As detailed in Building a PC With My Son, we had a blast building his new PC. He named the white case after the Arctic Thunder arcade game. This page is devoted to the component list that makes up this box.
| Component | Selection | Price |
|---|---|---|
| Case | Thermaltake Commander MS-I Snow Edition | $50 |
| Motherboard | ASUS P8Z77-V LX | $105 |
| CPU | Intel i7 Quad-Core 3.4GHz | $290 |
| Memory | Corsair Vengeance 16GB (2x8GB) | $125 |
| Hard Drive | Seagate Barracuda 2TB SATA 6Gb/s | $80 |
| Optical Drive | ASUS 24xDVD-RW SATA | $20 |
| Graphics Card | n/a; to control costs we are starting w MB's integrated graphics | - |
| Power Supply | Corsair CX750 Builder Series | $80 |
| Monitor | ASUS VS247H-P 23.6" Full-HD LED-Lit LCD | $135 |
| OS | Windows 7 Home Premium SP1 (OEM System Builder) | $90 |
| Keyboard | Razer BlackWidow Tournament Edition Mechanical PC Gaming Keyboard | $60 |
| Mouse | Razer Abyssus Optical PC Gaming Mouse | $30 |
| GRAND TOTAL ** | $1065 | |
** That sounds a bit high for a RYO machine, but here are some comparable systems from reputable manufacturers
| Brand | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|
| Dell | $1080 | Right on the money for the most comparable system I could configure; an XPS 8700. I could only configure it with a 1TB drive and 12GB of memory (on 4 DIMMS). |
| HP | $1440 | To my surprise, HP's site had more fine-grained customization options (down to the power supply) and I priced out an ENVY 700 010xt for about $400 more than I spent. |
| Apple | $1711 | As Mac's can run Windoze (why would anyone do that!?!?) I wanted to get an Apple number to compare against. I had to go with the mini line as the Mac Pros were so far out of the league of what we build. I found a somewhat similarly configured Mac Mini Server for $1576 and then just added the cost of the cheap monitor we bought. |
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