Holiday Budget System Buyers' Guide
by Zach Throckmorton on November 8, 2011 12:00 AM ESTRecommended Budget Systems
Note the below prices include neither taxes nor shipping as those vary based on the buyer's specific location. The RAM, hard drive, optical drive, power supply, and case recommendations are all, of course, interchangeable between the AMD and Intel-based systems, so mixing and matching those components is unproblematic.
Budget AMD Athlon II X2 system
As noted on previous pages, the AMD motherboards are largely interchangeable and the inclusion of the ASRock board in this list is largely subjective. In this case, it is my opinion that the ASRock board's richer feature set outweighs its shorter warranty.
| Component | Product | Price |
| CPU | AMD Athlon II X2 250 (dual-core 3.0GHz) | $60 |
| Motherboard | ASRock 880GM-LE (HD 4250 IGP) | $55 |
| RAM | GSkill 4GB DDR3-1333 kit | $26 |
| Hard drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB | $70 |
| Optical drive | Lite-on iHAS124-04 | $18 |
| Power supply | Antec Earthwatts 380W | $40 |
| Case | BitFenix Merc Alpha | $39 |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $100 |
| Total: | $408 |
Budget AMD A4-3300 system
It's important to remember that the A4-3300 uses socket FM1 motherboards, so you cannot swap only the processor between these two AMD builds. You must change both the chip and the board. Given the benchmark results on the second page, the Athlon II X2 250 system above is a better general, basic usage computer—if you are not interested in gaming. However, if you are interested in playing less system-demanding titles at lower resolutions, as well as general computing, the following A4-3300 system will let you game on a budget. For anything more demanding, we'd recommend either upgrading to a quad-core Llano APU (with its faster GPU), or add a budget GPU to one of the other two builds. The Llano system also uses less power than the Athlon build, though the Celeron still wins as the low-power champ of this trio.
| Component | Product | Price |
| APU | AMD A4-3300 (dual-core 2.5GHz, HD 6410) | $70 |
| Motherboard | ASRock A55M-HVS | $59 |
| RAM | Mushkin 4GB DDR3-1333 kit | $26 |
| Hard drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB | $70 |
| Optical drive | Lite-on iHAS124-04 | $18 |
| Power supply | Antec Earthwatts 380W | $40 |
| Case | Fractal Design Core 1000 | $40 |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $100 |
| Total: | $420 |
Budget Intel Celeron system
Similar to the AMD system, the budget Intel boards are also interchangeable, and in this case I include the Biostar motherboard largely because it offers a DVI port and legacy PCI slots (whereas the ASRock and MSI boards do not).
| Component | Product | Price | Rebate |
| CPU | Intel Celeron G530 (dual-core 2.4GHz, Intel HD Graphics) | $57 | |
| Motherboard | Biostar H61ML | $60 | |
| RAM | Mushkin 4GB DDR3-1333 kit | $26 | |
| Hard drive | Seagate Barracuda 7200.12 500GB | $70 | |
| Optical drive | Lite-on iHAS124-04 | $18 | |
| Power supply | Corsair CX430 V2 | $45 | -$10 |
| Case | Fractal Design Core 1000 | $40 | |
| Operating system | Windows 7 Home Premium 64-bit | $100 | |
| Total: | $416 | -$10 |
Suggested upgrades
Neither the Celeron nor Athlon II X2 systems as configured will work as a gaming computer. Adding a Radeon HD 5670 will bump both systems near $500, or a more capable Radeon HD 6770 will push them over $500. Including an SSD will not significantly change the overall cost of the system given current HDD pricing; it's worth considering ditching the mechanical hard drive altogether if you don't need much storage space given the relatively high cost of platter-based drives right now. (Note that you'll still want a larger capacity drive if you plan on storing any video or lots of pictures, and if you want to install more than a couple modern games.) As discussed earlier, the Llano platform with an A4 chip isn't going to impress in terms of benchmarks; upgrading to a faster A6 or A8 chip would help, but that will also increase the price quite a bit. If you're interested in going that route, we'd also suggest looking at motherboards with the A75 chipset, which adds native USB 3.0 and SATA 6Gbps support.
Closing Thoughts
If it weren't for the anomalously high prices of hard drives at the moment, budget systems built around AMD and Intel CPUs would be well under $400—OS included. That's about 10% less than the budget systems we outlined back in February of this year. While the AMD AM3 system hasn't changed all that much, on the Intel side, you're getting a substantially more powerful computer today than earlier this year, and one with much better upgradeability to boot. AMD's Llano platform is a bit of an odd man out at this price, as the dual-core Llano fails to really impress given the cut-down GPU, but about $20 more will net you a modest gaming system if you're willing to go that route.
Once more, it's important to note that the upcoming holiday season will present lots of great deals for budget-conscious builders. The Hot Deals section of AnandTech's forums is a great place to find and share the latest low prices on components. Further, the General Hardware section of the forums is a great place to ask for and share advice with fellow computer enthusiasts.
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buildingblock - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
I don't see how the X4 2.6Ghz 631 can ever even begin to be a winner against the Intel opposition. It is no more than an A6 3650 with the graphics unit disabled. My local hardware dealer is listing it at around 10% more than the Intel 2.8Ghz G840, which easily out-performs it and has a GPU. The budget end of the market is dominated by cheap Intel H61 motherboards and the 1155 socket Pentium G series, and the X4 631 brings nothing whatsoever to the table that's going to change that.Taft12 - Wednesday, November 9, 2011 - link
What analysis do you need to see? It is an A6-3650 with the graphics lopped off. If you want to know how it would do in CPU benchmarks, just look at a A6-3650 review.Despite the GPU sacrifice, you get no TDP savings. It's a piece of shit through and through not worthy of discussion.
mhahnheuser - Friday, November 11, 2011 - link
...you are spot on. But I can tell you why. Because if he ran the right discrete card in the Llano it would crossfire with it and then there would be absolutely no point to the comparison.mhahnheuser - Friday, November 11, 2011 - link
...so the conclusion should have been....don't buy the Celeron over Llano unless you add a fast discrete DX compatible gpu. He only tested the X2 so that he could validate the comparision to Llano by building a higher performing, higher cost Celeron system. The X2 is a old Gen processor whereas the Celeron tested is in Intel's SB family...how is that a basis for fair comparison?mhahnheuser - Friday, November 11, 2011 - link
Good observation. I second your opinion.Wierdo - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Maybe I'm missing something, but how come the performance difference between the X2 3.0Ghz and A4 2.5Ghz is so big?They're pretty much the same core give or take a few tweaks and an added GPU block, right? I don't understand how a 500mhz drop can lead to 30->19 sec in PPT to PDT conversion for example.
What am I overlooking here?
slayernine - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
The A4 is a different processor, it is not from the same line as the X2 and thus performs quite differently. Also 500mhz can make a huge difference in single threaded applications. For example if you tried to play back a 1080p video without GPU acceleration (relying entirely on the CPU) the A4 would stutter at 2.5GHz but the X2 should be ok at 3GHz. However in reality the A4 is a much more well rounded processor that allows light graphical capabilities for gaming and video performance.Also some might point out that a significant portion of the A4 chip is dedicated to Radeon cores thus limiting the ability of the CPU portion through purpose build design.
Taft12 - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Wow, this is really coming out of your ass.The CPU part of Llano *IS* derived from good ol' K10 - Llano is/was referred to as K10.5
It DOESN'T perform "quite differently", Anand found in the A8-3850 review that its performance was quite close to the Athlon II X4:
<i>Although AMD has tweaked the A8's cores, the 2.9GHz 3850 performs a lot like a 3.1GHz Athlon II X4. You are getting more performance at a lower clock frequency, but not a lot more.</i>
slayernine - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
It offers different features thus is quite different type of processor. One of those differences is the amount of CPU die dedicated to actual CPU functionality. I didn't say the CPU is portion is built differently. I am fully aware it is based on the same architecture. Perhaps I confused you in my choice of words.FYI Taft12 we are talking about the X2 3.0Ghz VS A4 not Athlon II X4 vs A8. The reason this matters is that the X2 3.0Ghz offers better CPU performance A4.
Summary: Clock for clock the X2 isn't much different from the A4 but the A4 is a lower clock speed and thus slower at CPU intensive tasks because half the the damn thing is a GPU! APU's at the same price point will generally be slower than the competing CPU. So perhaps the simple answer to Wierdo's question is simply: "Clock speed matters."
Wierdo - Tuesday, November 8, 2011 - link
Hmm...I don't see how 500mhz difference causes super-linear scaling in performance, 2.5/3ghz is less than a %20 difference, it shouldn't be more than %20 performance difference one would think - with the cores being from the same family (K10) for both products I'm missing where the balance can affect non-multimedia workloads.It's quite interesting from an academic perspective, If it was primarily limited to graphics type workloads I could understand, but I don't see it for stuff like PPT->PDF conversions for example.