Building a monster personal computer

Just a few days back I wrote “Purchasing a personal computer in the new millennium” which is how to get the absolute best computer by paying with a bit of elbow grease.

If not elbow grease then perhaps a small fee to your local microelectronics store is the key to success.

The resulting 8 core computer that was built in that previous article cost only $741.40 which is probably cheaper than some of the pre-built quad-core computers available.

While fooling around, I was wondering what kind of crazy big computer you could build on a limited budget. I didn’t do a proper job but I did replace the two key components, the motherboard and the CPU.

Description Price
MSI G210 1GB D3 PCIE DVH (graphic card) 31.99
EVGAMEM 16GB 8X2 D3 2133 DIMM C11 (ram) 84.99
MS OEM WIN7 PRO 64BIT SP1 OEM (operating system) 139.99
INLANDPRO ILSILVER 400 WATT ATX PSU (power supply) 24.99
Supermicro H8SGL-F (motherboard) 312.00
WD 1TB 3.5 MAINSTRM BLUE HD (hard disk) 39.99
AMD Opteron 6370P, 16x 2.00GHz, Socket G34, boxed (cpu) 771.00
IPSG LG 24X DVD BURNER (dvd drive) 14.99
CORSAIR CARBIDE 100R SILENT ATX (pc case) 57.99
Subtotal 1477.93
Build fee 130.00
Total 1607.93

It is actually a pretty amazing computer, even if it won’t help for most common situations.  Most software cannot take advantage of a 16 core computer, although I would suspect that photoshop and perhaps a few other graphics rendering software packages might.

This motherboard can support up to 128 gigabytes of memory, it would be a great computer for running quite a few virtual machines simultaneously or some sort of as a application server.

This entry was posted in Setup From Scratch, Soapbox and tagged , , . Bookmark the permalink.

One Response to Building a monster personal computer

  1. Pingback: getting the most out of your computer – threading | Paranoid Professor

Comments are closed.