Hey, I'm a completely new person to building my own desktop, but I would like to get a gaming rig. The parts I decided on are: Newegg Wishlist And that runs to about $1600 before tax/shipping+handling. I really have NO CLUE how to build a desktop - should I attempt to build this on my own or maybe somehow finding someone to pay to build it? Thanks in advance for the help.
the parts you put together you pretty reasonable, although i'd suggest going for a better known PSU manufacturer instead of just going on the rated wattage. Try antec, tagan or enermax, theyre all decent quality and are within your budget. 400w should be more than enough from a reputable maker as fo how to build it, the best advice anyone can give you is to make bestest friends with google, and search for anything and everything and spend a few weeks just reading up. Its worth it in the end
Okay, that's cool. I changed it to an Antec PSU. Anyway, I guess I'll make the jump and attempt to build this machine. Is it really as hard as it sounds?
90% of things come with an idiots guide to installing (read quick install guide).. also did i miss the hard drive?
Nope. Patience. Time and Patience. (Not to mention a nice cash-flow) Is all you need. (Ignoring manuals)
It's not that difficult - read up and keep well-prepared with the many good sites on the subject, and you shouldn't have a problem. Everything clips together pretty easily. The hard part comes when something goes wrong, but hopefully you won't have to deal with that; if you do, we're here to help
you didnt, but someone did while a 150GB raptor is the fastest it gets, you're probably best off with a decent sized (300GB is a good price per GB ratio) current generation hard drive. They're all good tbh, lots of people have difference preferences for one reason or another, but dont listen to them there are some drives which are particularly known for dying, but that isnt an issue with the new drives around at the moment. going SATA is best, 16MB cache is a plus but it isnt vital. 300MB/s SATA wont really make much of a difference over 150MB/s SATA.
In the manual of most motherboards there is a diagram about how to mount the parts. It shows how the CPU should be placed, the RAM fitted and how the whole board goes into the case. (anyway, its in the manuals of the motherboards i use...)
okay, i got a Western Digital hard drive. 320GB, 7200 RPM. I heard that OEM is bad.. but the best rated ones were all OEM. Could this be a problem?
OEM isn't bad - generally, it means you don't get a warranty but with hard drives this isn't the case. They're cheaper because you don't get screws etc with them, but you should get those with any good case anyway.
OEM isnt available in stores afaik. OEM is a drive sold by a computermanufacturer. Like Dell or HP/Compaq. A drive that you get out of such a system is often a OEM drive. And no, its no problem. Its the same drive as you buy in a store, but it may have a sticker from the computermaker, and if you need waranty on it, you need to contact them, not the manufacturer of the drive.
Alright, now it's a 250 GB Seagate Good to hear that OEM isnt as bad as that one person told me it was. Thanks everyone for suggesting products and pointing out anything missing on my list. 1 or 2 more weeks of reading up and updating that wishlist, and I'll pull the trigger. Building's the part I'm afraid of.
OEM means original equipment manufacturer... meaning this drive is MEANT to be sold to companies such as dell etc, as it comes minus manual, minus pretty retail box, minus cables, minus screws... basically all you get is all most people building their own systems every really need... the drive this means you will need to get appropriate cable to hook up the drive (though most likely your motherboard will come with one), and get the needed screws to mount it in your case (again, most likely will come with the case) this is not really detrimental, though you will find that most OEM drives only come with a 1 year warranty, whereas retail drives may feature a 3 year warranty, though most hard drive manufacturers (especially western digital) are giving 1 year warranties on their retail drives anyway i personally tend to steer towards maxtor or seagate drives, as I find western digital drives a bit noisy
as I said, everyone has their preference in drives for some reason or another, but don't necessarily listen to all of them Seagate drives are, and always have been, on the slow end of the scale. The 7200.8s are also not top knotch on reliability as many people would like you to think. for drives around 300GB it isnt as easy to pick one out as with the top end drives (ie, for a 500GB drive, the hitachi 7k500, is without question, the one to get) There was a recent article on StorageReview weighing up mid-capacity drives that is well worth having a look through. I'm not saying that anyone in particular is wrong, but its worth having a read up before just taking someone's word for it. A lot of people simply prefer "x" drive manufacturer because its what they've always ysed and they've not had problems with them, rather than, as is the case with every other component, looking at the facts (ie when x cpu is undeniably better than y cpu) something you may want to look at in particular before jumping straight in with seagate - http://www.storagereview.com/articles/200601/250_office.png
I've just finished building my second PC. It isn't as hard as you would imagine but when things go wrong, which they did with mine it is an absolute nightmare. Sending products back to the company, CD's that don't work. You name it, it went wrong. Once you got it going though its great, I got a 7600 NVidia, 3ghz Intel Pentium 4 and 1gb of DDR 2 RAM and my PC can now lay most of the games at highest specifications!
The motherboard manual is your best friend when building a machine for the first time. That's where most problems with new builds lie. Good luck and let us know how it goes.
Hmm... sticking in a PCI/PCI-E card is pretty common place and I'm sure you've had at least some rudimentary experience with that, and if not, it's no big deal since it's pretty fool proof. Sticking a ram stick in is another thing that's done fairly often, and that's pretty fool proof too (can only go in one way). Also ram sockets nowadays seem to require much less pressure than they used to, they just click right in, instead of requiring you to exert all the weight of your body on the friggin thing to pop in. The processor insertion is a pretty delicate job, but if you follow the instructions in the mobo manual, should be all good. Same for heat sink installation. Motherboard headers, and all the other tiny bits of wire are also a delicate job, and frustrating if you have big hands, but just follow the manual for that too, and double check to make sure there aren't any swapped wires should be fine. I've rarely built a system that doesn't post the first time it's put together (some rare exceptions caused by DOA components), but that might be just me. Set aside about 3 hours of time to do everything. You'll probably finish in 1 or 2 hours, but just in case you have to sit there reading the manual for an hour. In the winter you have to worry about static, but it's spring now and pretty damp. If you're still worried, don't work on carpet, or just take your socks off. Let's see. I think software installation is actually the hardest part. Drivers seem to be the cause of most crashes. I'd get another computer, find all the newest drivers for all your components (vid card, sound card, mobo chipset, amd x2 patch for win xp, etc etc), burn them to a CD and have it ready for when windows asks you for them. Oh, found a good win xp tweaking guide if you're interested: http://www.tweakguides.com/files/TGTC_3.0.zip But yeah, don't sweat it, try to lay off the caffeine, take it nice and slow, you should be fine. -L6
Mm.. oh yeah, the components dont come with drivers? Pity... An OEM video card is there, I just noticed. That, I think, isn't a problem... Maybe1 or 2 more weeks of consideration - I have like 4 different possible setups I like; I'll have to choose soon.
major things that will require drivers are motherboard chipset and video cards it's best to get the newest version of the necessary drivers from either the board manufacturer (as I had to do recently with my new AOpen board as the default nVidia nForce 3 ones don't have all of the right parts) or the chipset manufacturer (nVidia in most AMD cases) video card drivers can be found from ATI or nVidia respectively pretty straight forward... download them now, burn them to cd, and once you get windows installed on the new system, pop cd in, copy extractor programs to your hdd and run them... if you're not sure exactly what to do, go with the default answers (easy setup) and you'll 99% of the time be sorted properly it's no where as difficult as a lot of people seem to believe to build a pc... just read the manuals and take your time.. and above all.. have patience
