(Aside – I suspect there is a way to get WordPress to create a multi-part post, but I haven’t worked it out in the 20 seconds I spent looking at it – so I’m going to go with a new post manually linked to the previous one.)

A couple of weeks ago, I was lamenting the inability of my current Dell Studio 1747 laptop to drive Elder Scrolls V at more than about 3 frames per second at 2560 x 1440 resolution on my nice new 27″ monitor (purchased for working at home, of course) and so started researching what it would take to put together a new gaming rig for myself.

I spent a good few hours looking at CPUs, solid-state-drives, power supplies, motherboards etc. looking for the right sweetspot of price per performance, and quietness.  The reviews at anandtech are awesome, as is Tom’s Hardware when their ad-serving links aren’t causing the site to slow to a crawl.

As I was going through this process, I found the search engine at MegaBuy easy to use, and their prices seemed very competitive. So, once I had my list of bits, I priced everything on megabuy.com.au. But when I put it all together in my shopping cart, and went to check-out, I discovered that MegaBuy’s shipping model seems to be to drop-ship everything from suppliers, and charge an additional delivery fee every time a new supplier is added. By the time I had about $150 in shipping fees, and 4 separate shipments, I was feeling a little insulted.

After a bit of googling, I discovered mWave, and noticed that not only was it’s shipping pricing more reasonable, but that many components were actually cheaper, too. mWave strongly recommends shipping to a work address, and I had to head off on an overseas business trip, so I put the plans for the new gaming PC on hold. While away my plans morphed into building a computer for my son instead.

In the interests of full disclosure, I should probably point out at this point that I’ve never actually built a complete PC from scratch before. I’ve done plenty of cannibalizing, power supply replacements, graphics card and memory-stick insertions etc. but I’ve never actually got an empty case, motherboard, and all the other bits and pieces and put them all together. Not only that, but I hadn’t actually been too bothered with the internals of a PC since the mid-2000s, when I decided that laptops were the way to go for the foreseeable future – so was totally out of date with the latest CPUs etc until I started my latest research.

But undaunted, on my return I switched the focus of my research to a cheap and cheerful but somewhat future-proofed desktop machine, that wouldn’t be too complicated to put together.

The decisions I made were:

• To use a micro-ATX motherboard and corresponding slimline case. I could just picture my wife’s reaction if a full-size ATX desktop tower showed up in my son’s room, but wasn’t confident in being able to fit everything necessary into anything smaller than micro-ATX at the target price-point.
• An on-board graphics card would do just fine. I’d heard good things about Intel HD Graphics – good enough for my son’s educational and non-cutting-edge-game-playing purposes anyway.
• Choose a decent CPU for under $60. cpubenchmark makes it so easy to compare CPUs by simplifying it  down to a couple of easy charts . I don’t know about you, but $60 seems insanely cheap to me for a CPU that has performance equivalent to a cutting edge processor from only a few short years ago – and definitely appeard to be around the sweetspot for price performance at the lower end of the price-range.
• Go with a case that has power supply included. Let’s face it, this machine isn’t going to be sucking a lot of power – and it seems like you can save a few bucks by getting the case and power supply together.
• 4GB RAM is plenty – but I decided to go with a single stick so I can add more if need be – it looks like it will be cheaper to get one stick than two anyway!
• Be careful to get the right motherboard video outputs – I have an existing monitor with HDMI inputs but no DVI that I want to reuse for 1920 x 1080 viewing – so decided to get a motherboard with an HDMI connection
• Wireless networking was more important than wired – My house isn’t cabled with CAT5, so figured I wouldn’t need Gigabit Ethernet – only a wireless card. I also didn’t want a USB dongle sticking out that could get knocked by my son or one of his friends when messing around in his room.
• Might as well go wireless keyboard and mouse – less to get pulled yanked and potentially destroy the connectors on the PC

So, here are the parts I ordered today:

From MegaBuy

• Aywun DM529 Micro-ATX Slim Desktop Case, Black, 300W TFX PSU with 1 x 5.25″ external and 2 x 3.5 drive bays (1 internal, 1 external), and four slimline expansion slots – $58.91
• ASRock H61M-HVS B3 microATX motherboard, with Intel H61 Express chipset, 2 DDR3 memory slots at up to 1333 GHz max 16GB, HDMI and D-Sub video connectors, 1 PCI-e 16 and 1 PCI-e 2.0 slots, 4 x 3.0 GB/s SATA ports, 6 USB 2.0 ports, 5.1 channel Audio, and 100MB LAN – $51.38
• Genius Slim 2.4GHz Wireless Keyboard Combo – $25.08
• TP-Link Low profile bracket for WN781ND – $3.96 (so can fit the wireless card below into the low profile slot of the Aywun case – was not in stock at mWave)
• Shipping (including insurance) and credit card handling fees – $32.16
• Total: $171.49

From mWave

• Intel Pentium G630 Dual Core Processor 2.7GHz Retail Box – $69
• Corsair 4GB Single Module Memory DDR3 1333MHz – $26
• Seagate Barracuda 7200rpm 500GB HDD – $72
• TP-Link 150MBps Wirless Lite N PCI Express Adapter – $16
• Samsung SH-222BB/BEBS Internal 22x DVD Burner – $19.99
• Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 64-Bit DVD – $99.99
• Shipping (including insurance) and credit card handling fees – $12.89
• Total: $315.87

So, in theory, if all these pieces fit together how I hope they will this is a pretty decent slimline Windows 7 PC (including keyboard and mouse) for under A$500.

Next time: Receiving the orders.