Holiday Budget System Buyers' Guide
by Zach Throckmorton on November 8, 2011 12:00 AM ESTRecommended Budget Systems
Note the below prices include neither taxes nor shipping as those vary based on the buyer's specific location. The RAM, hard drive, optical drive, power supply, and case recommendations are all, of course, interchangeable between the AMD and Intel-based systems, so mixing and matching those components is unproblematic.
Budget AMD Athlon II X2 system
As noted on previous pages, the AMD motherboards are largely interchangeable and the inclusion of the ASRock board in this list is largely subjective. In this case, it is my opinion that the ASRock board's richer feature set outweighs its shorter warranty.
| Component | Product | Price |
| CPU | AMD Athlon II X2 250 (dual-core 3.0GHz) | $60 |
| Motherboard | ASRock 880GM-LE (HD 4250 IGP) | $55 |
| RAM | GSkill 4GB DDR3-1333 kit | $26 |
| Hard drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB | $70 |
| Optical drive | Lite-on iHAS124-04 | $18 |
| Power supply | Antec Earthwatts 380W | $40 |
| Case | BitFenix Merc Alpha | $39 |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $100 |
| Total: | $408 |
Budget AMD A4-3300 system
It's important to remember that the A4-3300 uses socket FM1 motherboards, so you cannot swap only the processor between these two AMD builds. You must change both the chip and the board. Given the benchmark results on the second page, the Athlon II X2 250 system above is a better general, basic usage computer—if you are not interested in gaming. However, if you are interested in playing less system-demanding titles at lower resolutions, as well as general computing, the following A4-3300 system will let you game on a budget. For anything more demanding, we'd recommend either upgrading to a quad-core Llano APU (with its faster GPU), or add a budget GPU to one of the other two builds. The Llano system also uses less power than the Athlon build, though the Celeron still wins as the low-power champ of this trio.
| Component | Product | Price |
| APU | AMD A4-3300 (dual-core 2.5GHz, HD 6410) | $70 |
| Motherboard | ASRock A55M-HVS | $59 |
| RAM | Mushkin 4GB DDR3-1333 kit | $26 |
| Hard drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB | $70 |
| Optical drive | Lite-on iHAS124-04 | $18 |
| Power supply | Antec Earthwatts 380W | $40 |
| Case | Fractal Design Core 1000 | $40 |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $100 |
| Total: | $420 |
Budget Intel Celeron system
Similar to the AMD system, the budget Intel boards are also interchangeable, and in this case I include the Biostar motherboard largely because it offers a DVI port and legacy PCI slots (whereas the ASRock and MSI boards do not).
| Component | Product | Price | Rebate |
| CPU | Intel Celeron G530 (dual-core 2.4GHz, Intel HD Graphics) | $57 | |
| Motherboard | Biostar H61ML | $60 | |
| RAM | Mushkin 4GB DDR3-1333 kit | $26 | |
| Hard drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB | $70 | |
| Optical drive | Lite-on iHAS124-04 | $18 | |
| Power supply | Corsair CX430 V2 | $45 | -$10 |
| Case | Fractal Design Core 1000 | $40 | |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $100 | |
| Total: | $416 | -$10 |
Suggested upgrades
Neither the Celeron nor Athlon II X2 systems as configured will work as a gaming computer. Adding a Radeon HD 5670 will bump both systems near $500, or a more capable Radeon HD 6770 will push them over $500. Including an SSD will not significantly change the overall cost of the system given current HDD pricing; it's worth considering ditching the mechanical hard drive altogether if you don't need much storage space given the relatively high cost of platter-based drives right now. (Note that you'll still want a larger capacity drive if you plan on storing any video or lots of pictures, and if you want to install more than a couple modern games.) As discussed earlier, the Llano platform with an A4 chip isn't going to impress in terms of benchmarks; upgrading to a faster A6 or A8 chip would help, but that will also increase the price quite a bit. If you're interested in going that route, we'd also suggest looking at motherboards with the A75 chipset, which adds native USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support.
Closing Thoughts
If it weren't for the anomalously high prices of hard drives at the moment, budget systems built around AMD and Intel CPUs would be well under $400—OS included. That's about 10% less than the budget systems we outlined back in February of this year. While the AMD AM3 system hasn't changed all that much, on the Intel side, you're getting a substantially more powerful computer today than earlier this year, and one with much better upgradeability to boot. AMD's Llano platform is a bit of an odd man out at this price, as the dual-core Llano fails to really impress given the cut-down GPU, but about $20 more will net you a modest gaming system if you're willing to go that route.
Once more, it's important to note that the upcoming holiday season will present lots of great deals for budget-conscious builders. The Hot Deals section of AnandTech's forums is a great place to find and share the latest low prices on components. Further, the General Hardware section of the forums is a great place to ask for and share advice with fellow computer enthusiasts.
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Taft12 - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Non-terrible graphics performance and a Windows install free of "value-add" bloatware for startersslayernine - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Did I just hear you say Intel onboard graphics offer "Non-terrible graphics performance" ? I hope you are just trolling me because that may just be the most ridiculous statement I've seen all day.slayernine - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
This comment system lacks an oh crap how do I delete that last post function. I get what you are saying taft12, you are saying a budget system not using onboard graphics allows for non-terrible graphics.Esben84 - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Thanks for an interesting article. I like that there's also focus on more budget oriented systems. It's not everyone that needs high-end components like us enthusiasts. Though I find it difficult to recommend building budget systems, when the prebuilt ones can be found so cheap. At work I've introduced the Vostro 460 basic config, and now we are now up to using 7 in total. They've been on offer for a long time now. We buy the basic config, which in the US costs $469 and it includes a Core i5-2400 quad-core Sandy Bridge CPU, H67 chipset, 2 GB memory, 320 GB harddrive, GBit LAN, Win7Pro, HDMI connector and Intel HD Graphics 2000. It's quiet, very cheap and it's a decent looking case. Only 2 GB extra memory is needed, and if used with two digital monitors, a cheap graphics card. With such a fast system, it feels very bottlenecked by not having an SSD. If only they would add a DisplayPort and change the harddrive to a 64 GB SSD, this would be the perfect system.Esben
Copenhagen, Denmark
Halnerd - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Why would you compare the APU($70) vs a Celeron($60) + AMD5670($70)? The Celeron had a built in GP, right? The APU would be expected to perform markedly slower than a CPU and discrete GPU. You need to run both the APU and Celeron with and without AMD5670 for proper comparison. This section of the article is ridiculously lopsided.frozentundra123456 - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
well, to be fair, he did test the Athlon with a discrete GPU too. He did basically say that the integrated GPU on the Celeron was worthless for gaming except in the very undemanding LFD 2.However, I agree with you in that I would have liked to see a comparison between the HD2000 of the Celeron and whatever integrated graphics the Athlon had (HD 4200??).
Maybe some older, non-demanding games or whether the integrated GPUs could handle 1080p video or Netflix streaming, or whatever. Or at least address whether the APU of the Llano offered any improvement over the other two integrated solutions (except in gaming) for the typical uses of such a budget system.
Wierdo - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Yeah makes no sense, the article's writing is so unfocused, the goalposts keep moving allover the place. For example, showing benches of Llano product vs X2 product + video card, but then in the build section using integrated mobo video card with the X2, wth.Interesting collection of info if you ignore the goal of the article though.
Halnerd - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Yeah, It would have definitely been more informative had they run all three CPU's with and without a discrete GPU. That would have given us a good idea of the full capabilities of each, whether for HTPC or gaming. As it stands the test methodology is bunk.Taft12 - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Agreed, it would allow a conclusion that points out the tradeoffs made between the 3 platforms. None are truly better or worse than the others, just different strengths and weaknesses.The article was actually terrific until the gaming benchmarks. That's when things went off the rails.
Halnerd - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
I would really like to see some analysis of the socket FM1 Athlon II X4 631. That is a really interesting product at around the same price point. Might be a winner if we are going to look at discrete GPU solutions. A full review of the 631chip (or any other FM1 Athlons you can get your hands on, i.e. 641?) would be very awesome.