Building Desktops The Frugal Way: Part 3

If you didn't already know, the "Blackbird" is in the planning stages of a rebuild. This will the 4th motherboard, and 3rd processor, although the CPUs and MBs didn't come and go together. All the board have been Gigabyte. The first was the GA-EP43 since I could only afford either the board I wanted, or the CPU I wanted, so I went with the Core 2 Duo E8400 Wolfdale processor. Eventually, I came into a GA-EP45 that I really wanted originally, so in it went and the E8400 got moved over. The following year, I was able to get the higher end, dual Ethernet version of the EP45, so another switch. This was followed by the Q6600 last year, which lasted less than 6 months, until I got a great deal on the "Yorkfield" Q9550. 

Then this happened! I've previously talked about this Gigabyte GA-Z77X board so I won't rehash it other than to say that I've received notification from Gigabyte's RMA facility in LA that the replacement is on the way back. 

That's kind of convenient since I just sent the HD 7750 that I bought back to them on another RMA yesterday. For those of you keeping score at home, I'm up to $110 now, $65 for the motherboard and $45 for the video card. I'm going to bet that my brother will send me his old i5 so, there'll probably be nothing spent there. So, what does that leave to be done for the new guts?

Well; there'll be the RAM of course since the move will necessitate a change to DDR3 memory of which, I don't any laying around. My philosophy on this is going to be that I'll start where I leave off on my current system, but leave room for growth. I'll start with the same amount (8Gb) of RAM, but in less memory modules (2 instead of 4), that way, I'll be able to upgrade to 16Gb at some point down the road. That's exactly what I did on my current system, starting at 4Gb in 2 modules, then adding two more when I upgraded to 8Gb. That's pretty much the poor-man's way to do it. You can spend a ridiculous amount of money on RAM by going with all the cool looking-high-spec'd-"gaming" stuff. I tend to buy "mid-line" which typically has a nice long warranty period and enough headroom to be good for later updates. I've usually regretted it the times that I've bought "value" RAM, so I just don't do that any more.I expect to spend somewhere in the $65-80 range for this. 

Then there's the issue of storage. You might think that with a Samsung 256Gb SSD in my current system, I'd just reload and call it good. But, noooooo.....my drive is the OEM version of the 470 Series. Yup.....SATA-II....... OK, on a day-to-day basis, I'd bet that I really wouldn't notice. But here's the deal. If I'm going to make a major change, why wouldn't I take advantage of every possible technological improvement. And we're not talking an incremental change here, we're talking doubling the throughput! 

However, I think I've found a loophole for myself that'll be a bit of a money-saver. The main place where you really feel the difference in speed is loading the OS on a super fast drive, and maybe some key applications like the browsers and a few others. So, if I don't replace the SATA-II, 256Gb Samsung with another drive of the same size, but I use a smaller one, I could put the OS on the smaller....say, Intel 330 180Gb or maybe Crucial M4, then reuse the Samsung as a secondary application drive, the 1Tb Hitachi could then continue on as a storage and "scratch" drive. I would be a 3 tier situation with storage being allocated to different storage solutions based on their size and need for speed. What the deciding factor will be based of course, will be $$$. I say somewhere about $120-130. 

So, when it's all said-and-done, I should be "all-in" at right around $300. That's a 2nd generation i5, with close to 1.5Tb of storage. I'm going to say that, I'll be happy with that.