After Much Consideration, We're Going to Build a PC

Discussion in 'Technology' started by nancyb, Sep 3, 2007.

  1. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I've threatened to do this for several years, but have always found writing a check much easier than actually doing it. We are going to build a PC from scratch. The boys want it for gaming, the girl is only interested in iTunes, the Web and using it for homework. With that info, what components do you recommend?

    As for experience in PC work, here's what I've done in the past:

    Installed a new motherboard that had a CPU already installed.
    Replaced CPU fan.
    Installed new power supplies.
    Installed numerous cards.
    Replaced DVD/CD drives.

    Where I've run into problems:

    Installing a second hard drive. For some reason, that project was a complete bust.

    My thought was that I would get one of those motherboard/cpu combos, then add on from there.
     
  2. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    How does this look and what am I missing?

    CPU/Motherboard/Case Combo
    V133-7110 :: Visionman / Socket AM2 / AMD64 X2 3800+ / 1GB DDR2-667 / Gigabit LAN / NVIDIA GeForce Video / Media Reader / PCI-Express / RAID 0, 1, 5 / 585 Watts

    $379.99

    cd/dvd drives
    L12-1017 :: Liteon 52x Black CD-ROM OEM Drive (Accessories Sold Separately) (2.2 lbs)


    $14.99

    A457-4030 :: AOpen DSW1812PL Lightscribe DVD Burner - 18x DVD±R Burn, 16x DVD±R Read, 8x DVD+RW, 6x DVD-RW, 8x DVD±R DL, 12x DVD-RAM, Nero Software, Internal (2.1 lbs)



    $39.99

    Disk Drive
    TSD-750AS :: Seagate / Barracuda 7200.10 / 750GB / 7200 / 16MB / Serial ATA-300 / OEM / Hard Drive (1 lbs)



    $219.99

    Video Card
    P450-8014 :: XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Extreme / 320MB GDDR3 / SLI Ready / PCI Express / Dual DVI / HDTV / Video Card (3.2 lbs)


    $299.99

    Cooling Fan
    T925-1074 :: Thermaltake TR2 / Silent Boost RX / Socket 754/939/940 / Copper / CPU Cooling Fan (1.35 lbs)


    $29.99

    OS
    M17-7412 :: Windows Vista Home Premium 32-bit DSP OEM DVD (0.25 lbs)

    $119.99
     
  3. JeremyEritrea

    JeremyEritrea Member+

    Jun 29, 2006
    Takoma Park, MD
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Where are you buying your parts from, NewEgg?
     
  4. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States

    That's where I got those quotes. I'm wondering just how long the resolve will win out over the checkbook. I figure if I don't move fast, the resolve will die.
     
  5. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Nice hardware list! The onboard video is usually pretty good with Nvidia chips, but if high-end gaming is desired, the separate video card is probably a good idea. You *might* be able to set up a multi-head monitor rig with those cards. Depends on if Vista can do that. I use two monitors here at work (on my laptop!), and I love it.

    More RAM never hurts, but 1GB ought to be sufficient (NB: I don't have much experience with Vista). In fact, "add more RAM" is the "take two aspirin and call me in the morning" of "my computer is too slow" remedies.

    I assume the Lite-On drive is for making easy disk-to-disc copies? You may want to upgrade that to a DVD drive - should only cost a few bucks more - or drop it all together. I have several Lite-On drives, and haven't had any problems with them.

    You've already done every step involved in building your own machine, perhaps save installation of the OS on a bare system. Piece of cake. The hardest part is making sure you buy components that will work together (RAM+MB+Proc+any cards), and it *looks* like you've got that sorted. Buying a "barebones" system takes a lot of the legwork out of it.
     
  6. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Ok, one more question before I fill in my credit number. Should I go with two smaller hard drives or one mega drive?

    Oh, and since I've installed DOS and Linux, I think I've passed the install OS from scratch test (we won't go too much into detail on the Linux stuff).
     
  7. Foosinho

    Foosinho New Member

    Jan 11, 1999
    New Albany, OH
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Personal preference, I guess. One bigger drive gives you more bang for your buck, but how "risk-averse" are you? Hard drives, in my experience, don't fail all that often, and most of the data we store on them is not critical (and if it is, it should be backed up anyway). And I doubt you would have performance issues that would require more than one drive.

    IOW, one drive is fine, unless it gives you the heebie-jeebies, in which case get two and mirror them with the onboard RAID.

    If you've installed Linux, Vista should be piece of cake.
     
  8. Belgian guy

    Belgian guy Member+

    Club Brugge
    Belgium
    Aug 19, 2002
    Belgium
    Club:
    Club Brugge KV
    If you get two smaller drives, you could run a RAID 0 configuration, I see your motherboard has an onboard RAID controller that supports this. That way, your two drives will appear as one volume. Meaning they will appear to be a "single drive" with the combined size of the two drives.
    An added benefit to this is that it will virtually double the reading speed to your HDs (since the data is distributed evenly among the two drives)

    Only downside to this is that if you use a RAID 0 configuration, if one of the HDs crashes, you basically lose all of your data.

    I'm running a RAID 5 configuration for my data HD's myself, but if you choose to go this way, you'll need three HD's and you will lose one of those three drives to the distributed parity, meaning although you'll have three drives, you will only be able to use 2/3 of their storage capacity. So three 500 GB drives in RAID 5 will only give you 1000 GB storage.
    However, in case of a single drive failing, you won't lose your data. So I guess it is all down to if the data you are storing is critical enough to warrant the extra cost of going with a RAID 5 configuration.
     
  9. Belgian guy

    Belgian guy Member+

    Club Brugge
    Belgium
    Aug 19, 2002
    Belgium
    Club:
    Club Brugge KV
    I agree with you here, if we're talking about quality HDs. I've had some bad luck with some of the cheaper brands. In my previous PC, I had to replace two of the three Maxtor drives by the time I bought my new computer. It was only three years old at the time that I replaced it, so only one of the three drives actually lasted the full three years. Never had any problems with Seagate or Western Digital HDs, though.
     
  10. Grouchy

    Grouchy Member+

    Evil
    Apr 18, 1999
    Canal Winchester
    Club:
    Columbus Crew
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I would go with two drives if you desire raid1/mirror and don't have a server you make frequent backups to, if you are doing any video/tv capture or recording or DVD ripping, or if you are going to be multitasking along the lines of playing an intensive game while listening to mp3's (game on one drive, music on another), or if you are a heavy photoshop (or any other software that creates a lot of large, temporary work files/undo points).

    Right now the 500GB drives are the best $/GB followeb by 200GB then 400GB. The 750GB drives are just a little overpriced IMO at the moment.
     
  11. spejic

    spejic Cautionary example

    Mar 1, 1999
    San Rafael, CA
    Club:
    San Jose Earthquakes
    With Vista you better get 2Gb of memory.

    And I agree that you are better off with a DVD read only drive than a CD read only drive.
     
  12. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    We're expecting the shipment to arrive Monday or Tuesday. Almost nothing on my proposed first list of components ended up on the final list.

    I upgraded the processor, skipped the barebones combo and bought separate parts, downsized the internal drive and bought a 500 gig external drive (thank Tom's Hardware for that idea). Anyway, I'm looking forward to everything showing up and hoping it will turn out ok.

    Here's the main list (not fully inclusive):

    MSI K9N4 SLI-F Socket AM2 Motherboard
    AMD Athlon 64 X2 5600+ Socket AM2 BOX CPU
    Corsair Value Select 1024MB PC5400 DDR2 667MHz (x2)
    XFX GeForce 8800 GTS Extreme 320MB PCIe w/Dual DVI
    Seagate 320GB Serial ATA HD 7200/16MB/SATA-3G
    Ultra 550w X2 Power Supply / 120mm / Titanium
    Cooler Master Centurion 5 - Blue, No PSU (Case)
     
  13. Boundzy

    Boundzy BigSoccer Supporter

    Jul 1, 2003
    Club:
    Liverpool FC
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    That looks more impressive than the original specs you mentioned. Should be a great machine. Good luck with the build.

    I will be replacing my AMD Athlon 3000+ machine in the next few weeks. My initial basic specs are:

    CPU: Intel E6750
    MB: Gigabyte GA-P35-DS3L
    Video: Sapphire X1950Pro 256MB
    Power: Corsair 450VX
    HD: WD Caviar SE16 250GB SATA
    RAM: Corsair Twin 2X2048-6400C4
     
  14. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    She's built and up and running. We had a scare with it not posting when the power was turned on. That was caused by the CPU power not plugged in! I was pretty tired when I was troubleshooting, so I completely missed that and worried about it at work all day. Anyway, I basically started the construction on Wednesday and got the OS installed last night. Today we worked on getting updated drivers.

    Hardest part of the install was the case. The front panel was a pain to get off. An internet search revealed that the best way was to pry it off with a screwdriver. It's a tool free design, which is pretty sweet for locking in drives, etc.

    Now that I've built first computer from scratch, I'm ready to build another one. I know that one will go much faster than this one.

    Vista's only crashed a few times and I got errors during the Office install. I guess I better move from this thread to the Vista one now.
     
  15. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    Just as a matter of interest what happened with the Linux install? Were there any problems? Which Distro did you use?
    You've just installed it and it's crashed? Man... only with Microsoft, eh?
     
  16. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Installing Linux was no big deal. I used Mepis. I did have hardware issues with my network that caused issues with Samba. Also, I have go and restart Samba by hand everytime I lose my internet connection. So, I wouldn't say I ever really used Linux much. I might do that with the computer that's being sent out to pasture after the new one was built.
     
  17. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    I use opensuse 10.2, not mepis but that seems, er... odd! You should only be offering samba to your local network anyway as you probably know. Anyway, what you suggest is usually a good idea. Linux makes a rock solid file server for video/music files and such like with no software cost.

    Have you anyone that's running mepis you can ask if you have a problem? I could help you with opensuse if you use that. :)
     
  18. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Whoa! Big bummer. The youngest comes out of the computer room asking if anyone else heard those loud pops or saw those flashes. Ooh, a nice electrical burn smell is coming from the computer room and the new computer is dead.

    Apparently, the power supply went haywire. The rest of the computer is fine. I bought a cheapo power supply to see if I could get thing working again. That must have worked, because i'm using the new computer now.

    I'm returning the fried power supply, but I'll keep the cheapo one. Just in case.
     
  19. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    To be absolutely honest, spnding additional money on some items, like expensive PSU's, is usually a complete waste of money in my experience. They're often no better and the cheap ones are usually made by the same people as the expensive ones.

    Some things have a better technical specification so, in that case, there's some point but PSU's and suchlike? Usually not. Sure, they've gotlittle graphs on side saying as how they'll be more reliable but it just doesn't seem to work out in practice.
     
  20. Rima067

    Rima067 New Member

    May 10, 2004
    I wondered about doing this before but don't feel I am experienced enough to do this. But, is it really worth building your own? Was the price worth it? How do you feel abotu this now after you finished?
     
  21. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    I think it's worth it because you get what you want, plus, you can be sure you can customize things. Now, when the computer blew up, I was pretty freaked. I can't just take the computer back to the place I bought it. The on-line vendors only offer a limited warranty, then you deal with the manufacturer.
     
  22. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Actually, that power supply is pretty nice, except for the fact it's shedding blobs of burnt electrical wires now. You could plug in only the wires you needed.
     
  23. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    It's definitely worth doing it. Just think about it for a minute... If nancyb had bought this from a shop the faulty component would still have been faulty but she'd have to wait quite a while for them to get around to fixing it. Also, what quality of component are they using? I'll tell you - they cheapest they think they can get away with.

    Truth is that nancyb has been incredibly unlucky.

    Most PC's bought from small shop's or manufacturers that haven't got the big brand names on are assembled by some spotty 18 year-old kid in the back room and, bluntly, they're probably overqualified for the work. They're are a few tricks and things you need to know but they usually revolve around practical stuff like how to connect up lights for the front of the case. If you've got a digital camera and photograph the components people on here can usually help including me.

    I've probably assembled between 2-3,000 PC's in the past 20 years and it's now trivially simple. Gone are the days when the western digital hard drives weren't compatible with the western digital hard drive controller!!!

    The thing to remember is, if you don't know ASK!!! For a start, ask the people selling you the bits 'Is this compatible with that?'.

    Really, it's simple :)
     
  24. Naughtius Maximus

    Jul 10, 2001
    Shropshire
    Club:
    Chelsea FC
    Nat'l Team:
    England
    Like I said to the other fella... you've been very, very unlucky. Having said that the PSU is one of those items that does fail. That's why they have a burn-in test which, essentially, consists of puttting a bunch of newly assembled PC's in a small room or box which is sealed and then running them for, say, 12-24 hours. They will typically run a round-robin test of memory, hard disk, etc. The temperature will get up to around 30-40 degrees C and its usually the parts with moving bits, (like the PSU), that will fail first.

    One thing I would say is that fixing PC's is much, much easier if you have another one. For example, I had a PSU fail like you but, obviously, you can't be sure what else has gone, if anything. So, I simply took the top off another PC, ran the power cable from the working machine to the dead one's motherboard and switch it on. It worked fine so it was obviously just the PSU. Of course, if I didn't have a working one I couldn't have done that.

    That's why you'll always find bits of PC's lying around in experienced PC builders garages... not because they definitely need them - but they MIGHT!!!

    Also, if you saw the PC I'm using now it hasn't got a top on. In fact, I haven't bothered putting the top, (case), on a PC in about 10 years because I'm always whipping it off again to fiddle around with stuff :D

    Mind you, that's just me!
     
  25. nancyb

    nancyb Member

    Jun 30, 2000
    Falls Church, VA
    Club:
    DC United
    Nat'l Team:
    United States
    Yes, having another computer around does help. My old, spare power supply was only about 250 watts, so it really wasn't up to the task. We borrowed someone else's to determine that the problem was the power supply. Now, I'll have my own spare.
     

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