For when less is all you really need, there's the Ultimate Budget Box.
Lots of computers out there very rarely do anything processing intensive, let alone 3D intensive. If casual use of Google Earth is the most intensive 3D application run in any given month and most gaming is best described as "occasional" (such as the venerable Serious Sam 2), the mainstream Budget Box is probably overkill. Lots of office desktops, student computer labs, and home machines do little more than e-mail, word processing, play MP3s and stream a little video. A little photo editing from the now ubiquitous digital camera along with transcoding music or video is probably about as intense as things get.
The main Ars three-box System Guide packs a lot of computing power in for the money, and it increases every year-- some years more than others. The current result is that lowest rung-- the Budget Box-- in the main System Guide has the power to run most games comfortably at 1680x1050 or chew through Folding@Home like a monster, which is overkill for a huge chunk of readers, even the enthusiasts that populate Ars.
The Ultimate Budget Box is different from the traditional system guide goal of a capable all-around box including gaming: it omits any pretense at serious gaming or to cram the most features possible in the budget. The Ultimate Budget Box's twist is a lowest-cost system of reasonable capability for the average user. Low cost, reliability, and quality are key, so long as it can do everything they need it to do. It's about a reasonable, low-cost box: it doesn't skimp on components, but it isn't loaded up with features either. Hence the emphasis on the Ultimate Budget part of the equation.
The UBB is for builders who what the cheapest, lowest-cost system that they can build themselves and still feel confident that they're using quality parts that will result in a solid build. As a lowest-cost starting point out of the systems recommended in the System Guide, the Ultimate Budget Box also offers flexibility for those who need to start off with something basic, to tweak to their needs while spending as little as possible on extras.
If you want the absolute lowest cost system possible, look elsewhere. The UBB is about as low cost as we can get and still feel confident you're building a quality system. If you can relinquish the desire to build it yourself and don't mind buying, there is the OEM prebuilt route. . .
Which isn't a bad one. For non-builders, the best alternatives in this price range are almost always prebuilt boxes from big OEMs such as Dell, HP, Lenovo, and Acer.
Once you factor in the cost of the operating system (unless you run a free one such as Linux), the most sensible route to a low-cost system is to buy one from a big OEM, and adding in the warranty support on tilts things further in favor of a prebuilt. Hit up GotApex, Ben's Bargains, Slickdeals, Fatwallet, and other hot deals sites for the current sale of the day and you generally emerge in pretty good shape. $399 for a halfway decent system including a LCD definitely isn't too hard to find these days. While it may not be the nicest, most quiet, or highest quality unit around, the value is definitely there.
A little patience to find a better than average sale often pays off huge in this price range, particularly if you can score a deal with a bigger LCD or a quad-core CPU (or both!). Those (unnecessary) upgrades can easily add another $100 or more to the cost of an Ultimate Budget Box, but if you can snag them on sale for no extra cost, why not?
Fortunately or unfortunately, as an enthusiast, you understand the tradeoffs involved, and you want to pick your own components and make your own compromises, not the ones HP or Dell has chosen for you-- and hence the Ultimate Budget Box is for you.
Almost everyone has been keeping an eye on the swarm of low-cost Intel Atom-based components and systems that have arrived in the last few months. Initially aimed at about a $500 price-point and currently encompassing somewhere from $300 to $800 today, a typical Atom-based netbook such as the Asus Eee, HP Mini-Note, Dell Inspiron Mini 9, MSI Wind, and Acer Aspire One is priced right in Ultimate Budget Box territory. Desktop seekers may have dug up the Atom-powered Asus Eee Box, which has a serious appeal for those seeking tiny, unobtrusive desktop computers.
Intel Atom and Via Nano-powered systems are great, extremely power-efficient boxes for typical internet use, word processing, and the like. If that's all you expect to do, we recommend you consider one before you commit to building your Ultimate Budget Box. Where these systems start to disappoint is if you do more than the most basic tasks.
Our own review of the Intel Atom and Via Nano shows that once you hit things like basic Photoshop, MP3 transcoding, and HD video playback, Atom and Nano are slow, and many are hobbled with small, painfully slow solid state drives (SSDs). Reviews at Xbitlabs, Techreport and SilentPCReview confirm this; as SPCR points out, getting a single-core Atom or Nano to do 720p content is about as good as you can hope for, which is good enough for the basics and borderline for anything more. The fastest parts from each make, the Via Nano L2100 (1.8ghz/25W TDP) and the dual-core Intel Atom 330 (1.6ghz/8W TDP) do better than their slower-clocked brethen, but showing the limits of such low-power processors is easily done.
We're not being entirely fair to Atom and Nano with these sorts of comparisons, considering most people know what they're buying into. We realize this.
From our standpoint, Atom and Nano offer an enviable ultralight footprint and power consumption for what generally works out to something almost the same price as the Ultimate Budget Box, a typical low-end bargain-shopped OEM prebuilt, or even a nice Dell consumer-grade Pentium Dual-core-powered laptop special. What you sacrifice is performance-- too much performance in our opinion. The Ultimate Budget Box is meant to be a low-cost box, but sacrificing the ability to comfortably handle a bunch of quick Photoshop edits or the ability to easily handle HD video higher than 720p resolution is just too limiting, too much of a sacrifice for the UBB to make when more powerful options are available for about the same total cost.
Obviously, there's the main Ars System Guide if you need more than the Ultimate Budget Box. That may be too much more, though.
What we mean is just a little beyond what we recommend in the UBB itself. The UBB is intended as a reasonable, low-cost box where we try to avoid spending any more than we have to. You're free to make your own tweaks, many of which we discuss throughly in the guide itself, but don't actually choose as the recommendation in the guide. Adding more memory or stepping up to a bigger harddisk are tweaks you may find make your own take on the UBB a much more useful setup for you, so we advise you to research carefully and to use your best judgement.
Photoshop geeks may benefit from doubling the amount of memory, people looking for a low-buck media box will probably want a bigger harddisk, distributed computing geeks can probably get by with a network boot and a faster processor, used as a low-cost computing node the UBB could get by with a less-capable motherboard, etc.
Some ambitious comments in the pre-article discussion take the UBB concept far beyond what we've intended in the Orbiting HQ. The sacrifices you may have to make to get there-- one poster's UBB-price-level gaming rig is a skillful bit of component shopping and quite a bit of somewhat frightening compromise-- are not for everyone, but the curious will find they're worth looking at. Items we've already mentioned, such as more memory, a bigger harddisk, or even a bigger monitor may actually fit in well with your UBB. Think about it!
Unlike pretty much every box except the HTPC guide, we use the onboard video as default graphics output in the Ultimate Budget Box. This means we want the best we can get for our limited budget. In this case, the AMD 780G chipset with the Radeon HD 3200 IGP is the best bang for your buck around, making it the chipset of choice in the UBB. Competing at the same price point is the Intel G33 chipset (for Intel chips); and nVidia Geforce 8200 and 8300 chipsets (for AMD chips), all of which are either slower, more costly, or both, which makes all of them less than ideal.
The fastest onboard video, but still far short of a discrete card, is the newly-released AMD 790GX chipset. Right now the supply of 790GX board is limited and most 790GX boards are pretty expensive, which means 790GX is not yet a viable solution. Intel's new G45 chipset is a considerable improvement on the older chipsets with integrated graphics for Intel systems, but it's both more pricey and slower than 780G, which makes it tough to justify. The future nVidia Geforce 9x00-series chipset for Intel processors may be a worthy alternative if its expected performance and price points hold up.
Lower-end alternatives would be boards based on AMD's 780V and 740G chipsets. If you need to save every last dollar, one of these might make sense, especially if you realize you're not going to need much 3D performance, period. Given that 3D performance of most integrated video is pathetic at best, we feel the couple extra dollars for an AMD 780G-based board are worth it. It's substantially faster than most of the competition, as per SilentPCReview and other reviews, and at such modest performance levels, the jump from, say 20fps to 30fps easily means the difference between misery and enjoyment.
The Asus M3A78-EM is our motherboard of choice in the Ultimate Budget Box. It features the AMD 780G chipset, four DDR2 DIMM slots, one PCI-e 2.0 x16 slot, one PCI-e x1 slot, two PCI slots, Displayport, HDMI, DVI-D, five SATA ports, one eSATA port, one IDE port, gigabit ethernet, 7.1 audio including S/PDIF out, up to 12 USB 2.0 ports, and Firewire. Quite a feature set for a microATX board. Should the Asus be unavailable, the Gigabyte GA-MA78GM-S2H is almost as good.
Cost: $76.99 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
The combination of low price and low power consumption is somewhat more difficult to answer due to the plethora of choices at the low-end.
Looking among AMD chips, we find that almost the entire Athlon64 X2 and Athlon X2 line-up has been crowded into the sub-$100 space. Most offer 65W thermal design power (TDP), which means they're somewhat more power hungry than the most-efficient Athlon X2's around, which offer a 45w TDP, and hence may not be ideal for a thrifty box. Conversely, with so many choices packed into this price range, you can get a good 400mhz or 500mhz more clock speed for very little more if you value performance more than efficiency. With performance of the slightly slower Athlon X2 parts already being more than adequate for the Ultimate Budget Box, we opt to save as much money as we reasonable can and go for the slower, cooler-running processors such as the Athlon X2 4850e and 4450e.
Intel builders have it a little easier, as Intel's Pentium Dual-core lineup are the only Intel processors sensible in UBB territory (unless you diverge wildly with an Intel Atom), particularly the 2ghz E2180 and 2.2ghz E2200. Both are cool and efficient, but their relatively low clock speeds, somewhat higher prices than their AMD counterparts, and slower graphics performance of chipsets for Intel processors make them hard to justify in the UBB.
The ambitious may find the AMD Phenom X3 8450 workable-- but with most applications barely acknowledging the existence of a second core, going to triple-core or quad-core is a complete waste in the UBB. Naturally distributed computing geeks are excepted.
The Athlon X2 4450e is a 2.3ghz part with 2x512KB L2 cache and a modest 45w TDP. We go for a retail boxed chip because the included heatsink/fan makes it a good deal, and the 3 year warranty is nice to have.
Cost: $58.99 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
2GB of memory is affordable for pretty much everyone, and DDR2-800 prices regularly hit $40 after rebate. 2GB is enough memory to keep Windows and most programs happy, and the pain of hitting the swapfile more often with less RAM just isn't worth it. Linux users or others using less bloated operating systems (Windows slimmed down with nLite, perhaps?) might be comfortable with less, but even then we don't think it's worth the sacrifice.
4GB of DDR2-800 is almost worth considering, depending on your needs. Photoshop users on a budget would be a prime example of those would benefit from more memory.
Kingston ValueRAM DDR2-800 or their competition in a 2x1GB kit enables maximum memory bandwidth from the dual-channel memory controller in the Ultimate Budget Box, and operation at the JEDEC-standard 1.8v helps to ensure optimal compatibility.
Cost: $33.99 [Comparison shop for this item]
As we discussed extensively in the motherboard selection, onboard video is both required to keep the price down as well as more than adequate for the Ultimate Budget Box's goals.
An upgrade to an AMD Radeon HD 4670 or nVidia Geforce 9600GSO would be a huge jump in graphics performance if your UBB needs a little 3D boost, but even the relatively modest price of one of these cards is a substantial chunk of the UBB's budget.
Cost: n/a
Onboard sound is adequate for most purposes. If you pick a motherboard like this month's recommendation, which has a digital out, and feed it to speakers that accept a digital signal, then you have even less to worry about.
Cost: n/a
The motherboard has integrated Ethernet on board, which is adequate for the Ultimate Budget Box.
Cost: n/a
Harddisks are an easy area to spend money on. Seagate's Barracuda 7200.10 250GB may actually be slightly cheaper, but the differences appear to be microscopic. If you're really on a tight budget, stepping down to a 160GB drive saves another ten or fifteen dollars.
With such a small price difference between 160GB and 320GB drives, though, we go with the 320GB Western Digital Caviar Blue (aka Caviar SE16, model WD3200AAKS), which has an efficient single-platter design, low noise, 16MB cache, and a three-year warranty.
Cost: $53.90 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
As commodity items, DVD-RW's are pretty much pick and choose for the best deal. Beige, black, or white bezels to match your case, a SATA interface, and the rest are all pretty standard for everyone. Performance differences tend to be minute.
The Pioneer DVR-216D and Samsung SH-S203N that we usually recommend tend to be a few bucks more, which is money we don't need to spend in the UBB.
The Lite-On LH-20A1S is a 20x DVD-writer, 48x CD-writer, has a 2MB cache, and a SATA interface.
Cost: $22.90 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
We don't ask too much from the case: no sharp edges, decent layout and ventilation, not too flimsy, and ideally, a decent power supply.
Finding the last is the most tricky. Per Xbitlabs's December 2007 ATX PSU roundup, the In-win units are decent. Not great, but decent. The rest of the case isn't too bad either, and unless you're willing to step up to the Antec NSK4480 or similar, well, it's hard to be too picky.
Should you feel like finding the case and power supply separately, the Seasonic SS-300ES and Sparkle ATX-300PN are two of the better values in this price range. With the power draw of a UBB being under 100W (Anandtech found less than 90W in similar systems), you really do not want to go overboard here. Case recommendations are a little more difficult; we recommend you get hands-on experience to see what's out there and try to avoid something too flimsy, sharp, loud, badly designed, or preferably, all four. Newegg and Directron are both known for ample case selections.
The In-Win Z589T (IW-Z589T.AQ350BL) is a microATX case with 2x5.25" bays, 2x3.5" bays, one internal 3.5" bay, one 92mm exhaust fan, and pretty decent quality all around. The Z-series chassis is available in a variety of bezels from In-Win if you don't care for this particular style, allowing for a bit more personality to show through the sea of anonymous black, beige, or white boxes. The In-Win Powerman IP-S350AQ2 350W power supply isn't too bad either, although like the case it comes with, it doesn't exactly stand out.
Cost: $52.13 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
A decent basic setup is the Logitech X-240 from the Budget Box, but that's probably too much speaker for the average Ultimate Budget Box. However, low-end in computer speakers tends to be uniformly pretty bad, so we simply allocate $15 to buy whatever you happen to like best due to a lack of product differentiation in this price range.
Your money may actually be better spent on a decent set of headphones, such as the Sennheiser MX560 or Sony MDR-EX51LP earbuds if you still want something vaguely resembling decent sound quality.
Cost: $15 (10/1/2008)
17" to 19" with either a 5:4, 1280x1024, or a widescreen 16:10, 1440x900 resolution, a typical 5ms (rated) response time, figure about an 800:1 contrast ratio, 300cd/m2 brightness, and typical 160/160 degree veiwing angles should describe almost every monitor in this price range, including the Acer AL1716fb.
They're not bad for the money, but they don't do too much either-- keep your expectations modest and you won't be disappointed.
If your Ultimate Budget Box is in a situation where it needs more screen real estate, or if you simply have the additional money sitting around, or best of all, if you know the additional resolution pays for itself with increased productivity, you may want to look at higher-resolution 19", 20" and 22" monitors such as the Acer AL2216Wbd 22" and Viewsonic VX1940w, both of which offer a widescreen 1680x1050 resolution.
Cost: $132.99 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Cheap and it works, that's the basic recommendation. For anything more, we strongly suggest that you buy what you like, because mouse preferences can be very specific to individual users. The Microsoft Optical Mouse 3000 is another budget favorite, while the tried and true Logitech MX518 is still one of the better high-end mouse choices.
Cost: $8.95 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Buy what feels most comfortable to you. Logitech, Microsoft, and other name-brand units are all pretty decent. Keep in mind the important nature of personal preference in this decision and the fact that your keyboard is a critical piece of your interface to your computer.
Cost: $6.90 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
The end-user/end-builder is never going to see the discount that big OEM's get on operating systems. The Ultimate Budget Box builder can get close on the hardware costs, but once the cost of the OS is factored in, it generally erases any cost advantage and makes it a worse deal.
Either you accept it and pay the premium for Windows, or you run a free operating system such as Linux. For basic word processing, internet use, even photo editing, Linux may be a workable choice for many, even moreso if you're willing to adapt to freeware such as GIMP and OpenOffice for photo editing and office duties. This has the added benefit of hammering your total software cost down to about zero.
If you prefer not to give up Windows, you can still run versions of GIMP and OpenOffice for Windows, should you prefer not to pay for Adobe Photoshop or Microsoft Office 2007. Naturally, existing power users of these applications will probably want to continue to pay for them (we do-- hey, such familiarity is hard to give up!), but they do prove that good low-cost or free alternatives do exist.
The most basic version of Vista skips out on the Aero interface, media center functionality, and some other features, but they're all unnecessary for the Ultimate Budget Box. Vista Home Basic's low cost definitely helps compared to other versions of Windows, and if you're worried about driver support, it's actually quite good.
Cost: $75 (10/1/2008) [Comparison shop for this item]
Any computer enthusiast worth his or her salt boots more than one OS. Linux is a wonderful choice for the Budget Box: powerful, cool, and cheap. Take your pick of distributions and go nuts! Fedora, Ubuntu, Debian, Slackware, and Mandrake, try Distrowatch.com, Cheapbytes.com, LinuxQuestons.org or one of the many others.
Cost: Free