Processor: Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200

Intel’s Pentium Dual Core E5200 is a remarkable chip. Costing just over 3000 pesos its price given the performance it delivers is unmatched. The Athlon 64  X2 5200 is the nearest priced offering from AMD but the E5200 offers much more performance. Also the E5300 set to replace the E5200 running 100mhz faster is a bit too expensive right now locally.

For every Juan out there the E5200 should be fast enough to handle day to day things like web browsing, browsing and manipulating pictures, doing your word and power point documents. Also if you do more intensive tasks like gaming and multimedia encoding, you can overclock the E5200 easily to as much as 50% of its clock speed. ( from 2.5ghz to 3.75ghz ).

At the JuanTech.com Labs we overclocked our E5200 sample easily to 3.75ghz without any special coolers, expensive motherboards and performance ram. At that speed this processor will end up matching the performance of Core 2 Duos costing three times more! This makes the Intel Pentium Dual Core E5200 the best value processor you can buy right now.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-G31M-ES2C

Never before came a value platform that was as easy to overlock as Intel’s G31 chipset. The choice of the G31 chipset is important in building the JuanPC because we needed a motherboard that could provide great performance at a price that we’d love. The Gigabyte’s GA-G31M-ES2C fit the bill perfectly. Priced at only 2500 pesos this is  motherboard of choice for the JuanPC. It comes with solid capacitors, dual bios, and a lot more features along with a solid software bundle.

The integrated graphics processor bundled with the G31 chipset, the Intel GMA 3100, won’t be able to play the latest 3D games out there but is enough to accelerate the Aero Interface that comes with Vista and perhaps your older 3D games.

This board comes with a limitation of being able to handle only two memory modules.  We built the JuanPC with 2x1GB sticks.  You can choose to go with two 2 gigabyte sticks.  Four gigabytes is plenty for most every Juan out there running day to day tasks. So this limitation of the G31 chipset should be much of an issue.

An alternative would be the EMAXX IG31-AVL. Priced at an unbelievably low price of BELOW 2000 pesos this could be the perfect board for those who don’t like to overclock.

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