I want to build the ABSOLUTE cheapest box I can...I've been looking through Newegg and trying to match the parts with each other, but I'm not sure how it goes. The hardware also has to be supported by Linux of course, but I think Linux has most of it covered. Can anyone help me try to build the cheapest system possible? My only wish are these minimums: >1.5 gHz CPU and >512MB RAM. Thank you.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...2E16813185057R
with
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16819104249
and
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produc...82E16820609047

That's 512Mb RAM, 1.6 GHz processor, and a mobo with onboard video and audio. You can get a $5 PSU from your local flea-market computer shop, and if budgets a real issue, I've seen people get creative making their cases. Note that the mobo is micro-atx, so you'll save on materials building the case there.

Start with the mobo. The CPU you buy must fit the socket of the mobo. Similarly, you want the front-side bus ("FSB") speed of the CPU to match the mobo. Same deal with RAM - you want the RAM speed to match what RAM speed the mobo can support. As long as the mobo, CPU, and RAM are all compatible, it then generally boils down to just choosing the individual other components you want (hard drive, CD/DVD, video card, etc)

That said, if your primary, main goal is just to spend as little money as possible for a Linux-compatible PC, your best bet would be to buy a used PC (for $50 or $100, you can get some pretty nice stuff, but obviously not cutting edge) and install Linux on it.

Well sometimes I pick a cheap mobo then try to find the cheapest parts that are compatible, and it turns out to be pretty expensive. How can I choose the optimum parts with respects to pricing?

Start from the parts that you generally find to be the most expensive, explore the various options and work your way up from there.

But as suggested by J.W., a decent used computer is often more interesting than getting the cheapest new hardware. If you're doing this only because you want to learn how to put a computer together, no-one is stopping you from pulling a used computer apart and fitting it together again.

If I do buy a used computer, take it apart, and put it back together again, I already know how to do that. I'm trying to learn which pieces are compatible with which pieces. A few years ago I might have bought an Intel chipset mobo and an Athlon processor and tried to fit that on, which obviously wouldn't have.

I haven't shopped for PC parts in a while but this is a nice box. Everything except the OS.
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...CODE=WEM1426BY

2.66 GHz processor, 200 GB hdd, DVD+-RW. Wow, I certainly hope we can do cheaper than that. Maybe I'm just old-fashioned, but last I heard 1.6 GHz, 80GB, DVD+-R and 1G RAM was a respectable mid-to-low end computer.

Yea, same here. I don't even need 1 gig RAM. Less than $200 is my budget. I don't mind used parts, but I don't trust any used parts unless they're from people I know.

So have you looked into PC Chips motherboards yet, as someone suggested? Some come with on-board cpu, lan, sound and video. It's not as if you have a whole lot of other components to buy after that. RAM, hard drive, optical drive, case - that's it. I actually used one of those for five years - it was so cheap I didn't think it would last me to the end of the year. It did. You need to check Linux compatibility, of course, but then that should be a standard ingredient of building a Linux system.

My experience has been that building the absolute cheapest box possible usually winds up being pretty expensive.

There are indeed lots of places that you can cut corners, but there are a couple of places where you should *never* cut corners because cheating there will give you a machine that is both unreliable and short lived. This, I would think, defeats the purpose.

First and foremost, don't buy a cheap power supply. Bite the bullet and get a good one. "Good" doesn't necessarily mean "expensive"; you can do adequately well for $40 if you shop. You want a PS that has lots of acceptance stickers from lots of rating organizations on it. Do NOT buy a used PS; practically the only time a PS shows up as used is after a malfunction, or a swap-out in an attempt to solve a problem. You don't want to buy someon else's problem.

A cheap power supply (or a used one that really was "the problem") may very well kill your computer due to spiking or failures that are not properly clamped off.

Second, cases are all over the map with respect to price and performance. You want one that does the job adequately - and the minimum criterion for "adequate" is that the ventilation is adequate to keep the system cool enough to function reliably. If the ventilation doesn't work adequately, you'll fry your mobo and cpu, which again defeats the purpose of a cheap case. Cheap cases will also have sharp edges in them (which can give you minor lacerations when you work with them) but this can be accepted; ventilation problems cannot be accepted. Pay close attention to that.

Third, hard drives are all over the map with respect to reliability, and price is sometimes an indicator. All manufacturers have had problems at one time or another with specific series of hard drives. Before purchasing any hard drive, regardless of price, make sure it has a decent reputation. Don't purchase a HD from a known bad series, even if it is free. Your data winds up being the most valuable part of a system, and it resides on the HD. The price difference between the cheapest (but known unreliable) and a much more reliable choice will only be $10-$20; move up the line.

JMHO, of course.

Some advice:

- VIA's C7 line up is strong and not too expensive in some cases (Everex will be selling some in Walmart for 299$ with Vista home, and a local store sells the same thing without vista for 199$)

- Western Digital and Seagate are the two best (IMHO) hard drive manufacturers. Seagate generally makes bigger drives with longer warranties (By 2yrs on all drives) that obviously cost more, Western Digital has performance drives (Raptor) and "budget" drives, that are more or less the same as Seagates just without the extra 2yr warranty that they and the raptors have, but you can buy them from WD after.

- Get at least 512MiB of RAM. Go for DDR2 instead of DDR if you can, DDR2 is cheaper. If you can risk it, go for 1GiB.

- Hard drives, you don't need a lot space for them... I know my boss has a stack of unused 40GiB drives in her office in like a container, incase anything goes wrong with the machines... Your boss(es) might have some too, try snatching one. 40GiB is more than enough for a budget machine, and if not, get 80GiB or 160GiB. Never buy them used!

- CD/DVD drives are best recycled; I know I have one machine (Pentium 2 without any RAM) that had like 3 optical drives, right now I've taken them out and am using them in multiple machines. You don't really need a x24 CDRW (x8+ will be just fine, you shouldn't be burning past x4 anyways) andin a budget box a DVDRW is not always needed. (And should you need it, a used drive might do the trick)

- Get a real man's power supply. I'm getting a PC Power and Cooling 310W PSU for 51$ canadian; with a 20$ case it's a lot, but it's worth it, because those cheap PSUs will die after a while, these will just keep going.

- Try and get more power-efficient equipement. Don't get an 89W CPU because it's 10$ cheaper than the 65W one; you'll pay the difference in your hydro bill in the long run.

AMD has cheaper CPUs than Intel (Around half the price; a X2 3600+ is 69$) but VIA often has the cheapest. I would never get a Pentium 4/D. Avoid them like the plague, they'll only hurt you in the end. Refurbished, if it's an Athlon XP or late-model Pentium 3, are generally OK and would prolly be the best idea at 30$-100$ apiece.

I'll second the suggestion about getting a decent power supply. I tried to cheap out on the one for my PC, got like a $15 dollar one. It died two months later. I bought a decent Rosewill psu for like $30, and it's quieter and has lasted a few years.

"Cheap" Way
$15 PSU
$05 shipping
$30 PSU
$05 shipping
----------
$55 total

Right Way
$30 PSU
$05 shipping
------------
$35 total

Mmm, make sure to pick a name you can trust... 30$ != High Quality, but stuff like SeaSonic, Antec (But it's all made by SeaSonic except for the "true power" crap) OCZ (For more demanding stuff), and others are quite good, and I hear time and time again PC Power and Cooling makes the most reliable for desktops, with Zalman being extremely good in the server zone.

Or worse:

$15 PSU followed by:

$30 PSU + $50 Mobo + $40 CPU.