HANDS ON GUIDE

Section 1: What's inside the PC?

Total Price: £446.63 inc VAT

The case: Cooler Master RC-330 V2
Price: £25.79 inc VAT

Not long ago, a Cooler Master case would have cost more than £100, but now you can pick up one dirt-cheap. A fine example is the one we've chosen for our budget beast. The RC-330 V2 has simple, elegant looks, and covers most of the basics. There's no intake fan, but there's space for a 120mm fan behind the 3.5in drive bays if you have one spare. However, there's a 120mm rear fan to exhaust hot air out the back. There's plenty of ventilation at the front, and the RC-330 uses a screw-free design inside.

The PSU: 500W FSP Blue Storm II
Price: £58.62 inc VAT

FSP's 500W Blue Storm II made a lasting impression when we reviewed it in our last PSU Labs test. It achieved an overall score of 85 per cent, which is incredible for a PSU that costs less than £60. Our only complaint was that the 5V rail is slightly underpowered, but this won't be an issue with only one hard drive and a DVD burner in this system.

What is important is the 12V rail, which we'll need for overclocking our inexpensive but potential-packed dual-core Pentium E2140 CPU to 3GHz, as well as keeping the GeForce 8800 GT graphics card happy. This is where the FSP shines, as it has two 12V rails rated at 18A each. There's also a powerful but quiet 120mm fan in the unit's base. We measured its efficiency at 81 per cent at full load, and 76 per cent at 50 per cent. It's a great PSU for the money.

The motherboard: Gigabyte GA-P31-DS3L
Price: £46.93 inc VAT

Sub-£50 motherboards are usually micro-ATX affairs with poor overclocking features and under-supported chipsets. This is what makes Gigabyte's GA-P31-DS3L is so special - it's a full-sized ATX motherboard with a quality Intel chipset that clocks to high heaven.

The low price is mainly due to its use of Intel's P31 chipset. It doesn't officially support a 1,333MHz front side bus for Intel's latest CPUs but we know the board will overclock well beyond 1,333MHz. You still get 8-channel Intel HD Audio, DDR2 support and S-ATA II ports.

The only drawback of this frill-free board is that it has little in the way of cooling. There are no fancy copper heatpipes or extra fans. Instead, it has a couple of heatsinks on the Northbridge and Southbridge, and nothing to cool the VRMs. As such, while the board can manage a decent overclock, you'll burn out the VRMs if you crank up the voltage 24 hours a day. There's plenty of power for a good overclock when you need it though.

The processor: 1.6GHz Dual-Core Intel Pentium E2140
Price: £43.11 inc VAT

The Pentium brand was a great success for Intel, but started to look like an aging has-been by the time the Pentium 4 was released. However, just when you thought the Pentium name had been dumped, Intel revived it for its budget line of dual-core CPUs.

Don't worry, though, as the Pentium E2140 bears little relation to the last generation of Pentium D CPUs; it's based on Intel's Allendale core, a variation of the acclaimed Conroe core found in the first generation of Core 2 CPUs. It's basically a cut-down Core 2 in disguise, although there are a few differences. The first is that the E2140 is only clocked at 1.6GHz and uses an 800MHz front side bus, although when we first tested it, we managed to overclock it to 3GHz using a 1.5GHz FSB, so there's no need to worry about this. The other difference is that the E2140 has just 1MB of Level 2 cache instead of the 2MB and 4MB pools found on dual-core Core 2 CPUs.

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