Picking the processor is perhaps the toughest part because not only is it easy to overspend and blow the budget right from the start, if you underspend you’ll end up with a poor system. As a general rule of thumb, I tend to look at CPUs that are in the $100 to $125 price range as the best bet.

For this build I’ve gone with an AMD piece, the Phenom II X3 720. This is a 2.8GHz, triple-core, Socket AM3 part. It’s also a “Black” edition part which means you have greater headroom for overclocking, if that sort of thing floats your boat.

Note: If you’d rather have a slightly slower quad-core part, then you can pick up the Athlon II X4 620 for around $99. At 2.66GHz it’s slightly slower than the X3 720 but if you run software that works multiple cores (video editing for example), it’s a good buy.

Price: $125

Motherboard

Now we’ve narrowed down the CPU we want, we can go looking for a compatible motherboard. Again, it’s easy to overspend on motherboards so the idea is to pick up a decent board at a sensible price.

I’ve chosen the Foxconn A7DA-S 3.0 AM3 790GX board. This is a great board without being overkill. It features the AMD 790GX chipset, 8GB of DDR3, 2x PCIe slots, decent sound, and HDMI.

Price: $105 Read more...