Contour Enthusiasts Group Archives Forums General Common Interests Building my first "mini-pc"

I have a CD-rom drive, I have a hard drive, all I need is... a Case with PSU, a Decent processor, and about a gig of memory, and I needed it cheap. (this is for a friend). What do you think? Should I encounter any problems? Im sure I wont I just wanted a 2nd opinion. I used to have a brother around I could get a 2nd opinion from. but not so much anymore..



The Hard Drive is a 200 GB Western Digital ATA133

XMS memory is high performance ie overclocking so I think it's a waste of money for this application. A GB of regular Corsair can be had for around $80.
Make sure the CPU is 90nm and not 130nm. The 130's are older, run hotter and are power hungry buggers.
Heat and power consumption are the two biggies you have to worry about in these mini's.

Yeah, with the newer AMD's the money spent on overclocking memory is pretty much a waste. Value Memory kicks ass.

If you can live without the small form factor case, Outpost.com usually have the Semprom 2800/3000 with full size ECS motherboard combo for $80 - $90.

I just received the Semprom 2800 + ECS MB combo and it's doing great. Straight out it's overclocked from 1.6Ghz to 2.0Ghz no sweat at stock voltage( 1.4V ) and stock heat sink. This is how it boots up, not tweaked from windows so it's robust OC.

AFAIK, the Semprom 2800 has bigger L2 cache than others, 256KB vs 128KB and it overclocks just as well. Others claim having taken this chip to high as 2.6Ghz.

I'm using an old PNY memory module with SPD of 2-3-3-7 at 200Mhz - 512MB.

This PC is my file server/video compressor/file sharer.

What do you mean by "mini?" Do you mean you want something like a Shuttle, or just a basic computer (in a mid size tower)?