Tom's Intl. $750 Cheap Computing Challenge

Introduction

Many computer enthusiasts have the funds to build cutting-edge machines, but the majority are probably faced with the same financial pressure being exerted worldwide right now. Naturally, picking PC components that offer the best price to performance ratio is a smart play. As evidenced by all of the “green” and “energy-saving” marketing going on, an increasing number of power users are setting aside their need for speed in favor of protecting their pocketbooks.

Thus, we were presented with a challenge to start off 2009: build a desktop PC for less than $750. Achieve the best performance possible while using the least amount of power, yielding optimized performance per watt. The challenge was not only to the US team, but also to the Tom's Hardware Germany, France, and Italy, making this a bit of a competition.

With each of the three criteria weighted equally, winning wasn't going to be an easy task, though. Finding the best blend of speed and power consumption would mean any component chosen must not increase energy usage at a higher ratio than it increases performance.

Keeping this goal in mind, we set out to gather the best components for this challenge.  We felt the key to success would be striving for performance, but avoiding quad-core CPU’s and dual-GPU graphics cards, suspecting that neither would shine consistently enough to justify the added power consumption. Let’s take a look our selected components, and then we’ll follow up with a closer look why each was chosen.