A friend of mine asked me to build her a (nongaming) comp. for best price, could use some advice on parts.

[likwidsolutions]

 So I've never built a non gaming PC so I'm out of my element as far as good valued, it's with gaming and other tasks in mind, besides my Intel NUC which is mainly just for daily tasks and sometimes I'll remote desktop or steam stream to it. Considering NUCs are barebones, I'm thinking it might be cheaper to buy either a non-K SKU i3-low i5 or possibly Ryzen 3 (I really haven't looked into the performance of Ryzen 3, as I had a 1600x by time they released. So I asked her what she is using it for, and what should would be doing the most at the highest workload.

 

She asked me about it with the intent of paying me to do it, but I was just gonna charge her 40 bucks or something because if I got a case with no window, I wouldn't have to worry about making it all nice and neat inside, so long as there were sufficient airflow. Since I haven't checked Ryzen 3 performance, I figured going intel would prob be the most useful because I don't want to build it and then her have problems because of Ryzen performance and drivers, yada yada plus won't need a GPU either, cutting costs. With an intel processor, I install the drivers and she shouldn't have to worry about much else. So her tasks are basically online school work with maybe an Excel or Word document open and a browser with some tabs open. I figured I would take an extreme scenario with something like Excel, Word, Chrome (few extensions) with maybe 5 or 6 tabs. I feel like most i3 processors would do fine with this (my NUC is a Broadwell i3 and unless I open too many tabs in chrome it's usually fine....I'm def guilty of too many tabs)...however I did recommend she try Opera or Firefox if it does slow down. Then the other possibility is a Pentium. I actually still have my G3258 but no boards from a Z97 (kind of want to find a board that might still let me OC), but I never really got a chance to push the Processor, I think I mainly streamed to it and then my Z97 board crapped out and just upgraded to Skylake 6700k which I sold for my 1600x

 

So before looking at ANY pricing, I figured it would most likely be an ATX because a mATX or ITX board would just prob cost more. I figure a decent skylake or kabylake board that is non-OC but no frills or anything too fancy on it should cost way less than 100, a windowless case could be had for probably less than 50, some RAM (guessing 8GBs or 4GBx2 would be fine, but when it comes to RAM I've never felt comfortable with less than 16GB, maybe it's me...like I said I have an i3 NUC, with DDR3L Memory, and it has 16GB and sometimes can stall a bit. Sorry for being overly verbose, Any quick suggestions out there? I'm guessing plenty of you have built some cheap HTPCs (not that it is going to be as one). But most ppl who do build them tend to make em cheap because it's basically streaming for the most part. 

 

I'm already looking at stuff but if you have any thoughts or hey, if you see a combo or something let me know. BTW I live near a Micro Center which is definitely a useful source if you see something that they have for a good value. 

 

BTW not really trying to source used parts although it might be easier, prob. wouldn't be as quick plus no returns or anything. If I can get her going at 250 I think it would be fine, but that's why I'm seeking adivce. If I can do it cheaper, well I'll find out. 

[IKnight]

If it's only stuff like Google, word processing, etc.etc. 

Get something like a pentium g4560, 4/8GB ram, whichever cheap Lga1156 board is in stock, no GPU (inbuilt graphics), 300ish-w PSU.... 

If you want to splurge a bit more, get a Gtx 1050/1050ti.

[TVwazhere]

G4560, it's a kabylake pentium processor thats as good as any i3 but at a better price ($80 vs 110)

8gb ddr4 is enough for what she needs

Make sure she at least gets an SSD, it'll be alot more responsive, and Word/Excel files dont take up a crap ton of space, a 250gb SSD can be had for $80

 

Definitely look at what micro center has though, odds are they'll beat any prices you'll find on the internet

 

[INTEL_HP_2002]

6 minutes ago, likwidsolutions said:

I figured it would most likely be an ATX because a mATX or ITX board would just prob cost more. I figure a decent skylake or kabylake board that is non-OC but no frills or anything too fancy on it should cost way less than 100

I would personally suggest a basic board (H110, B250, A320, B350) which would most likely be Micro ATX (ATX Boards tend to feature higher end chipsets which sounds totally unnecessary in this situation). If you decide on Intel then I would suggest waiting for coffee lake and buy an i3 as they are quad core. 

[Patrick3D]

Intel Pentium G4560 as suggested would be the best choice for something low-cost, the integrated graphics are fine for 1080P workstation use, including watching movies and Youtube, etc... Just make sure to use an SSD for the main drive. If she doesn't have much data, going with a larger SSD would be better than the usual SSD+HDD pair most people do. Don't bother with any of AMD's old APU's, although some of them cost less they do not have anywhere near the performance of the Pentium G4560. The new APU's won't be out anytime soon.

[likwidsolutions]

Since the whole i9 stuff, I gave up trying to figure intel out since they don't seem to know what to do after Ryzen. Obviously they'll adapt but as I said, doesn't need to be high end, either way when is Coffelake due? 

[likwidsolutions]

1 minute ago, Patrick3D said:

Intel Pentium G4560 as suggested would be the best choice for something low-cost, the integrated graphics are fine for 1080P workstation use, including watching movies and Youtube, etc... Just make sure to use an SSD for the main drive. If she doesn't have much data, going with a larger SSD would be better than the usual SSD+HDD pair most people do. Don't bother with any of AMD's old APU's, although some of them cost less they do not have anywhere near the performance of the Pentium G4560. The new APU's won't be out anytime soon.

I think this sounds like a good compromise. Thing is, I have extra SSDs, and at the close Microcenter they have a bunch of clearance boards (usually older gen or returns but in tact). Heck I found a Z97 one time just recently but didn't buy it. I think an SSHD would do though, as I have a 1TB one unused. so that helps too. Thanks for all the suggestions to anyone in the topic, although keep adding advice if you want, but just thinking about it now doesn't sound as hard to keep costs down as I thought (just used to building ~1k builds give or take so I just didn't know off the cuff.

[mariushm]

For something very cheap, you could also have a look at a board with processor soldered to it.

 

Here's an example:

 

55$ ASRock QC5000M AMD FT3 Kabini A4-5000 Quad-Core APU SOC Micro ATX Motherboard/CPU Combo

ADD a 55$ stick of 8 GB DDR3 memory

ADD a 55$ 120GB sata 3 ssd drive

ADD a 37$ Seasonic 300w Bronze efficiency psu

ADD maybe a case and you're done.

 

Performance won't be i3 or even g4560 level when it comes to brute cpu power but the graphics are better than Intel's and can handle pretty much everything and it's cheap.

The raw cpu performance is somewhere around a third of what ryzen 3 1200 can do.

ps and the girl may appreciate a SILENT pc ... only psu fan would spin. Go for slightly higher end psu and you may even get a psu that will be 100% silent (fan off) at such low power consumption (< 50w for whole system)