Aug

23

Building a New PC - Part 1

August 23, 2007 |

Cooler Master<br /> RS-430PMSR/P<br /> Power SuppliesEvery few years I get that itch to build myself a new computer. Because I am neither a “serious gamer” nor editing video on my computers, I can usually use my machines for quite a while without any major upgrades. A few weeks ago, however, I tried to watch some HD video on the ABC website and while my broadband connection is fast enough, my machine just couldn’t display the picture fast enough.

That left me cranky enough to finally order some new parts to go with the Intel E6700 Core 2 Duo I have had lying in the house since last December (full discolure: this is a freebie from Intel - my wife builds processors for them and gets a free one every year).

As most of the parts will arrive tomorrow, I thought I would write some short tutorials on home-building a PC in the next few days.

I will be recycling some parts from my current machine, but will add a new processor, motherboard, hard-drive, memory and graphics card. Here is my current setup, which I put together early in 2004:

Case: Apevia X-Dreamer ATX

Power Supply: COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power 400W

Motherboard: MSI K7N2 Delta-L Socket A

Processor: Athlon XP 2800+ with stock cooler

Video Card: Geforce FX5200

RAM: 2×512MB DDR333 Viking

Hard Drives: 2 internal IDE drives, 80GB and 40GB and 1 external USB drive with 160GB

OS: dual booting Ubuntu and Vista

 

The new setup will look like this:

 

Case: Apevia X-Dreamer ATX

Power Supply: COOLER MASTER eXtreme Power 400W

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-965P-DS3

Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 (2.66ghz) with a Skythe Ninja cooler

Video Card: GeForce GE8600GTS

RAM: 2×512MB A-DATA 800mhz (I might buy another set of those - 1GB seems a bit too low)

Hard Drives: 2 internal IDE drives, 80GB and 40GB and 1 external USB drive with 160GB (I will probably buy an SATA drive and retire the smaller

OS: dual booting Ubuntu and Vista

 

Here is my strategy for building a new system which should work well for at least three years, can be upgraded easily and will allow for playing a game or two as well:

Don’t be intimidated. Once you know what components you want, putting the system together isn’t much harder than building a LEGO set from instructions. PC components are all standardized and as long as you buy everything according to one standard, you will be fine (that is, you need to buy the processor cooler that is meant to fit on you processor and a motherboard that is meant to fit in your case). We will talk about this in the next part.

Evaluate what you need. Enthusiast sites will tell you that you can’t live without the latest and greatest. Take video cards. According to most gamers, anything but a high-end Nvidia GT8800 card for $500+ will do. If you don’t play games, it hardly ever matters what graphics card you use. If you business is crunching numbers, you might want to go with a high-end processor (think Core 2 Quad). The reason you are building your own system is so that it exactly matches your requirements. Don’t compromise.

Read a lot of reviews. Most of the work (and fun) in building your own system is in researching the components. I like looking at the users reviews on Newegg.com (also the place where I buy all my parts, by the way). However, I also read a lot of reviews and look at benchmarks on enthusiast sites such as Anandtech and Tom’s Hardware.

Get a motherboard you can upgrade to at least the next generation of processors. In this case, the Gigabyte board can handle the new quad-core processors.

Get a mid-range processor. There is usually a sweet spot where the next step up just becomes too expensive and the price increases exponentially. For example, I would not recommend buying the E6700 (remember, mine was free). The E6300 is cheaper and can be overclocked to the same specifications as the E6700. And right now, you can buy a quad-core Q6600 processor for under $300. The next step up from there is the Q6700, which costs around $550 and isn’t that much more powerful. Unless you are crunching numbers, however, a quad-core processor is a bit of overkill right now.


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