Building a cheap PC in 2022

[mikkh]

As before, let's forget about gaming - there are hundreds of articles/videos on the internet about building a cheap gaming PC.
Some are really good, but a lot aren't for one reason or another that I won't go into here.

In my 30+ years of building/mending PC's I've noticed people tend to hold on to IT hardware far longer than they should and seem to accept the obvious slowdown that comes with using old technology.
What amuses me, is that these same people have the latest mobile phones/TV's/tablets etc, but somehow think computers last longer!

With the industry still not fully recovered from the graphics card shortages, it's no longer possible to buy an APU (combined graphics and Processor on the same chip) at a reasonable cost nowadays.
At least from AMD anyway. Intel have regained the ground they lost in the budget end of the market and I've just found some Celeron CPU's for £50 and some upcoming Pentium Gold ones for not much more.

It is offset a little by Intel Motherboards costing £20-30 more than their AMD counterparts, but it still ends up cheaper than going the AMD route

Celeron G6900 is the CPU I've gone for. It's pretty weak in the multicore department, but single thread performance (browsing the internet etc) is up there with much more expensive CPU's and because it's based on the latest 12th generation LGA 1700 architecture, it could be swapped for a better one as prices drop - be careful though, not all Intel CPU's support on-board graphics, those with F at the end usually.
We don't want to be adding a separate graphics card to the cost, or scratching our heads as to why it's not working anymore!

I wouldn't normally advocate such a cheap CPU, but it will be good enough for some people and has the advantage of being Windows 11 compatible.

Any motherboard will do (that supports LGA 1700 of course) and I can't see anything under £70 on the usual sites I check prices on. All of them seem to support M.2 SSD's though, which will be needed to get the most out of this budget CPU.

8 GB of RAM will suffice for a general purpose PC, but make sure it's 2 x 4GB and NOT one single stick of 8 GB, or you'll lose the dual channel ability which speeds it up. (approx £50)

Add a 256 or a 500 GB M.2 SSD (£30-50) and you're almost there.
Just need a PSU (80+ bronze standard 500W should suffice) around the £50 mark - never try to save money on a PSU, you'll regret it.
Cases are a personal choice, but again don't cheap out, £20-30 cases might look the part, but they're cheap for a reason and there's very few under £50 that are actually good, unless they're on offer.


Quick tot up, that's around £300 for a general surfing/office PC.
It might be wise to hold out for the Pentium Gold G7400 though, which will be around the £80 mark when it arrives in a few weeks - a LOT more performance for an extra £30.

[mikkh]

And for those not confident enough to build one themselves and not sure how to navigate the many pitfalls of buying second hand, here's a decent buy from eBay

www.ebay.co.uk/itm/334338197489?hash=item4dd81c07f1:g:HxsAAOSwsBliE3l6


Refurbished PC with the upgraded drive to Solid State Drive - up to 10 times quicker than with a standard HDD, the system will start in seconds. Cleaned and resprayed if needed.

Processor: Intel i5 6-Core 3 GHz i5-8500

Graphics: Integrated with CPU Intel UHD 630

Storage: 480 GB Solid State Drive + 500 GB HDD

Ram: 16GB super-fast DDR4 RAM

Power Supply: 260 Watts

DVDRW, WiFi, Power cable,

Genuine Windows digitally activated

Windows 11 Home 64 bit.

A decent buy for £324 considering it comes with Windows 11 (which they're charging full retail price for) and the option to add 2 x 23" monitors and other bits to make it a full setup for £100 extra.
2 monitors is a bit of a niche setup, and you'll need a pretty big desk to accommodate it, but it does have it advantages. You can choose to use the whole panorama as one desktop or drag say the browser window and plonk it on the other monitor, while using the spare to do something else.

Pros:

It comes with an 8th generation CPU - most second hand PC's in this price range will contain anything from 1st to 4th generation (basically 5 to 11 years older)

It has a decent sized SSD as the main drive, making the mechanical extra drive basically redundant.

16 GB of RAM (I'll ignore the silly 'super fast' addition, which will be false anyway - it will the slowest DDR4 available) is over the top for a basic machine like this, but there's no such thing as too much RAM and it could be useful in certain scenarios.

Looks like it has plenty of USB 3 ports, which is handy for getting maximum speed from external devices.

Fairly compact design which can be used either horizontally (with monitor on top) or vertically like a standard PC tower.

Cons:

Weak non standard PSU that will be difficult (to source) and expensive to replace. I'm perhaps being over fussy with that, it's plenty for it's current state, but leaves no room for expansion if you decide to add a graphics card later and these were sold as office machines originally anyway.

The cheap wifi adaptor is several generations behind and will struggle if your router is far away or behind thick walls.

Intel on-board graphics, although they're not terrible for everyday use and could be boosted by allocating more of the RAM. You could afford to allocate 2 GB if the BIOS allows it.

Overall it's a solid machine though with good multi-thread and single thread performance and the ability to run Windows 11 smoothly thanks to the SSD.
I'd even consider it myself, assuming I could negotiate a fairly big reduction to supply it without Windows.

[jazzazz]

Sounds good except for one things, it has a HUGE inherent VIRUS, referred to as WINDOWS, LOL LOL :-).

At the very least, convert it to Linux :-)

[mikkh]

And for those more technically minded, there's a third way, but it takes a bit of patience and some luck too.

By scouring the auctions/auction sites you can pick up some real bargains. These are usually labelled as salvage, scrap, spare parts or just incomplete/unknown. I tend to be very wary of 'untested' though, because in my mind that invariably means have been tested and found wanting or not worth fixing. Not always obviously, but it doesn't make sense to me to not test something when it could mean the difference between a bargain £20 buy or at least £100 profit. I reckon I could test 100 or more machines in a day quite easily and find the real duds quickly. For that reason I will avoid like the plague any job lots of PC's in batches of 5-50 (or higher) that claim to be 'untested' - I just don't believe them.

I've just bought 2 such machines for a bargain £11 and perhaps been a little unlucky because I've actually had better bargains in the past with virtually full built PC's.
These two have been stripped right back to the bare bones - just the case and motherboards, but one does contain a bonus PSU too. I'm still happy because they're 2019 and 2020 models and easy to get parts for. One is an Intel (LGA 1200 10th generation) and the other AMD Ryzen compatible.

The Intel one has the PSU, so just needs RAM (already got spares) A suitable CPU (£60) and a small M.2 SSD (less than £30) to make a nice PC for a very good price. I have a few old mechanical hard drives knocking around if I wanted to go even cheaper, but it would seriously impact on performance.

There's a lot of these bargains to be had and a lot just have the hard drive removed for security reasons - ex business machines mostly. That's a good thing though, I wouldn't trust an old hard drive to be reliable, especially if it's a clunky old mechanical one. Far better to fit a new SSD and run it at a speed it's never achieved before.

Happy bargain hunting.