CoN 25th Anniversary: 1997-2022
Building my own PC

Posted: 19th January 2011 16:50

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I, despite knowing nothing of how to do so, am going to try and build my own PC. Basically I've grown dissatisfied with doing everything out of my laptop, and want a Windows 7 computer with a little more power. I'm going to need it for "normal" PC functions like the MS Office suite of products, plus GIS functions using the ESRI suite of products (which is a little too intense for my laptop to run comfortably) and some gaming. I'm aiming at a budget of $1,500, but I can go higher if it means a significant upgrade.

Right now I'm looking at an Intel i5 2500k processor, as it seems to be very high-rated for its cost. Any suggestions to go from there? I'm an extreme neophyte about this and will take all the advice/help I can get.

This post has been edited by laszlow on 19th January 2011 17:31

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Posted: 19th January 2011 16:59

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Before jumping right into recommendations, where will you be buying the parts? I'd recommend NewEgg, and they have the great option to have wish lists that you can share to show exactly the build you're going for, and people can give you advice on pieces of hardware that might not fit together so well.

I was in your exact same situation just a few years ago and had a blast building the thing from scratch, so I'd love to hear how it goes. You'll probably want to build from the motherboard out, and I'd recommend Gigabyte there. Intel for the processor is always a great choice, and Gigabyte makes some really great mobos for those chips.

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Posted: 19th January 2011 17:09

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I figure that if you're not going to use it for serious gaming (though from previous conversations we've had, I imagine some of the GIS stuff actually will need some things that are also common to gaming rigs, like solid power in the graphics department), $1500 should be more than enough to do what you need to do.

The i5 would be what I was looking at, myself, if I were building right now, though Tiddles or someone more knowledgeable than me might have a better notion, as I haven't built a PC in four years. Windows 7 Pro x64 seems like a no-brainer these days, so you can stuff it a bit more full of dual-channel RAM and actually have it be useful. I myself upgraded my graphics last year to the Radeon 5770 and find that to be a pretty great card for the price.

Since you're someone who hasn't built before, I would say one thing: take the advice that you're given here, and then go to Newegg and get a bundle of CPU and Motherboard together. It's nerve-wracking to install a CPU under the best conditions, and doing it for the first time is even worse, because it's not hard to screw up if you're not careful. By buying a bundle, you can have the pros install and test it for you before shipping, and it still will save you money on buying an off-the-shelf system.

Edit
I might be wrong about Newegg having bundle testing, as I now don't see it on the site. I really thought I'd gotten an email months ago saying that they now offered the service, though. If for some reason they don't, try mwave.com if you want that service. Prices are nearly as good as Newegg and I know they offered pre-installed CPU/Mobo combos last time I built.


This post has been edited by Rangers51 on 19th January 2011 18:10

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Posted: 19th January 2011 17:31

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Last time I looked at any of this, i5s around that range seemed to be recommended as the best bet for price versus performance, so you could be onto a winner there. Bear in mind, though, that Intel just pushed a new architecture and set of chips out the door a few weeks ago, so check a few tech forums and websites to see what's happening and what might happen soon price-wise - you might be able to get a much cheaper i5 if you time it right as they get sold off, or conversely it might end up being better going with one of the new Cedar Mill chips.

Here are some suggestions:

RAM: get at least 4GB if you want to use 64-bit Windows, which I recommend you do. (The retail and upgrade packs include both 32-bit and 64-bit editions. You may as well get Home Premium rather than Professional unless you really need something that's in Pro; there'll be a feature matrix somewhere) Going much higher than that won't do a lot at the moment, but leaving yourself room for expansion will help. Try to dig up some detailed information on what speed RAM is recommended for your CPU. Getting faster RAM costs quite a bit of money for not much direct return at all, unless you want overclocking headroom - and on that subject...

Overclocking: consider it if you're on a budget and you want a bit more performance, and you have time to read up on it and test it. A lot of components actually allow for overclocking in the warranty, because a lot of system builders do it. I'm too lazy to stress test my machines properly so I can't advise much there, but a great number of people see it as a real waste not to get a bit more out of components that are designed with a lot of headroom.

Video card and monitor: it's vital that you purchase at least a mid-range video card if you want to do any gaming at all (at least something with a 6 as the second digit for the Radeons; I don't know what NVidia's current equivalent is). I don't know if you already have a monitor you plan to use, or if you're going to buy a new one, but these two can affect the cost quite a lot. Get a larger monitor, and you'll want to run games at a higher resolution to avoid a blurry picture; that requires an increasingly beefy video card as resolutions increase. On the other hand, if you're only really interested in desktop applications and a few non-intensive games, you can spend very little on a video card and have a nice big monitor for other work. As for which brand to use, lots of people will recommend either for various reasons. I'm a long-time ATI man, but some people seem to have problems with them.

Case: look at some reviews and make sure you get something that's well built and easy to assemble in. Too many nice looking (and not so nice looking) cases can be a real pain to work with, and you don't want that for your first build. It's worth putting a bit of budget in to make life easier.

And don't forget to install the little spacer screws between the case and board!

Power: choose your power supply after all the internal components. Look around the place and you'll find some online calculators to tell you how much power your configuration might need. Give it a little headroom too, and most importantly, buy a name-brand power supply. A cheap PSU that claims to be 600W might only be as good as a 300W from a good brand. Don't be tempted to save money here - this is one thing that will not only bring the whole machine to a halt if it's not up to scratch, but if it blows, it can bring down a lot of other expensive equipment with it.

Don't bother with a dedicated sound card unless you're a serious audiophile with equipment to match. It's just not worthwhile these days.

That's all a bit high level, I realise, but in spite of having build a machine nine months ago, that already leaves me out of the loop for many of the specifics. Have a go at a shopping list, and we can always take a look to see if there's anything obviously wrong or missing. Sticking it on a forum where people do this sort of thing a lot can help too, but you always have to watch out for brand bias as with anything like this.

Good luck with it anyway!
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Posted: 19th January 2011 18:09

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Quote (Tiddles @ 19th January 2011 12:31)
Case: look at some reviews and make sure you get something that's well built and easy to assemble in. Too many nice looking (and not so nice looking) cases can be a real pain to work with, and you don't want that for your first build. It's worth putting a bit of budget in to make life easier.

And don't forget to install the little spacer screws between the case and board!

Both excellent things to point out. I got an amazingly stylish case (as in, designed by a design company that has produced auto designs for Fiat and Ferrari, among others), and while it it is mostly easy to deal with under the hood, the overall build quality was lacking in places and it's insanely heavy. And with my first build in 2004, I forgot the spacer screws and immediately shorted out the works - I was lucky that it still all worked when I remembered to put the screws in later.

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Posted: 19th January 2011 19:33

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Almost everyone I've talked to mentions those spacer screws. It seems to happen to a lot of people and is a classic rookie mistake. I'll definitely heed those warnings.

I found an excellent deal from Microcenter on a Intel Core i5 2500K LGA 1155 Boxed Processor together with an Asus P8P67 LGA 1155 P67 ATX Intel Motherboard for $300 US. I'm going to try and build around that.

One more question, though: will I need a wireless card? here's the motherboard I'm looking at. If I want to use wireless internet, I'll need a wireless card, right? I can't see one included on the motherboard.

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Posted: 19th January 2011 20:00

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Yeah, you would need a standalone wireless NIC in order to pipe wifi into that machine, either one that connects via PCI (the expansion slots on the motherboard) or USB. If you can get away with it, I'd stay with wired, especially if you're going to need to transfer lots of files across the network - I just upgraded my network to wired gigabit when I moved into my new house, and it was worth it, and it's definitely not speed you can get via wifi.

You could also consider a power-line networking setup for the whole house if you have a wired network elsewhere in the home; the data actually would travel through the powered electrical wall jacks in your home at that point. However, it's a lot more expensive than just getting a wifi adapter, so unless you really need faster network speeds than Wireless G or N can give you (either is faster than your internet connection if you have full wireless strength), you'll want the wifi adapter itself.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx...4-059-_-Product looks inexpensive and has good reviews, but it's a class of hardware that I just know absolutely nothing about. smile.gif


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Posted: 19th January 2011 20:03

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I'm going to try and stick to a wired connection. My computer is going to be located near the router. I also found a harddrive that should work (1.5TB, about $100) and am now looking for a decent RAM and video card.

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Posted: 19th January 2011 21:06

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This past summer, I built a half-decent rig for a little under $700 (including shipping, returns, mistakes, etc) and the best thing I learned from it was the the whole process is generally user-friendly. It was the second one I've done and the first I've done by myself, and I was surprised overall by how basically intuitive the job was. So if you have any fears left over from inexperience, I would put them to rest.

The thing I would reiterate is Tiddles' mention of not skimping on the power supply. Seems to be the only significant error I made, prompting me to already begin thinking of upgrading.

Also, this is more situational, but I recently had the problem of being too far away from a wired internet jack, so a wireless option might not be the worst use of money. That's more dependent on where you live, though.

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Posted: 20th January 2011 21:29

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Haha, learn from my husband's mistake. Get a decent power supply! I've got 550 watts now.

We bought a pretty decent computer, and only upgraded the graphics card to make it that much better about a year ago. It worked great!
That is, until it started shutting off randomly. While he was in Iraq, I had to troubleshoot it with the help of roomies. We first replaced the power supply, which was something awful, like 250 watts when my graphics card alone needed 450. Putting in the 550 watt one didn't fix it, so I had to look at other parts.
The power supply's failure killed my video card and motherboard by shorting out sad.gif Hello, new computer after only a year!

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Posted: 31st January 2011 01:07

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sorry to hijack your thread, laszlow, but i've been pricing parts to build my own PC as well for a bit now, and i'd like the input of someone more learned than myself on the subject.

basically, i want to build a PC that'll run the latest games, but i dont care abouyt running them at their highest specs. all i care about is smooth framerates and a respectable resolution.

here's a list of parts i'm looking at. if you guys could take a look at these and tell me if these will do what i want or if they'll even work together, i'd very much appreciate it smile.gif

Case: NZXT M59 - 001BK Black Steel ATX Mid Tower Computer Case
i have some computer cases from two busted PCs that i can use, if need be.

Mobo: GIGABYTE GA-M68MT-D3 AM3 NVIDIA GeForce 7025/nForce 630a chipset Micro ATX AMD Motherboard

CPU: AMD Athlon II X4 645 Propus 3.1GHz 4 x 512KB L2 Cache Socket AM3 95W Quad-Core Desktop Processor ADX645WFGMBOX

GPU: GIGABYTE GV-R545D2-512D Radeon HD 5450 512MB 64-bit DDR2 PCI Express 2.1 x16 HDCP Ready Low Profile Video Card

PSU: StarTech ATX2PW550PRO 550W ATX12V 2.01 SLI Ready Power Supply

RAM: CORSAIR XMS3 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model CMX4GX3M2A1600C9

HDD: SAMSUNG Spinpoint F3 HD502HJ 500GB 7200 RPM 16MB Cache SATA 3.0Gb/s 3.5" Internal Hard Drive -Bare Drive

Operating System: Microsoft Windows 7 Home Premium Full

so if you guys could let me know if i've made some terrible choices or if i'm missing something, i'd much appreciate it!

This post has been edited by Malevolence on 31st January 2011 01:37

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Posted: 31st January 2011 04:16

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I'm no expert at estimating such things, but I'd say that you're undercutting your goals if you plan on grabbing the Radeon 5450. It's definitely an amazing price, but I doubt you'd be able to run much in terms of new/up-and-coming games, much less at a respectable level.

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Posted: 31st January 2011 18:15

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Agreed - the rest is mostly good but the video card is comparatively puny and is the single most important element for playing games.

You may not care about running current games with the highest level of detail, but a card that can't do that for current games will struggle to do anything at all with games released a year or two down the line, so it's better to put the money into something a little bit better for now so that it will be useful for longer.

Consider a different PSU also - I've not really heard of Startech and the little bits and pieces I can find aren't filling me with confidence. This might help.

The rest looks fine, assuming the MB+CPU+RAM are a compatible combination.

This post has been edited by Tiddles on 31st January 2011 18:15
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Posted: 31st January 2011 18:57

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thanks for the heads up on the PSU and the graphics card. i can afford to spend more on the ard, so i'll do that. and i'm sure i can find an equally powerful PSU for the same price.

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Posted: 28th March 2011 17:57

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Hey, remember this? The last parts came in today. By taking advantage of several deals at various times, I managed to go only a *little* over budget on this thing. The final specs:

CPU: Intel i5 2500k
Motherboard: Asus P8P67
RAM: Patriot Memory Signature Lin 8GB (2x4GB)
Hard drive: Barracuda 1TB SATA drive
Video Card: GeForce GTX460
Power Supply: Corsair Professional Series HX-620W
Case: Antec DF-30 mid-tower chassis
Monitor: Asus VH236H 23" LCD monitor
DVD drive: $20 cheapo drive
Keyboard: $20 cheapo wired Microsoft keyboard

So... does that sound alright? I'm going to try and assemble it all this evening after my part-time job. Gotta remember those spacer screws, and also remember that the 3GB SATA ports are faulty in the mobo I bought (sigh).

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Posted: 29th March 2011 13:19

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I've refrained from comment because I'm not exactly a system builder. I just performed my first RAM upgrade weeks ago to bring this new Macbook Pro of mine up to 8gb and recently swapped out my mother's hard drive just shortly before that. It stands to reason that compiling complete configurations is not something I have practical experience with.

However just to be of help to anybody who might've been hit with the Cougar Point bug, as Laszlow I've done lots of reading up on the issue. Motherboard manufacturers are largely sympathetic so you can probably exchange that for a fixed one at no extra charge if you act quickly. Asus will even pay for the two way shipping from you to them. I'd highly recommend doing it so you can move your Berracuda to a SATA II link when Solid State Drive prices come down to your liking. Any conventional HDD won't even come close to saturating the two SATA III buses Sandy Bridge provides. Even most of today's SSDs, blazingly fast as they aren't really taking full advantage of SATA II.

This post has been edited by Tonepoet on 29th March 2011 13:36

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Posted: 30th March 2011 00:16

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It's actually a little too late for me to do that. I didn't find out about the faulty ports until more than 30 days after I bought the motherboard, and it was from a walk-in retailer instead of an online service. Luckily, it's an ASUS board so it comes with 4 good 6GB ports instead of 2. I strongly doubt I'll be hooking up more than 4 devices to it.

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Posted: 5th April 2011 18:12

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Quote
Luckily, it's an ASUS board so it comes with 4 good 6GB ports instead of 2. I strongly doubt I'll be hooking up more than 4 devices to it.


Hmm, there are a couple of applications you could choose to utilize like the various implementations of RAID, considerably fast eSATA connections for backup purposes or simple virtualization but these are all rather uncommon applications so you're probably right. However, If you think you might ever want to do something like that or sell your rig second hand to somebody who might...


Quote
It's actually a little too late for me to do that. I didn't find out about the faulty ports until more than 30 days after I bought the motherboard, and it was from a walk-in retailer instead of an online service.


...upon further examination of the situation at hand, you should still be covered under Asus's manufacturer direct warranty which covers their motherboards from faults for at least three years after the product's date of manufacture, unless otherwise noted. Which it is in a sense it is, in that after finding out about the issue, Asus reset the warranty of afflicted products to February first of the year two thousand eleven, to give their customers the maximum amount of time to carry out an exchange.

In this FAQ about the bug Asus gives the specifics on how to carry out the exchange and details on cross shipping to minimize downtime. It is of particular note that while the recommend requesting an R.M.A. as soon as possible, it doesn't seem that they require it. This is especially worth noting as they're willing to reset the warranty again to the shipping date for people who act before June 30th. You could chill out with the new gear 'till the end of may, send your board in and be covered for a few extra months. Granted it's not quite as simple as an in store return but it's something worth considering nevertheless.

This post has been edited by Tonepoet on 5th April 2011 18:39

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Posted: 15th April 2011 01:39

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Well, it's been two weeks! How is everything running? How fast is it? Does it have any limitations for graphics?

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Posted: 22nd April 2011 14:42

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Sorry for the delay, but I finally got the bugger set up. Took me awhile because I was terrified of breaking something, but so far everything's running perfectly smoothly. Got 8 gigs of RAM, 1TB hard drive, and a 1024MB GeFore GTX 460 video card. It probably can't play EVERYTHING, but it will play enough things. Currently in the process of downloading parts of my Steam collection.

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Posted: 23rd April 2011 05:44

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I think you'll be very happy with that - I'd be amazed if there's anything it can't play on very high settings at the moment, unless you have some kind of insanely huge monitor resolution (which you haven't according to the earlier spec). Glad it's all working out so far.
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Posted: 10th September 2011 16:11

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I hope you don't mind me putting this here Laszlow. It's a really useful thread this one. Some of the tips have been great.

I'm looking to put together a PC that will run video and music editing software at a relatively high level and play most games but, like Malevolence, I don't really care if it's not at the highest graphical setting. So far I've made this list for £366. First of all I'm wondering will this achieve what I want, and without any notorious problems in the hardware? If it does then is it possible to downgrade anything? I was hoping to come in at under £300 although I don't really mind if it doesn't. Also if anyone can see that I'm missing something please point it out!

Video card: Gigabyte ATI Radeon 6770 HD 850MHz 1GB PCI-Express HDMI

HDD: Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blue 7200RPM 16MB SATA 6Gb/s

Mobo: Asus M4A77T

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 AM3 Black Edition

RAM: 4GB (2x2GB) Patriot DDR3 1333Mhz CL7 Gamer Series

What I'm really unsure about is this case, fan and PSU. Link. My friend has had it for over 6 months without any issues which makes me tempted to follow him. For the record I don't really care about what the case looks like. It's a 500W supply and the manufacturer is EZCool. They're not on the lists Tiddles linked earlier. To make it worse on the reviews one person said the PSU exploded and the other said it was fine. Hmm.

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Posted: 11th September 2011 02:24

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Quote (sweetdude @ 10th September 2011 11:11)
Video card: Gigabyte ATI Radeon 6770 HD 850MHz 1GB PCI-Express HDMI

HDD: Western Digital 500GB Caviar Blue 7200RPM 16MB SATA 6Gb/s

Mobo: Asus M4A77T

Processor: AMD Phenom II X4 955 AM3 Black Edition

RAM: 4GB (2x2GB) Patriot DDR3 1333Mhz CL7 Gamer Series

What I'm really unsure about is this case, fan and PSU. Link. My friend has had it for over 6 months without any issues which makes me tempted to follow him. For the record I don't really care about what the case looks like. It's a 500W supply and the manufacturer is EZCool. They're not on the lists Tiddles linked earlier. To make it worse on the reviews one person said the PSU exploded and the other said it was fine. Hmm.

I haven't checked specific compatibility from piece to piece, though I probably could if you haven't already; here are a couple thoughts I had just from browsing the list:

HDD: I'd sink a bit more money into this. Storage costs next to nothing these days, and if you're really doing a lot of audio editing, you'll probably end up with a lot of raw uncompressed files. You can get one or two terabytes for not much more, so why not? Of course, this is coming from a guy who has three terabytes on one of his machines and two and a half on another, so I believe in storage overkill.

Mobo: I was on an ASUS for the first few years of my current gaming rig, and I honestly wasn't that happy with it. Not everyone has my experience, that's just anecdotal, but I was much happier after I moved to a Gigabyte board.

Case: I'd think about getting a case and PSU separate, or being very wary of the reviews. It's hard to tell where a PSU comes from in a combo unit like that, and that's a contributing factor as to why they cost so little. A blown PSU will ruin your day, so it's not a bad idea to save up a little longer for a more known quantity on that score. 500W seems low to me, but honestly, I'm not sure. I think I tend to overbuy on wattage too and I really shouldn't.

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Posted: 11th September 2011 11:30

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Ok I've bumped the storage up to 1TB, I think that's for the best. I'm buying the mobo, processor and RAM together in one tested unit so as far as I know they're compatible. Not sure about the graphics card. Thanks for the heads up about Asus I'll bear that in mind and see if there's an alternative.

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Posted: 11th September 2011 14:15

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Quote (sweetdude @ 11th September 2011 06:30)
Ok I've bumped the storage up to 1TB, I think that's for the best. I'm buying the mobo, processor and RAM together in one tested unit so as far as I know they're compatible. Not sure about the graphics card. Thanks for the heads up about Asus I'll bear that in mind and see if there's an alternative.

Having it pre-assembled and tested is a great idea, because it really minimizes the chance that you get something DOA and then have to send it back. However, all the stuff you picked out should be compatible, I did do a little bit of checking last night. Your graphics card will be fine - as long as it has a slot on the motherboard and there are drivers for the OS you plan to install, there's very little that can go wrong there aside from the thing simply not fitting in the case, but, now that I look at that card, it's not out of the realm of possibility - the passive cooling on that thing is massive.

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Posted: 19th February 2013 14:07

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I'm bumping this because I just finished a build on a new rig for the first all-new build I've done since 2006 (my earlier posts refer to a partial rebuild I did on Climhazzard a little while later).

I think I spent right at about a thousand dollars on the whole thing, and it's a pretty serious rig. It's running on an Intel Core i5 3570k with 8GB RAM and a 1GB Radeon HD 7770 graphics board on a Gigabyte motherboard. I loaded it up with a 128GB SSD plus 4TB of other storage, and it's also got a Bluray burner. Tiddles helped me pick out most of the parts, and I did the assembly and setup over the last week or so.

Eventually, since I got a pretty generic case, I would like to do a custom paint job on at least the side panels of it. However, I usually have about 15 projects open and not completed at any one time, so I'm not holding my breath.

In any event, if you're reading this because you're looking to build a new machine, you could do a lot worse right now than my setup. I'll be happy to share pics or more specific specs if anyone's curious down the line.

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Posted: 22nd February 2013 00:28

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This is relevant to my interests. I have zero experience building PC's but I am slowly trying to at least upgrade what I have (which is pretty bad according to most surveys).

anyway, here is my laughably bad system. I am completely open to suggestions. My budget is probably going to be close to 1000, maybe 1150 at the most. If this can get me a whole new system that is built to handle casual (as in, I just want to be able to play a few games, and I'm not too concerned with future proofing) gaming, please include those suggestions as well.

http://h20000.www2.hp.com/bizsupport/TechS...ectID=c01423731

^Let's all point and laugh at the dinosaur PC.

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Posted: 22nd February 2013 00:41

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You could build something very similar to my rig for $1000, Nyte, and it would be good for at least a couple years' more games, I think. I didn't total up everything I spent, but the only stuff I brought over from my old computer was one hard drive, the bluray burner, and the card reader. You probably also don't need a 3TB drive or a SSD hard drive like I put in mine.

It's nervewracking to build your own PC for the first time but they've done a pretty good job of making it noob-proof since the last time I did it. It's always scary to have to put pressure on a $400 set of equipment to get the chip in the motherboard, but once you do it's pretty smooth sailing.

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"To create something great, you need the means to make a lot of really bad crap." - Kevin Kelly

Why aren't you shopping AmaCoN?
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Posted: 22nd February 2013 02:00

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sounds good. Any chance of you posting up a full parts list? I'd probably use Newegg or maybe even Tiger for some of the parts (is Tiger even still a thing?), so long as I know that they work together and are capable of handling say a Skyrim at average settings.

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Posted: 22nd February 2013 08:35

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See all that fancy tech speak above?

That's why I console game

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