do the trick. It performs very well and should hold hours of digital video, dozens of hours of digital audio, and thousands of photos. You can never have enough storage, though, and a second “archival” drive to store finished projects wouldn’t be a bad investment if you were to spend a bit more money. What would a do-it-all PC be without a do-it-all optical drive? ASUS’ DRW-0402P/D was one of our favorite multiformat DVD burners in No integrated audio here, pal! The Of course, it’s no good without a decent set of speakers. With a little shopping around you can find some great deals. The Logitech Z-5300 speakers we found are a great buy. A 5.1 speaker set is great for watching DVDs, gaming, or even listening to DVD-Audio discs. These push 280 watts of power and are THX certified. The list price is $199, but you can easily find them much cheaper online. Graphics & Video If we just had a bit more money to work with, we could have beefed up the 3D card to a more impressive Radeon 9800. As it is, the 256MB Radeon 9600 Pro will perform pretty well, and has all the DirectX 9.0b support we need to get the most out of the latest games. This also gives us access to ATI’s Multimedia Center software suite, which gives us a TV viewer with weekly program guide info, DVD player, and audio/video file playback facilities. Coupled with the company’s Remote Wonder, it’s a pretty useful tool for browsing, recording, playing, and managing video content on your PC–provided you have a recent ATI video card. There’s a second visual component to this system, though: a TV tuner card. The Hauppauge WinTV-Radio isn’t top-of-the-line, but it’ll give us full cable TV coverage, PVR capabilities, and FM radio to boot. Combined with a program like Snapstream’s Beyond TV3, you could have a quite serviceable PVR. A combo product like ATI’s All-in-Wonder 9600, which combines video and TV tuner together, may be a little cheaper than buying separate cards. But this solution lets you upgrade the two components separately as you see fit. Keyboard and Mouse Without these two peripherals, your computer is pretty much useless. And yet, consumers skimp on them all the time. We chose Microsoft’s Natural Multimedia Keyboard for its handy media function buttons above the function keys. The Operating System Of course, you don’t really have a computer without an OS, so we picked Windows XP Home Edition. Linux is often an option, but it’s probably not the wisest choice for this PC. Gaming is limited on Linux and it can be very tricky to get video and audio editing and transcoding to work properly when working with a wide variety of formats. The software available for Windows XP just expands the capabilities of our “does-it-all” PC more than Linux would. At least for now, anyway–Linux continues to make strides in all categories of software support. Our Winstone tests run a variety of common applications – business and productivity apps in Business Winstone and video, audio, and web development apps in Content Creation Winstone–to determine an overall level of system performance. Hard drive activity is frequent, and both CPU power and memory bandwidth play a big role as well. Both Business Winstone and Multimedia Content Creation Winstone 2004 can be ordered from VeriTest and delivered on CD-ROM for a nominal shipping charge. They cannot be downloaded. For our video encoding tests, we ran Windows Media Encoder 9 to recompress a high bitrate AVI file into a 1 megabit CBR WMV9 file, with “CD quality” audio (640×480 video, 16-bit / 44.1 KHz audio). With QuickTime 6.5 we compressed this same video clip using Sorenson 3 video and MPEG4 audio. For DivX compression, we used the popular VirtualDub freeware and DivX 5.1.1. Our Adobe After Effects test involves a batch process that processes multiple data items using various resolutions, encoders, and effects. For audio compression tests, we took a large 254MB WAV file and compressed it to MP3 Pro using MusicMatch 8.1, and to WMA using Windows Media Encoder 9. In both cases the files were constant bitrate, not variable bitrate. In Flight Sim 2004, we set all the graphics options to the maximum possible–a machine like ours should be able to handle it.. Likewise, we ran Halo using the pixel shader 2.0 path for the best in image quality. The “Antalus” botmatch in Unreal Tournament 2003 was run with graphics settings set to their highest. All tests were run at 1280×1204, an aggressive resolution for such an inexpensive PC. While it’s difficult to build a PC that is ideally suited to all applications (and nearly impossible to do it for only $1,500), we’ve put together quite a capable system here. With the right software, this system has all you need to: What’s more, it can do all of these things quite well. There are areas where we had to cut a couple corners to come in under budget. A faster video card could have improved 3D game performance, for example, and lower-latency RAM would have improved overall performance slightly. A second large hard drive would be a nice place to store all the digital media you accumulate, too.
Processor
One of our favorite gadgets is Mitsumi’s combination floppy drive and memory card reader. Unfortunately, some tasks these days (like installing RAID drivers on a clean Windows installation or flashing a BIOS) still require a floppy drive. Why not take up that space with something more useful, like a card reader? This makes getting those photos off your digital camera or loading up that memory-card based MP3 player that much more convenient.
Audio
We also determine overall PC performance with PCMark 2004, the latest from FutureMark. This version has expanded on the limited repertoire of the original. FutureMark has added several multithreaded tests, as well as expanded to include storage and graphics. We’ll look at the overall score as well as the CPU, memory, and hard disk tests.
Just to provide a reference point, we’ll compare the numbers of this machine against the
Video and audio encoding performance is far superior to our less expensive Athlon XP based machine. This machine is made to, among other things, record TV and transcode it for burning to DVD, as well as record and compress audio. These times are also very important, and it shows why we put a premium on choosing the CPU, motherboard, memory, and hard drive.
At a resolution of 1280×1024, our $1000 game PC beats out our $1500 PC in a couple key benchmarks, like Halo, Flight Sim 2004, and the synthetic 3DMark 2003 test. This is due entirely to the faster graphics card we put in the gaming rig. However, we manage to post competitive scores in many other game benchmarks, and it’s safe to say that overall game performance is good. Obviously, a faster video card is a key target area for future upgrades.
On the other hand, we spent a few dollars on features that don’t show up in benchmark scores but make a real difference. A 17-inch monitor would have been much cheaper, but we wouldn’t want to edit video or touch-up photos on it, so we went for a quality 19-inch Samsung CRT. A floppy drive is cheaper than the all-in-one card reader we installed but the convenience is worth a few dollars more. All in all, it’s quite a capable system for the price. Would an Athlon 64 perform better? We’ll find out soon, as we build a comparable system based on that platform.