Building an AMD A8-3870K Llano APU System For Under $300

[Becky]

Legit Reviews have published an article looking at Building an AMD A8-3870K Llano APU System For Under $300:

"Are you looking to build a budget PC, but have a limited budget to work with? We have had a number of readers and businesses that we consult with looking for new systems that will save power and be faster than the systems they currently have. When we started to look into low cost Do-It-Yourself (DIY) systems we found that you could easily build an AMD Llano system for less than $300. And when we say under $300 we mean with shipping included!

You would think that for under $300 we would have to cut corners and use knock off brands, but that is not the case here. We are using the top of the line AMD A8-3870K APU and an OCZ Vertex Plus R2 60GB Solid-State Drive (SSD) into this system. The one corner that we did cut is the operating system. Most people that are upgrading an older PC are okay with using the license they still have, so that should be an issue. Microsoft Windows 8 is coming out later this year, but not too many people are looking forward to that.

Rather than just showing you how to build the system and show you a few benchmarks and call it a day we wanted to show you a real world problem that a company was facing. A local business was wanting to upgrade an office full of computers that they purchased back in 2004. The power supplies in the systems were failing due to leaking capacitors and some of the hard drives were starting to fail with over 50,000 hours of up time. Back in the day they spent over $1500 for these systems. They were custom built by the company that uses the propitiatory software that runs only on Windows XP 32-bit. These systems were built with Intel Celeron 2.0GHz single core processors along with 80GB IDE hard drives, 1GB of memory and an AOpen H340A slim ATX case with a 200W TFX power supply."

You can read the full article here.