How cheap could you build a PC?

[good_man]

All the price cuts and new budget priced componants made me think...

How cheap can someone build a PC nowdays?

Nothing fancy just something that will work if you plugin the power.

 

[k-]

you can buy like a emachines or w/e with sempron and stuff inside for like 300 bucks.

 

[nav_909]

Free if you look around hard enuf

 

[Berticus]

Yeah, almost nothing. Take a look at what Best Buy has to offer, look for a cheaper price elsewhere, bring it to Best Buy, they'll match the price before the rebates. Hopefully they'll have rebates, and you can get it for free.

Although Radioshack doesn't have a lot of components (they do have some), they will also do a price match before mail in rebates. Just do whatever rebates they have afterwards.

Then you can also look for rebates from the manufacturer. A friend of mine got like 2 GB of OCZ (I believe) RAM for free because Radioshack had them, but newegg had a lower price. Radioshack matched the price matched that, and after he applied the rebates, they were literally $0 (well he paid some money for stamps and envelopes).

There's a lot of places that do the price match thing. So look around, and see what stores near you will do it. Then see if they have the components, and see who has rebates that can get you the components for almost nothing.

 

[illinikevin]

I think it would be hard to build an all new machine for under $300 or $400(not including software). At that price range your best bet is to look around for good used deals. I just sold an AMD 64 single core machine with a 6800 video card and a gig of ram for $350 because it had been sitting in my closet for 4 months. Ask around if you looking for a good cheap computer because it is better than building one and because it is the whole machine you can make them run it before you buy it.

 

[trinitron64]

Free, just drive around on garbage day.

The wireless network I have in my house was thrown out on the side of the road... a linksys wireless and some other no name broadband router... plus all the cables.

I have picked up probably 6 pc's in the last year off the side of the road. All of which had functioning hard drives (he he he, fun to checkout peoples shitty short stories and poorly cropped vacation photos :lol: ) Many pentium 3's and some celerons.

Yuppies throw out perfectly good pc's... so... get out there and start salvaging!

 

[chuckshissle]

You can have a high performance PC for cheap nowadays. You can build a high performance gaming rig for around $700. Unlike my "high performnace pc" I bought about 5 years ago (Presario 6000, anyone might remeber) that cost me $1200 to pawn and now with that same price tag you can have a pc that could outperformed it twice!

 

[tool_462]

I have literally built about five good PC's for my siblings and cousins from parts I have found working for the city I live in. I have friends on garbage pickup and I work for our engineering department but they call me when they pickup an old box and I pop the side and take whatever looks good Early last week someone brought a beat up NZXT case to the computer/monitor/battery/cell phone...etc recycling area and I popped the side...

Saw stock AMD heatsink and noticed it looked like the newer ones. It had a BFG Geforce 5950 graphics card (not the best but will use in a home PC build for a friend)

Looked like crappy ram but turned out to be Corsair ValueSelect. 2x512

Asus SK8N mobo (no big deal)

But it was what was under the heatsink that I got a kick out of...
An FX-51 processor! It's not the best by any means but it actually performs pretty well in there. I tossed in an older unlocked 6800 card I had from my old personal PC and the machine plays alot of newer games pretty well. Further testing proved that he had a bad HDD and a toasted PSU which probably happened at the same time by my guess. Had the XP key stuck to the inside bottom of the case and after an old HDD I had laying around and a PSU from another PC at the recycling center, I "built" a PC for about 10 bucks

Got a little long winded, but it's a pretty entertaining story. Those FX-51's are about as common as BigFoot sightings

 

[good_man]

Yeah, almost nothing. Take a look at what Best Buy has to offer, look for a cheaper price elsewhere, bring it to Best Buy, they'll match the price before the rebates. Hopefully they'll have rebates, and you can get it for free.

Although Radioshack doesn't have a lot of components (they do have some), they will also do a price match before mail in rebates. Just do whatever rebates they have afterwards.

Then you can also look for rebates from the manufacturer. A friend of mine got like 2 GB of OCZ (I believe) RAM for free because Radioshack had them, but newegg had a lower price. Radioshack matched the price matched that, and after he applied the rebates, they were literally $0 (well he paid some money for stamps and envelopes).

There's a lot of places that do the price match thing. So look around, and see what stores near you will do it. Then see if they have the components, and see who has rebates that can get you the components for almost nothing.

I don't quite get it , how do they make profit with these kind of rebates ? :?: :!: .

 

[4Aces]

Buy a Dell with a monitor for $350 when they have those weird sales, take it out of the box and setup to run. First thing format the drive and re install windows from a windows XP installation disk. Then you could add video and sound to your liking in step two. You'd probably end up with a 17" lcd for the monitor too with the weird deals their throughing out nowadays.

 

[Berticus]

Most people get lazy and forget/don't have the time to do the rebates. I usually do mine, but I just missed two rebates ($40). My parents came really close to missing a few of their rebates on some hardware too.

And the rebates come from different places. There's the store rebate which can either be in-store or mail-in, and there's the manufacturer's rebate, obvioulsy that's mail-in.

On top of that, most people don't do the price match thing. Vendors and manufacturers know this, and they're kind of expecting you to buy something from one place, and just stick with it. I should get my friend to talk here... He's good at getting a lot of things for free without having to do referrals or anything like that. He's gotten a few iPods, RAM, PSP, a few cell phones, just to name a few for absolutely nothing by looking in the right places.

If I were him, I'd sell the iPods and get a better DAP, and some other hardware. But then again, he could probably get those other hardware and better DAP for free too...

He's really just that good. Well... he's been doing it for a long time.

 

[MagicPants]

Here's the cheapest *new* computer I could come up with:

$38 AMD Duron 1.8

$5 Masscool Socket A cooler

$33 Foxconn 748k7aa Mobo

$19 Geforce 4000MX

$16 LG 16X DVD

$40 40 GB WD Harddrive

$10 COOLMAX ATX mid Tower Case

$10 ATADC POWERKING 400W psu

$28 Xandros Linux

$4 Keyboard - Beige

$3 Mouse - Ps/2

$80 Monitor 19" CRT


Total $206

This is assuming you shop at NewEgg (I'm too lazy to shop around for a machine I'm not actually buying) and you only buy new. The DVD was $5 more than a CD, but I figured it made it a more complete system. You could add a floppy drive and cable for about $10

 

[MagicPants]

For an extra $3 you may want to go with this PSU:

$13 HIPRO $300W PSU

 

[MagicPants]

and I totally forgot about system ram:

$23 256MB DDR400 gigaram

also Speakers:

$5 inland speakers

This brings the total up to $237

 

[mrreality13]

8O or get lucky like me,at circut city i got a acer t135, gigabyte g8-k8vm800 mb,3300 sempy,160 gig hd,only had 256meg 2700 ram(had gig of 3200 layin round as well as old 9250 agp card))dvd-cdrw was like $399.00-was open box marked down to $349.00,had a 20%off cupon from moving into new apt as well as a deal 10%off for sighing up for credit card(paid off same day) ended up $252 plus 6% tax :lol: