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.
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