The Budget Computer Vol 5

The light gaming/multimedia build

This is continuation of the Budget Computer Series. Check the rest of them out at:

Budget Computer Vol 1
Budget Computer Vol 2
Budget Computer Vol 3
Budget Computer Vol 4

So you want to do a little light gaming and maybe edit a few videos or pictures. In the previous scenario it was unlikely that you were going to be loading lots of things from the disk and instead a lot of what you were going to be working with was going to be in memory. Because of this the speed of the memory becomes a key point. With multimedia though chances are you are going to be loading up a bunch of files from the hard disk to manipulate. So here is how I would go about building the system.

Monitor: 21"-24" you still don't need to be worried about the refresh rate too much here and are more concerned with the ammount of desktop space available to display the things you want to manipulate.

Hard Disks: Try to get a motherboard that supports onboard raid. If you manage that make sure you get 2 hard disks and set them up in a Raid 0. This will allow you to decrease the read time from the drive substantially. Also you will want to make sure you get 7200 rpm drives or faster and preferably ones with at least an 8mb cache. Target 500gigs or more for the pair of drives.

Processor: Focus on a faster clock speed over quad cores. Preferably something 2.8ghz or more. Also try and find something with lots of cache. This will allow for less transfers between the RAM and the CPU Cache.

Ram: 3gb worth to start. Need to have plenty of room to manipulate those files once they are loaded. After you have 3gb get more speed in the ram over more ram. If you never use up all that ram having more won't give you any benefit after all.

Video Card: Most 256mb video cards will suite your purpose here. You shouldn't need to spend over 125 for the card. Remember this system is not intended to run the latest and greatest games.

As with the other build I would look for MotherBoard and CPU combos or even a barbone system to start with that meets most of these needs. It can save you a bit of money especailly when you consider barebones systems come with the case and power supply.

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