Build a quad-core Intel PC for under $500
Money might be tight these days, but you can still put together a quad-core Intel system for under $500. Darren Yates explains how.
Give anyone a budget of $2,000 and they’d have no trouble building a high-speed PC that covers most needs. But on a budget of just $500? It sounds impossible, but with some careful design choices, you can still build a quick quad-core Intel PC with 240GB solid state drive that, all up, might not be Formula One-fast, but still packs ‘hot hatch’ zip.
DON’T SKIMP ON CPU
In days of old, a CPU upgrade path was an important consideration in a PC build — you’d research the upgrade path and time your jump to maximise the upgrade options. Now, you just buy as much CPU as your budget allows and choose a motherboard to suit, knowing your next upgrade will likely require a new motherboard anyway. However, with only $500 to buy a whole system, not just a CPU and motherboard, we won’t be buying straight from the top drawer. Nevertheless, thanks to Intel’s excellent Core i3-8100 CPU, we can still have four-core performance for about $160 and not surprisingly, we’re making this chip the centrepiece of our new build.
But with a third of the budget gone in one hit, we’ve a tonne of work to do — we still need motherboard, RAM, case, power supply unit (PSU) and storage, all for under $340. For motherboard, Gigabyte’s H310M-H microATX board gives us everything we need. Sure, Intel’s H310 Express chipset has no RAID and only singlecard gaming prospects, not to mention the board having just dual DDR4 memory slots, but it still covers all the basics – USB 2.0/3.1 (Gen.1) ports, Gigabit Ethernet, audio, HDMI and VGA ports. At around $95, it works for us — but half the budget is now done and dusted.
One area we have to compromise on is RAM. Looking at the market, you can pick up 4GB of DDR2400 RAM for roughly $65 or 8GB for $115, yet on a $500 budget, we have no choice but to go with 4GB. Still, save up your pocket money and an extra 4GB stick later should work a treat. It’s also why you buy CPU power now — you want to avoid upgrades that require component-replacement.
STORAGE
The recent arrival of new budget TLC (triple-level cell) NAND solid-state drives (SSDs) has really crunched
prices. Kingston’s SSDNow A400 series has received pretty fair reviews and although the read/write speeds aren’t life-changing, it has the cheapest 240GB SSD on the market locally, selling for around $75. Unfortunately, we can’t afford a hard disk drive here, but again, the H310M-H’s four SATA 6Gbps ports ensure adding one later is a no-brainer.
CASE AND PSU
However, we’re now left with just $100 to find a case and PSU. You have two options at this point — you either hunt down your own individual case and PSU selections, or, you look for a budget case/no-name PSU bundle. Bundles start from under $50 and while they are tempting, we’d suggest giving many of them a miss — few of these PSUs will have warranties beyond 12 months. Still, if you must go down this road, our tips will ensure your build’s power requirements don’t exceed 40% of the total PSU power output, and make sure to upgrade the PSU as soon as you can. PSUs are built with electronic components of a certain rating — the further you stay under these ratings, the more reliable they’re likely to be. So for a no-name 500-watt PSU, stay under 40% of total output, or 200 watts.
More broadly, there are two factors affecting PSU quality and price — the PSU circuit design and the quality of internal components. A new design with high-quality components is clearly the ‘holy grail’, but even an older design with high-quality components is usually a solid result. Unfortunately, it’s the more cost-restricted designs with lower-quality components found in some budget PSUs that can be more the worry.
Given a case still has to come out of the remaining $100, it made choosing the PSU our most difficult pick, with top-tier makers like Seasonic or Super Flower well off the menu. In the end, we opted for CoolerMaster’s recent 500-watt MWE500 for a bunch of important reasons, aside from its $55 price tag. First, it has Active PowerFactor Correction (Active PFC) so it’ll be a bit cheaper to run. Second, it’s one of the few 80 Plus-rated PSUs you’ll see this side of $60, so it’s more energy efficient. Third, it comes with a three-year warranty, and fourth, it supports Intel’s ‘Haswell’-class C6/C7 low-power states. However, key for me is that it’s rated to operate at up to 40°C ambient temperature — many other budget PSUs are rated to only 30°C or even 25°C, which means reducing your power demands or setting up a cool-room to run your system.
CASE
Now with just $50 left in the kitty, there’s little room for case luxuries. However, you’ll find a number of cases around this price point. Cougar’s MG110 microATX case will be a tight squeeze but still allows for a full 350mm-length graphics card at some point, so too Fractal Design’s Core 1000, both selling for $49. DeepCool’s roomy Tesseract mid-tower is another $49 model with two blue LED-lit fans and dust-filtering, but only handles graphics cards to 310mm. You choose.
COMPROMISES
Yep, there’s no doubt we’ve made compromises — but you still get a quad-core Intel-powered PC with 240GB SSD that covers all the basics and has plenty of upgrade potential. We wouldn’t call it a ‘renovator’s delight’, but you’ve got options particularly for storage, RAM and PSU (and yes, even CPU, for the moment, if you must). Intel’s Core i3-8100 CPU has a thermal design power (TDP) rating of only 65 watts, and given the only other component of note in this build is the Kingston A400 SSD, few PSUs would be troubled by this load. That said, a Seasonic PSU, an extra 4GB of RAM and a 1TB WD Blue hard drive would round out this build nicely later on.
So, yes, you can build a quad-core Intel box for under $500 — just.