HANDS ON GUIDE

Section 1: What's inside the PC?

Total Price: £446.63 inc VAT

However, as we went to press, the E2140 was becoming hard to find. The next model up, the 1.8GHz E2160, is a damn fine chip that has the same core as the E2140 and should still overclock nicely. Bear in mind that there are two steppings of the E2140 and E2160: M0 and L2. We tested the L2 version, but the M0 version has a higher thermal specification (or heat tolerance), so it may clock even higher than our L2 chip. We haven't tested this yet, though, so you may want to stick with the L2 version if you want the same stepping that we used.

The Memory: 2GB (2x1GB) Corsair TwinX XMS2 DDR2 PC2-6400
Price: £34.08 inc VAT

Unlike most other PC components, the cost of memory goes up and down like a rollercoaster. In fact, many people make money out of speculating in memory prices, as they do with stocks and shares. The good news is that now is an awesome time to buy memory.

We fitted 2GB of PC2-6400 Corsair XMS2 memory to our budget PC. The important factor to consider when buying memory is the bandwidth. Our CPU uses a 200MHz front side bus (800MHz effective after quad-pumping), for a total bandwidth of 6.4GB/sec. For this reason, you'll want to look at PC2-6400 memory, which has the same bandwidth, if you don't want your memory to hold back the rest of the system.

Purists may tell you that you'll need even more bandwidth if you're going to overclock the FSB too, but you need to draw the line somewhere when you don't have much money. Very few applications require more than 6.4GB/sec of memory bandwidth, and that you can remove the link between the memory speed and front side bus speed in the motherboard's BIOS to give yourself more overclocking freedom.

This Corsair memory set comprises two 1GB sticks; you need 2GB for a memory-hungry operating system such as Windows Vista.

The HSF: Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro
Price: £15.26 inc VAT

Okay, you get a heatsink and fan with your Pentium E2140, but it's a reference Intel cooler. This isn't necessarily bad; the Intel reference cooler will cool your CPU to the required temperature, but it will also impersonate a light aircraft in the process. Thankfully, there's another option that costs just £15.26 and will make your CPU much cooler while keeping down the noise.

We've been almost unhealthily in love with Arctic Cooling's Freezer 7 Pro for years, and it has yet to be superseded for value. It also has a square of Arctic Cooling's own MX-2 TIM on the base of the cooler, so you won't need any TIM the first time you use it. It's quiet, cools effectively and costs just over £15. What more could you want?

The graphics card: 256MB XFX GeForce 8800GT
Price: £117.36 inc VAT

You may think that a decent GeForce 8800 card is out of a modest budget's league, but this XFX card wowed us in our graphics card Labs test. The main reason for its low price is the memory, as this card has only 256MB of 700MHz (1.4GHz effective) GDDR3 RAM, while a regular GeForce 8800 GT has 512MB of 900MHz (1.8GHz effective) memory.

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