Cheep, cool running specs?

[nko]

If I wanted to buid a PC for under $250, what parts would I use? My requirements:

Cool CPU

Quiet fan

8 GB / HD space

Sound, AGP video

*Hopefully* including a monitor, but not necessary

Small form factor

Low power consumption


I'm thinking a Crusoe CPU, but I haven't heard THAT much about them. How is their performance? Performance is definitely not at a premium, but faster is nicer. I guess I could bump the price, but the main hope here is for a cheap, slower, quieter, cooler, low-power-eating PC. Are Crusoes even available for indiviual sale to normal people?

[Choozo]

For something really quiet and a very small footprint, have a look at what they have over at Mini-ITX (http://www.mini-itx.com/store/).

As for the Crusoe chip, I was under the impression that this was made specifically for notebooks and/or tablet PCs, but I may be wrong :)

Cheers :)

[RWiggum]

For a CPU you might want to look into a VIA C3. They're cheap and run cool, but are fairly low-powered. I've seen them in bargain internet-terminal PCs. Not suitable for current gaming, but would be fine for an email/web/mp3 machine.

For fans, I like Thermaltake's A1357 "Smart Case Fan II". It's 80mm, so if you have a big HS (I use an Alpha Pal 8045) you can also use it on your CPU. What I like about them is that they're speed or temperature controllable. Note that an Alpha 8045 ($45 without fan) would be gross overkill on a VIA C3. In general, Thermaltake makes good quality cooling equipment, though.

For mobo, you could look into an nVidia NForce2. They've got just about everything embedded on the mobo - AGP, sound, maybe ethernet. I've heard they aren't well supported under Linux yet, though. I've always liked Asus mobos - very good quality.

You'll have a hard time finding a hdd that small. New ones tend to be in the 40 - 120 range, with not much range in price. It's usually not worth spending $90 on a 40GB when you can double your storage for $20 more. You might be able to find unused old stock (also known as "NOS" - new old stock) on eBay, though.

[RWiggum]

Update - I did a little browsing at newegg.com. Apparently the VIA C3's are only usable with VIA mobos, which just happen to be mini-ITX form factor as recommended by Choozo. The CPUs are embedded on the mobo, but the mobos are cheap ($120) and come with just about everything on them - sound, video, ethernet, etc. Just add a case, hdd, memory, and cd/dvd and you're done.

[nko]

Hmm... so say I did this:

HDD = $100
CPU + mobo = $120
RAM = $~50

Then just use my current computer's CD-ROM to install an OS, and if I wanna use a printer, CD / DVD, or anything else, I could just do it over the network. Build my own case (always wanted to) to house any number of these things, and I'd be in business!I could set up a box with, say, 4 of these things, and use them as servers. As soon as I get the money, I'm gonna do this!

Plus some money for cooling, cords, etc. Maybe a monitor, and a switch board.

[RWiggum]

I looked a little further on newegg (you've actually gotten me interested in these mini-ITX systems) and found 20-40GB drives in the $55 range. I'd go with a 5400 rpm drive for lower noise, too. The build-your-own case idea is interesting. Are you thinking plexiglas, maybe? That could be neat. Newegg had mini-ITX cases (w/ PSU) for about $60. A full system would run:

CPU+MB - $120
Case/PSU - $60
HDD - $55
CDRW - $45
256MB Memory - $38 (Crucial)

For a total of $318. Not too bad. Like you said, you wouldn't have to install a CD, and you could drop to 128MB of RAM for $23, for a total of $258. Without a case, you'd pay $198 + materials for the case.

I've gotten interested in low-cost, low-heat, low-noise "media PCs" that just do the basic computing needs. This looks like a nice solution. I looked up the VIA C3 on Tom's Hardware. They only put out 12W of heat, compared to 70W for a 2GHz Athlon! Of course, they are on par with a 700MHz Celeron, but that's all you need for word processing/email/playing MP3's, right?

[nko]

I've been interested in building a little machine like this for a while now, but only recently started generating income (got me a job!). I've got a P-II 266 that's plenty fast for most applications. A celeron-700-alike would be awesome. There's just too little demand for mega-powerful PC's these days. I think this sort of thing will grow more popular in the near future. If I could get a little desktop comptuter like this that ran cool and quiet, it'd totally replace my loud, hot machine I've got now.

And yeah, I was thinkin' plexiglass :). That, or maybe mount it higher up on a wall, nice and secure, but totally open. It'd look cool, but even high up and well secured, I dunno if I'd trust it there. Maybe with a little chicken wire or something :D

Hey.... for all that it matters, could I network boot such a computer?

And for that matter, how easy / hard is it to make dumb terminals run on x86 hardware, old UNIX style?

[RWiggum]

About the only thing I'd be careful with a plexiglass case is grounding. I've seen people run a mobo with it just sitting on its shipping box, but I always thought all of the metal mounting screws helped to ground it to the case. Might be worth a little research.

I haven't messed with networks much, so can't help you on your network boot question. Old Sun Sparcstations with no CD-ROMs or HDDs scare me a little bit. I'm so brainwashed by Intel hardware that headless/diskless systems baffle me to a degree. I know it's possible, it just seems a little weird to me to boot a machine across a network.

You might also want to check out this article (http://www6.tomshardware.com/cpu/20020605/index.html) at Tom's Hardware Guide. They fully benchmark the C3. Some tasks it does reasonably well. Others, it's not suited for - in particular MP3 encoding. It was about 3 times slower than a Celeron 667MHz doing MP3 and MPEG-4 encoding. Its SiSoft Sandra scores were pretty lousy, too. In their conclusion they say, "depending on the particular benchmark, an old Celeron 667 is either considerably faster or considerably slower." Just be aware of what you're getting - it's not going to be very high performance, merely adequate. Should be a step up from a PII-266 in just about every task, though.

[nko]

Just the kind of article I've been looking for! Good point about the metal, too. Maybe I'll strip some of the casing from an old computer.

A C3 would definitely provide plenty of performance, as long as I stay away from multimedia, which I do anyhow.