Build Budget PC Less Than $300

June 2013

The date is important in regards to any quote. Recently I thought of upgrading an old PC used for some younger family members. The old PC was running an Athlon XP of early 2000s vintages. The PC itself has got a mixture of component.

The challenge is to build a PC for less that $300. As shown in the table below, this can be done. The prices are quoted from www.msy.com.au in Australian dollars. The actual components have prices listed in the Price column. The Alt column shows the prices of alternative PC components.

The key components that need upgrading are CPU, Motherboard, RAM, Hard Drive and Case. The cost limit is enough to include a CPU Fan. The main design is to have the budget Celeron CPU which has integrated ATI Radeon graphics. The motherboard is chosen to include some legacy PCI slots to use the existing wireless adapter card. The lack of grunt of the Celeron is made up by the whopping 8GB RAM. The old DVD writer can be reused. A modern PC Case would improve the image of this budget PC.

Alt	Price	Components	Model	Details	Link
	$62.00	Motherboard	AsRock B75 Pro3-M	2PCI, USB3, UEFI, Socket 1155, SATA3	http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/B75%20Pro3-M/?cat=Specifications
$60.00		Motherboard	Gigabyte GA-B75M-D3V	1PCI, USB3, UEFI, Socket 1155, SATA3	http://www.gigabyte.com/products/product-page.aspx?pid=4151#sp
	$44.00	CPU	Intel Celeron 1610	Ivy Bridge, 22nm, 2.6GHz, 55W, DualCore, 2MB L3, 64bit	http://ark.intel.com/products/71072/
	$67.00	RAM	8G Kit 1600 Patriot-S	DDR3, 2-sticks
	$69.00	Hard Drive	WD Green EZRX 1TB	3.5" SATA internal
$20.00		CPU Fan	Thermaltake Contact 16	2 copper pipes, 100W	http://www.thermaltake.com/products-model.aspx?id=C_00001805
$22.00		CPU Fan	CoolerMaster Hyper TX3 EVO	3 copper pipes	http://www.coolermaster.com/product/Detail/cooling/cpu-air-cooler/hyper-tx3-evo.html
	$15.00	CPU Fan	DeepCool Gammaxx200	2 copper pipes, 95W	http://www.deepcool-us.com/Product/GAMMAXX200/
	$43.00	Case and PSU	Generic	ATX
	$0.00	Wireless Adapter	Use existing PCI wireless adapter
	$0.00	DVD RW	Use existing
Total	$  300.00

NotesHPC

Contents
=========

Using Windows' Performance Monitor (perfmon)
Detecting Cache and Memory Misses
Detecting Processor Bottlenecks

Using Windows' Performance Monitor (perfmon)
============================================
Ref: http://www.sysed.com/DnLoads/QualityContents/W2K3Server/99_W2K3_Server_AppE_Performance_Counters.pdf

Ref:http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/cc750967.aspx
TechNet - TechNet Library - TechNet Archive - WindowsNT Workstation - Resource Kit

Chapter 9 - The Art of Performance Monitoring
Chapter 10 - About Performance Monitor
Chapter 11 - Performance Monitoring Tools
Chapter 12 - Detecting Memory Bottlenecks
Chapter 13 - Detecting Processor Bottlenecks
Chapter 14 - Detecting Disk Bottlenecks
Chapter 15 - Detecting Cache Bottlenecks
Chapter 16 - Monitoring Multiple Processor Computers


Detecting Cache and Memory Misses
===================================
To analyse cache miss, the following performance counters may help:
- Cache : Data Map Hits :
Percentage of Data Maps in the Cache that could be resolved without having to retrieve a page from
the disk, i.e. the page was already in physical memory.
- Cache : Fast Read Resource Misses /second :
Frequency of Cache misses necessitated by the lack of available resources to satisfy the request.
- Memory : Pages /second :
Number of pages read from the disk or written to the disk to resolve memory references to pages that
were not in memory at the time of the reference. This is the sum of Pages Input/sec and Pages
Output/sec. This counter includes paging traffic on behalf of the system Cache to access file data for
applications. This value also includes the pages to/from non-cached mapped memory files. This is the
primary counter to observe if you are concerned
- Memory : Cache Faults :
Occur whenever the Cache manager does not find a file's page in the immediate Cache and must ask
the memory manager to locate the page elsewhere in memory or on the disk so that it can be loaded
into the immediate Cache.


Detecting Processor Bottlenecks
================================
The symptoms of a processor bottleneck aren't difficult to recognize:
- Processor: %Processor Time often exceeds 90%.
- System: Processor Queue Length is often greater than 2.
- On multiprocessor systems, System: % Total Processor Time often exceeds 50%.