Updated 23 May, 2012, 6:39 pm IST

A Budget PC under Rs 20,000

25 Nov, 2006, 5:05 pm IST | by Gaurav Seth

In this guide, we help you build a definitive budget PC and assure you a well-built machine.

With computer components becoming increasingly powerful over the years, you can now have a powerful, good looking and feature rich desktop PC for as less as twenty thousand rupees. That’s exactly what we are going to do in the following article. We will be building a fully functional system that easily complies to our regular computing needs like web surfing, office applications and entertainment in the form of movies and music and can also handle multi tasking to a degree. So lets dig in to see the components we chose and why we chose them.

Processor: AMD Sempron 64 2800+ (Rs. 2,100)

At Rs. 2100, there is nothing that can touch the Sempron 2800+. With a very small difference in performance between its Intel counterpart—the 2.66 GHz LGA 775 Celeron costing around Rs. 2800, the Sempron becomes an obvious choice. You may argue as to why we didn’t go for the AMD 3000+ (socket 939) costing slightly more at Rs. 3100. The justification to that is we are not focusing on hardcore gaming. So, rather than spending Rs. 1100 for a little more horse power, we utilized it for getting us a 2.1 channel speaker set, the Creative SBS 370. For the technically inclined, the Sempron 64 2800+ is a 64 bit single core processor running at 1.6 GHz with 256 KB of L2 cache. It is a socket 754 processor with its successors being socket 939 and the latest, socket AM2.

Motherboard: Asus K8V-VM Ultra (Rs. 2,550)

Asus boards are synonymous with good features and rock solid stability and the K8V-VM Ultra is no different. It’s a decent micro-ATX board based on the VIA chipset. Even though the machine is not oriented towards high resolution gaming, by adding a budget graphic card like Nvidia’s 7300GS (Rs 3500) you can still enjoy recent games at normal resolutions (like 1024 x 768 ) and just for that, the motherboard features a 16X PCI Express slot. That for a budget board is remarkable. It offers 4 USB ports at the back on the I/O panel plus additional four through the USB connector on the motherboard (they would be used to power the USB ports on the front panel of your case. For more on the specifications check it out on the Asus website here.

RAM: Hynix 512 MB PC3200 DDR 400 (Rs. 2,550)

As mentioned in our earlier feature, 'Laptops under Rs. 40,000', we once again recommend nothing short of 512 MB—for use with Windows XP. Most of us who go for budget systems make the mistake of opting for 256MB of RAM. The anti-virus itself along with a few other programs running, like the Yahoo and MSN messenger, take up more than 256MB of RAM. This forces the system to turn to the swap files on the hard drive, slowing the system.