Blog 3: Let’s Spend Some Money!
James P -
Hello everyone! I’m back again to build some computers. Last week, I experimented with building a PC for free, which was eye-opening to what actually goes into creating a computer but also showed me the limitations of working with free parts. So, this week I think it’s time to actually spend some money.
The plan for this week is to buy all the parts I need to start creating 2 budget PCs for the next week. For each of these computers, I want to keep the budget under $150 while also keeping a decent level of performance. To achieve this, I will be using a different method for each PC. The first one I call the “Linus Method” because I got the idea from a Linus Tech Tips video. It consists of purchasing a used workstation that a company no longer needs since they’ve upgraded their systems and adding a graphics card to the workstation in order to greatly increase its performance. The second method is the “Ebay Method” where I buy each part separately from Ebay and put the whole computer together from scratch.
Finding the right parts for both PCs took A LOT of research. I mostly used Ebay to find what I needed since the parts are typically used and cheaper while also not requiring me to pick them up most of the time. For the Linus method, I just searched up “Workstations” and filtered by free shipping and max price of $70. I paid close attention to the CPU, the brains of the computer, to find the workstation with the best CPU. Then, I searched for graphics cards, keeping track of the best ones and comparing them to any new ones I find. To compare them, I’d search up “[Graphics Card A] vs. [Graphics Card B]” to judge the performance of each one. For the Linus Method I bought a Workstations and Graphics Card. The Ebay Method was similar. I first started looking at parts that don’t affect performance too much, like the Power Supply, RAM, and storage. Then, using the same comparisons as before, I found the best CPU and graphics card for each. Interestingly, the best graphics card for both was actually the same, so I ended up buying a particular graphics card meant for rendering to compare them. Finding the parts wasn’t too difficult, the trickiest part was making sure everything was affordable and worked together since all computer parts only work with other specific parts, so I had to make sure that every component was compatible with one another while also staying affordable.
In the end, I bought the parts for two complete computers, spending a total of $291.63 on 7 items. That’s what I paid for everything but by selling some extra components that came with each of the computers (the workstation for example had a power supply I wasn’t using) allowed me to bring the cost down. The Linus PC ended up costing me $90.39 and the Ebay PC cost me $143.29. It’s important to note that these PCs were built with different performances in mind, I will delve into how the Cost/Performance ratio is for these computers in a future blog. Stay tuned for next week’s blog where I go into actually building the computers from these parts
Pictured: 218 Opened Research Tabs (Not all tabs pictured)
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