uATX System Buildup: Choosing Components

Quick Thoughts

The first question to answer is exactly how much I spent on both systems. I might as well cut straight to the chase, so here are the numbers.

As you can see, the results are not good for my general health right now. Even trading components with friends and searching for bargains still resulted in my system being $186 over budget and my daughter's system coming in $208 above the original target. The total overage was $394 and would have been higher if I had bought the Intel based system. In my defense… wait, there is no defense here. I simply blew the budget by going outside the original scope of my project.

However, if we remove a few items that were not on the original list then the numbers are much closer in total. Going from 8GB to 4GB in each system would save us $150, continuing on with our Monsoon speaker sets would save another $248, and living with onboard sound or pulling a couple of Audigy 2 ZS cards out of the closet saves another $145 while still providing better audio than the Realtek chipsets used on our boards. (Ed: but do you trust the Vista drivers?)

That is a total of $543 that could be saved quickly and would put us $149 under budget. I could collect all the loose change in the car and come up with a dollar or two, enough so I could either go with 8GB in each machine or maybe get the two sound cards instead. There is some room to work with on configuring each system within the budget, and one could easily make the argument to purchase a regular DVD drive for my daughter instead of the BD drive. This configuration change would result in a $123 savings. That would be enough money to move our video card selections up to the 8800GTS 512MB card in each system as one example.

Of course, we could play the "what if" scenario all day and never actually get the systems built. All of this is moot in my case; I already decided what direction to go, purchased the components and have the systems running now. I decided the speaker sets would be a general investment like the previous units. I thought the audio cards were a luxury, but knowing how much the systems are utilized for media playback, the thought of using the onboard Realtek chips meant I was willing to sell just about anything on eBay to keep that from happening.

In fact, after looking at each component purchased and playing devil's advocate with myself, I begin to wonder if building my own system is even worth the trouble now. Heresy for sure, but after doing some serious thinking about the subject there is a little truth in that statement.

The next question is if I got my money's worth. This is especially important since I spent an additional $394 over my budget. There are a lot of things you can do for $394 in this world and computer equipment is at the bottom of the list for most people. I will answer this question in the next article when we see just how well these components perform - not only against the Intel system I thought about building, but against a few components that were on my original wish list.