Build an Intel Sandy Bridge budget system - Overclockers UK

👤by David Mitchelson Comments 📅22-02-11
CPU & Motherboard - Intel Core i5-2300 & ASRock H67M-GE

Intel Core i5-2300 Full Specifications

To start things off the core components featured in this system are surely the CPU and motherboard. The CPU chosen for our budget system is the Intel Core i5-2300 which is the cheapest of Intel's 2nd generation Core i5 family of processors. It's stock speed is rated at 2.8GHz and will move to 3.1GHz if you have turbo mode enabled within the BIOS. This chip comes with 6MB L3 Cache and is Intel's most affordable quad-core processor currently on the market. Not only does it bring quad-core functionality at a fantastic price-point but it also has an IGP meaning that we can take advantage of onboard graphics capabilities.

Being a retail version of this processor, we get the Intel HSF and also the extended warranty of 3 years.

Intel Core i5-2300 2.80GHz (Sandybridge) Socket LGA1155 Processor - Retail [BX80623I52300] @ Overclockers UK

PRICE: £148 inc. VAT (price at time of article)




ASRock H67M-GE (mATX) Full Specifications

Next up we have the motherboard. Our intention is to select a board with integrated graphics ports but with a view to future-proof, so we want PCI-E lanes too. We won't be overclocking due to many reasons such as the intended use and also the fact that we are using a non-K processor. Only the K series of Sandy Bridge processors have the capability of being overclocked because they have unlocked multipliers unlike the non-K processors (like the Core i5-2300 we are using today).

Essentially, the Intel H67 chipset is perfect for our intended use as It comes with integrated graphics ports (DVI and VGA). The ASRock H67M-GE has PCI-E lanes so we can add a graphics card in the future if we want and it also has additional DDR3 DIMM slots over the non-GE ASRock board. We also have the luxury of 2 x USB3.0 and 2 x SATA 3 (6Gb/s) ports for faster hard disk drive usage.

We've seen UEFI BIOS on Intel P67 motherboards but our Intel H67 courtesy of ASRock in the H67M-GE comes with UEFI too. So you can navigate the BIOS using your mouse over a intuitive, efficient GUI. For the price, this is a fantastic board when you consider the features included - we've only briefly gone over a few. This is the one of the cheapest Intel H67 boards currently on the market and is a good choice.

ASRock H67M-GE Intel H67 (Socket 1155) DDR3 Micro-ATX Motherboard - (Sandybridge) @ Overclockers UK

PRICE: £75 inc. VAT (price at time of article)








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