New desktop for the house
Jo’s been inquiring about a new system since quite some time - her current laptop is in a state of broken mess(half the keys don’t work/battery ded etc) and she’d require me to give up my desktop if she needed to work on something for a bit. She does read quite a bit, but that’s something she’s sorted using the Kindle PaperWhite and her Nexus 5X.
Past Friday, she gave me a reminder about having it would be nice and me being a bit free, decided to come up with a new build. Mandatory things were:
- semi decent processor
- 8GB RAM (she’s a webdev, browsers are memory hogs)
- Budget cap of ₹30,000
That’s about it. I started with a base 6th gen Skylake based i3-6100 as my system build. Since I wasn’t sure about the pricing, these are what I came up with:
- Processor: i3-6100 ~ ₹9,300
- Motherboard: MSI H110M PRO ~ ₹4,700
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR4 ~ ₹2,610
- HDD: WD Blue 7200rpm 1TB ~ ₹3650
- Cabinet: Generic thing around ~ ₹2000
- CM VS 450 ~ ₹2600
- Mouse: Logitech M100 ~ ₹300
- Monitor: Dell 18.5″ E1916HV ~ ₹6000
Total come down to ~ ₹31,160 which isn’t too bad.
I also prepared an AMD build on a _just in case need - _
- Processor: AMD A6 6400K ~ ₹4,300
- Motherboard: Asus A68HM-K ~ ₹4,000
- RAM: Corsair Vengeance 8GB DDR3 ~ ₹2,850
- HDD: WD Blue 7200rpm 1TB ~ ₹3650
- Cabinet: Generic thing around ~ ₹2000
- CM VS 450 ~ ₹2600
- Mouse: Logitech M100 ~ ₹300
- Monitor: Dell 18.5″ E1916HV ~ ₹6000
Total come down to ~ ₹25,700 which is significantly lesser than the i3 build, but benchmarks showed that the AMD processor was about half as slow the i3 one.
I ran it by Ankit Infotech on SP Road and told him my mandatory requirements - and what the guys there suggested was pretty close to what I had planned for. These were the final acquired components:
- Processor: i3-6100 ~ ₹8,750
- Motherboard: MSI H110M PRO ~ ₹4,850
- RAM: Kingston HyperX 8GB DDR4 ~ ₹2,500
- HDD: Seagate Barracuda 1TB ~ ₹3,535
- Cabinet: Intex ~ ₹1,600
- PSU: - skipped, used the one which comes with cabinet.
- Mouse: Logitech M100 ~ ₹250
- Monitor: Dell 18.5″ E1916HV ~ ₹5,150
All in all, including 5.5% tax it came to ~ ₹28,100 - that’s pretty neat savings as compared to the online prices. Carrying these back however would be a pain - especially with the plastic ban in Karnataka and SP Road being… not very broad. I asked them if they would home deliver the components(intention being I wanted to assemble them myself and I didn’t get my car - lord knows where you can park there), those folks suggested they’d assemble the system themselves and we can just carry the cabinet and monitor and head off. Decided that would be a better idea and did that.
The system was surprisingly light - no thanks to the cabinet which is basically a paperthin tin can and with inbuilt SMPS, no GPU - takes off quite a lot of the bulk. In fact the monitor was much heavier as compared to the cabinet.
Some pics and a video of the basic components being put in place
