My school wants me and some mates to build 60 new computers as the one's we've got a a bit crap (P3's with 128MB RAM). In return we all get paid and I get some of the old computers - which I'm gonna use as a computer farm, and give some away. The budget is £500 per computer, but now they've seen how cheaply I have worked out it would be if we made it ourselves they've put the budget down to £200 per computer (excluding the monitor) I have put this together: Processor: AMD Sempron 2300+ 1.6GHz Price: £39.99 Motherboard: ASROCK K7 VIAKT400A Price: £23.50 PSU: Included in Case Package Price: £0.00 HSF: Included in Processor Package Price: £0.00 RAM: ebuyer 512 DDR SDRAM PC3200 Price: £28.51 HDD: Samsung 7200 40GB Price: £30.54 Case: Casecom KG-168 & 300W PSU Price: £15.84 Mouse: Ebuyer silver PS/2 Optical Price: £0.99 Keyboard: Optronix Multimedia OP070 (Grey) Price: £3.89 CD-RW: Phillips 52x Price: £19.39 Floppy: Sony (mpf920) 1.44MB Floppy Black = Price: £4.00 LAN: Sitecom 10/100 PCI Price: £4.21 Case Fan: Q-Tec 80mm Case Fan Price: £1.28 TOTAL PER COMPUTER: £172.14 GRAND TOTAL: £10,328.40 I's not a hugely powerful computer, but it has to cope with Macromedia and photoshop, no more really, its not a gaming machine - obviously, components come off the net, mainly ebuyer. My question is whether is a good enough system, what is Sempron actually like? And would it be totally necessary to have to get a graphics card, or just use onboard graphics? I rather keep the budget quite a bit less than £200 each to be able to get some other stuff, there will be 2 DVD-RW in each computer room. I suggested a case window and some lights for a few quid extra, the principal said he will think about it - the first school to have modded computers?
A sempron is about the equivalent of a Celeron of the same speed. If content creation will be occuring, I HIGHLY reccomend that you shoot for a better quality optical mouse than that. Microsoft Optical at least. Dont bother with case bling; spend extra money making these computers more stable or with better quality components. Make sure the pre-included PSU is not a POS either; the last thing you need are 60 computers blowing up because of cheap PSUs.
if i were you id approach a supplier and negotiate a better price or better components for the same money and who is responsible if anything goes t*ts up? if it were me id give Dell a ring or a reseller do a deal and pocket a commission setting up fee but its not so good luck m8
Id go for a slightly better motherboard, you dont need the NIC then. And as stated, get a better mouse. Remmember that if your buying 60 of each components then a fair amount will be DOA, so remmeber to add on the cost of shipping these parts back.
The thing is that the school has just spent £2.4 million on a new state of the art Performance centre, and they are pretty tight at the moment, and the computers need replacing pretty urgently. As for the NIC, I have opted for that because they are often more reliable than onboard ones, as for the mouse, might get more expensive ones, but my friend has that mouse and its a pretty good mouse, and quite nice imo. The cheap PSU - I have that particular one at home for a 1Ghz Athlon, and it hasn't failed in 8 months. I am not sure whether a manufacturer will provide a computer for less than £200 each, unless you can suggest one, or put together a better computer for less than £200.
Whatfraud Electronics are advertising DIY PC kits in this month's Computer Whopper for £99.95 plus VAT (page 99). Spec reads:- Sempron 2400 256Mb RAM 40Gb HDD MSI KM3M-V mobo with onboard graphics midi tower "gaming" case with 350W PSU No mention of optical drive, and like yourself, no mention of OS either.
im sure the school will already have a licensed OS knocking around, even on P3s wniXP will run fine (id assume they have 98/2k probably) i agree with what most have said, get a better mobo, for a few quid more you can get branded ones and the onboard NICs are often better than the separate ones, combining the two would give yu nearly 30 quid budget which at ebuyer can probably get you an asus kt400 mobo with a load onboard. graphics well, you can get onboard if oure using 512 ram, it shouldnt be so bad. and DONT get crap mice, theres nothing worse.
I've heard about the company though, not entirely reliable! But could you give me a link to this anyway, can't seem to find it on their site. As for the OS, we are currently using Windows 2000, gonna use XP on the new machines, 3 years ago the school was granted £15,000 worth of any Microsoft Software, from Microsoft! So MS software isn't a problem.
Might want to consider some diffrent ram, i have heard that ebuyer's ram has like a 40% chance of working
Go for an Asus/MSI/Abit/Gigabyte mobo. Much more reliable. After all, you really don't want to be fixing these new PCs all the time do you? Same for the RAM. Some Crucial DDR333 shouldn't be much more than that.
buy complete pcs with a warranty from somewhere... youll be forever looking after them if you buy shitty asrock motherboards with ebuyer ram! and optical mice in a school?! theyd get trashed in microseconds where i work...
We have optical mice at my school, but only in the computer room for students that actually take IT classes. The library PCs are 650 Mhz Athlon's with 128MB RAM and they load WinXP over the network. Slow as shite Oh and a ballmouse, of course.
true, but in the crap one's everyone steals the mouse balls i would get an asus intergrated everything with some ram like geil (it's best not to buy crap stuff, as when ones starts to fail... you know a few minutes later another 10 or so will )
Yeh, my school has optical in the main computer lab for IT classes, and in the library where no "cool" kid would be seen. All the rest are ballmice, with the thing you take off to get the ball out glued into place.
As has been said i would definately go for something other than ebuyer ram. Value ram by branded companies is much more likely to work for longer than the ebuyer stuff. seem to have shot yourself in the foot though by saying you can build the pcs for £200 though as it means you have to compramise on virtually all the componants by getting cheap versions from budget brands. Might be worth going back and negotiating a rise to £300 a pop, then get reputable branded componants.
i would say for £240 you could build quite a reptable pc from branding rather than ebuyer/skanky also i would ask them if they would be jenerous anf give you sometime like a 7% discount or something since your spending sooo much... £12,000