There are occasions when, either because you have a certain specific need, or because of pure “DIY” the need to build a second PC arises. Today we are going to tell you about our personal experience, because in this situation we set up a Full pc for very little money purchases hardware in Aliexpress. Do you want to know how and what was the result? Well keep reading.
All computer and hardware enthusiasts would like to have a PC with next generation hardware, but this is often not possible due to high component prices. However, if you need a PC to perform secondary tasks, or if your needs are more modest, know that you don’t have to spend a lot of money, as long as you know what to expect.
A cheap PC on Aliexpress? Not exactly!
First of all, it should be clarified that when we say that we assembled a PC by buying on Aliexpress, in reality what we bought were some of the parts. The real story is that we had a waiter relatively old that we used for Minecraft and it decided to die a short time ago so we didn’t really need all the parts but only the motherboard, processor and RAM. The case (mATX), the power supply, the graphics card, the system SSD and even the heatsink, we were able to reuse them.
For this “PC upgrade” task, which was basically getting rid of a very old motherboard, CPU and DDR2 RAM that had given us many years of service and swapping them out against “new”, we decided to take a look at Aliexpress, where we came across several very interesting offers in which they offer you server processors in a kit including a motherboard and RAM, at knockdown prices .
We opted for a kit including a processor Intel Xeon E5 2620V2with an X79 motherboard and two memory modules of 8 GB each DDR3 at 1333 MHz, and it cost us just over 118 $, although for just over 100 $ we had the option of choosing the same , but with 4 GB RAM modules (8 GB in total, but we prefer to take the option with 16 GB).
And how does this team work?
As you might have guessed, what we bought is by no means state-of-the-art hardware, but it is pretty powerful hardware. The Intel Xeon E5-2620V2 is a server processor that has 6 cores and 12 processing threads at a maximum speed of 2.6 GHz with a TDP of only 80 W, which allows us to have quite decent performance with contained consumption and, what is more, it has earned us a relatively small and old heat sink that is valid for its LGA2011 socket and maintains good operating temperatures (below 50ºC).
This processor, which cost around 500 dollars at the time, is comparable to the third generation of Intel Core processors (Ivy Bridge) launched at the end of 2013, so it obviously has its time. However, since we assembled it on a computer whose mission is to be a server for Minecraft and media files, it does its job like a charm (in fact, much better than the Celeron we had before for it ).
In addition, we also significantly improved the speed and the amount of memory we had, since we went from 8 GB DDR2 to 16 GB DDR3 and from 800 to 1333 MHz, and the equipment, even if it does not not stand out for its great connectivity (it doesn’t even have USB 3.0), it has SATA 3 connectors, so our 2.5″ SATA 3 256GB SSD continues to work perfectly for us.
In short, for only 120 dollars, we have updated this server with much more powerful hardware that works like a charm. If you are in a similar case and are looking for hardware to update a secondary computer or a home server, no doubt in stores like Aliexpress you can easily get it for very little money.
