It’s been a long and arduous process: ever since our esteemed Editor challenged me and four of my colleagues to acquire computers for £250 – with Stuart Turton trying to blag one for free – I’ve been scratching around dozens of online retailers to find the cheapest components and the most reasonable component prices.

Last week I finally put together a specification I was happy with and ordered my components, and it was soon time to start building. A somewhat slap-dash assembly proved that the rig worked, and yesterday my three replacement case fans turned up.

Fitting those wasn’t easy – the two fans at the front of the machine were surrounded by small, bevelled metallic edges, so removing them from the chassis was a combination of brute force and pure luck which left my fingers covered in small cuts. Once installed, though, the three fans worked like a dream, and the noise pumping out of the Warrior 250 – which is the machine’s current name, incidentally – was halved.

The successful fan installation meant that I could press my cable management kit into service, and liberal use of cable ties and sticky pads resulted in a chassis that many a professional PC builder would be proud of: power cables are tied to free drive bays, smaller cables are lashed to the bottom of the chassis and some spare wire is even tucked away behind the motherboard, out of sight.

After my earlier overclocking misadventures – my initial 20% overclock saw the PC fail to even get to the motherboard loading screen – I restricted my ambitions to an initial 5%. This worked fine, so I upped the overclock to 10%, which gave me a clock speed of 2.75GHz – enough for now, although I haven’t yet delved into the more advanced options available in the BIOS. Still, a 10% performance boost isn’t to be sniffed at, especially when trying to run more demanding applications.

I’m intending to dive into the more hardcore performance options tomorrow to see if I can extract more performance out of my plucky Pentium Dual Core.

In the mean-time, Warrior 250 has the naming crown – but late contenders are always welcome, so post them in the comments below.