So, I've got a friend who needs a computer NOW without actually having money. He might be able to muster a few bucks though, so he is looking for something cheap which he can upgrade later.
As you probably know we live in Germany, so don't worry about the actual deals, just find me hardware parts that work now and can be upgraded to a decent gaming PC later.

He basically needs everything, including periphals (except printer) and a monitor.
Bonus points if the machine can run LoL right away.

Oh and he has an external HDD. Is it possible to use it as a system drive for now? (Yes we are desperate) Which problems could he run into when doing that?

H61 Intel Chipset Mobo, LGA 1155

Intel Celeron G30 Sandy Bridge

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In any case, if you're looking to upgrade in a year or two, LGA 1155 is the way to go, and the pentium/celeron sandy bridge series has a lot of bang for your buck.

They are going to ask what your budget is, anyway. I don't know if you can build a PC from no money

External HDDs are just normal HDDs in an enclosure. Open it up and if it's a proper SATA drive, you can go ahead and use that as the system drive with no problems.

If he's only going to play LoL, a llano-based platform might be cheaper than an Intel CPU + discrete GPU.

I was just thinking that after posting, actually, since their graphics performance is 3x better or something? On the flip side he did say he wanted to upgrade later.

I'd be tempted to go with a second hand laptop off an auction website (eg ebay). Such laptops are likely to have crappy battery life though, so would likely need to be used plugged in to mains power. But it solves the monitor problem (which will eat up a lot of money unless you get something junky/free) and because laptops depreciate so quickly you should be able to get something reasonable for not too much money.

Thanks for the answers so far.

No budget. Just make it as cheap as possible under the restriction that it can be upgraded into a decent gaming computer later.

He's not ONLY going to play LoL, but he'd like to be able to. To make it clear this is not a hard requirement, just an added bonus. If that would change the build, make 2 versions so we can decide whether to get it now or upgrade to something even better later.

Afaik Llano is AMD's Sandy Bridge so I don't see why that wouldn't work. You can disable the APU and use a discrete graphics card later, right? Or is it because you can't have powerful CPUs on LLano sockets?

EDIT:
Well Laptops have little upgrade options and we might get a monitor from somewhere. But we'll consider it.

Yes, of course laptops have limited upgrade options, but when your budget is $0 you can't be very choosy.

It is likely anything you do manage to cobble together so cheaply, when you come to "upgrade" it you're going to want to replace everything in the system anyway. If you're going to take that route, you might as well just buy something cheap that will fit the current need and then buy a whole new computer again later. In that perspective, buying the laptop first makes more sense.

Similarly, if you are dead set on buying a desktop system, again you're going to be better off buying it second hand from an auction site rather than brand new and building it. So then you should find auctions that look good (cheap, close by, whatever), post them here and we'll advise which ones to get or which ones to avoid.

Now, if you already had monitors and peripherals, or various parts you could bodge together like an existing case or power supply or a stick of ram, then buying the rest of the parts would probably be the better option. But at the moment it sounds like all you have is a hard drive.

We're also looking into second hand offers but so far we only found overpriced offers for outdated hardware so I made this thread to have an alternative where he only pays a little more and gets something up to date.

The point of the thread is to avoid just that. Case, PSU, mobo, optical and peripherals shouldn't be needed to be upgraded, while CPU, GPU and HDDs can be expanded / bought later.

Right now we have nothing but the external hdd, but I'm confident he can get some of those things from friends for (almost) free. But for the purpose of this thread we're gonna assume he needs everything.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 14 2012, 2:46 pm by NudeRaider.

Pretty sure the Llano CPU cores are the same as the Phenom's in IPC. It's not nearly the same high performance leap Sandy Bridge made, just that it has a very capable onboard GPU, unlike Intel "HD Graphics" which barely even plays Minecraft.

A LGA 1155 platform offers the most potential for an upgrade later on. The FM1 socket (for Llanos) only takes APUs and not any of the AM3+ chips.

he needs a computer NOW?

This is what you need:
RAM - ddr3 is best. Speed/brand doesn't matter.
CPU - probably have to buy this one, get the cheapest sandy bridge.
PSU - anything above 400W will be overkill. Does not matter much right now. The difference between a shitty PSU that works for 10 years and a good PSU is zero. Check the archive for reviews when he upgrades, as there's no telling when a shitty PSU is going to blow. It's also probably not worth buying a shitty PSU unless it's dirt cheap. Find a good one for cheap instead (loan him money if need be).
Motherboard - cheapest thing that goes with your cpu. probably have to buy this one.
graphics - intel onboard sucks. AMD's onboard is great, but requires an FM1 socket, which I can't see being upgradable in the future, and is hell of expensive. You buy AMD's onboard for the long haul, not for an upgrade path. Get whatever you can scrounge up. The 6670, 6770, GTX 460 (both versions), GTX 550, 7750, 6850, 6870, GTX 560 are the best price/performance, in pretty much that order.
heirarchy chart for graphics.

Case is optional. use a screwdriver to turn on the computer (short out the power on pins).
HDD is free. You might be able to take out the HDD if it's sata, but you can also use a thumb drive as your HDD, so no worries there.
Optical drive makes life easier, but you should probably skip it unless you can get it for free.

While not the latest chipset, you can get an AM3+ motherboard with an AMD 880G chipset if you want on-board graphics but want to stay away from FM1. You can get them cheap, too. The on-board Radeon HD 4250 graphics is definitely enough to play League of Legends with at least 20 - 30 fps at low settings, if not more.

I'd recommend a jumper block instead if you have an extra available, especially if you have one available with a tab on top to make it easier to hold onto it. There is less of a chance that you will short more pins than intended. Note that the jumper block on the pins counts as the power button held in, so you put it on then take it off to turn on the system. If you don't want to immediately get a case, but don't want to do either of those, you could even buy a power button on eBay or elsewhere to connect to the board. (I did a quick search on eBay for computer power button and found some with the cord to connect to the motherboard) Wherever you have the board sitting when not in a computer case, I'd recommend having the board on top of the anti-static bag it came in.

A USB drive requires special steps to get Windows running on it, which may or may not work with 64-bit versions of the OS. (USB drivers are loaded too late during Windows boot by default, possibly intentionally to disable USB boot)

His external hdd is USB. Problem?

K. That's my build so far. Comments?
https://www.alternate.de/html/product/MS-TECH/CA-0150/810956/?
https://www.alternate.de/html/product/Asrock/H61M-S/844050/?
https://www.alternate.de/html/product/Intel(R)/Celeron(R)_Processor_G530/913974/?
https://www.alternate.de/html/product/G.Skill/DIMM_4_GB_DDR3-1333/792158/?
https://www.alternate.de/html/product/MS-TECH/LT-118/881210/?
https://www.alternate.de/html/product/HannsG/HA195ABB/147469/?
https://www.alternate.de/html/product/Chieftec/GPA-450S/866084/?
totaling € 255,29

Looks good, but I sure hope your can cut out €50 with old parts from someone else.

It will be a regular SATA hard drive inside a USB enclosure. Open the enclosure up and take the hard drive out, and install it directly into the case like you would any other hard drive. Depending on the design of the enclosure, it may be very easy to take the hard drive out, or it may be very difficult, to the point that you have to destroy the enclosure to get the drive out. Usually once you open them the hard drive will be easy to get out, but opening it might result in making ugly scratches/marks or potentially even breaking the plastic.

If it's a very old external drive, it might be PATA/IDE, but anything bought within the last 3 years will almost certainly be SATA.

I was mainly referring to the "but you can also use a thumb drive as your HDD" comment.

Back to the external hard drive, also to consider is that the hard drive may be formatted as FAT32 unless he specifically reformatted it to NTFS. In that case, I'm not sure if it might have to be reformatted during installation or if it can do an in-place conversion to NTFS. Either way, there may be some risk of data loss if installing Windows to it (assuming you even get it out of the enclosure), so you may want to backup anything he doesn't want to lose from it before attempting.

Wait you're saying I can't use HDD externally but would have to make it an internal drive? That's probably not gonna work since this thing is definitely smaller than a 3.5" tray. Also I'm pretty sure he wouldn't want to give up the portability on the drive since he doesn't even own a thumb drive.

So what I wanted to know is what we need to do to make the USB drive an external system drive and what problems could come with it.

So you want to install an operating system onto an external drive, which you could detach from the parent computer and connect to other computers?

I wouldn't even attempt that using USB. If it has eSATA on it then it could work, though.

If you were to do this, you definitely should partition the drive into the system partition and then a storage partition for the 'portable' use. Bear in mind that installs of Windows 7 use up at least 15 gigs, and you'd want to make your system partition at least 30 gigs, assuming you're installing office and other programs (office can take up 10 gigs). If this is a 2.5" portable drive, it may not be very big.

Realistically you may be looking at having to buy a hard drive as well. Personally I'd just buy a second hand computer and be done with it.

Post has been edited 1 time(s), last time on Mar 16 2012, 12:09 am by Lanthanide.

it's a USB drive, without a doubt.

New motherboards have the drivers ready for boot off an external (which is the same thing as a thumb drive). You shouldn't have any problems.

While the motherboard will indeed boot from a USB drive (I have one from late 2004 that can do that), if you're talking about Windows there is a different issue here. Unless it is different when booting Windows with UEFI, Windows does not by default have the driver load order set up in a way that you can boot Windows from a USB drive. This can be changed in the registry and .inf files, but by default the USB drivers are not loaded at the time it switches to accessing the boot drive through its own drivers, so Windows halts with an inaccessible boot device error.

if all else fails, linux