Building Your Own Computer (Part 1)

Posted by David | Filed under Hardware

It sounds quite scary, but building your own computer is really not that difficult. As long as you spend a good amount of time planning what you need and get good quality components from a reliable retailer things should be absolutely fine.

I’d liken build your own computer to very advanced Lego! It’s sort of just like connecting wires to each other correctly, for my latest built all I needed to build was a mini £1.99 toolkit I bought with the rest of my components on Ebuyer, and 2 hours after it all arrived in massive boxes on my doorstep I had it set up!

In Part 1 of a series of blog posts I’m going to do on this I shall discuss planning your new desktop beauty.

Set a Budget

The very first thing you should do when building your computer is set yourself a reasonable budget, for a low end PC perhaps around £400, mid-end around £600, high-end £800+ and then don’t go over it! Component shopping can be addictive and higher/faster gear will entice you well above what your willing to pay! Saying this don’t compromise with cheap components, get something decent!

AMD or Intel that is the question?

The first thing to ask yourself is AMD or Intel as your processor. This is important as they both have to have a different kind of motherboard!

My advice currently would be to chose an Intel processor, and if you can afford it the 2.4Ghz Intel Core2 Quad Q6600 would be my top recommendation for a mid or high end desktop build, you really only need to go higher if you are planning on building something incredibly hardcore or require huge amounts of processing capability!

My recommendation would also be to get the retail processor and ensure it includes a heat-sink!! Your processor will die very quickly if it hasn’t got a heat-sink!

So far thats around £120 (£120) of our budget gone!

Choosing the Right Motherboard

Now before getting beyond this point if you are serious about building a computer you should have chosen your processor, or at least whether it is to be AMD or Intel as now you have a choice of either an Intel Motherboard or an AMD motherboard! Obviously you must get the same one as your processor. Also ensure that it is compatible with your processor choice. Older motherboards will not be able to cope with multi core processors! If you shop on a store like Ebuyer.com they supply enough information to decide whether a motherboard is compatible with a processor etc!

Also when chosing a motherboard ensure it has enough PCI slots for any extra components you may want to put in later on, such as soundcards, graphics cards, tv cards, physics accelerators, wifi cards etc!

Some motherboards will come with inbuilt sound, for the average listener this will probably suffice, but for those of us who enjoy our THX sound systems then a separate sound card is required!

Not every motherboard fits in every case! Make sure when you get a motherboard that it is going to fit in your case, for most people this is going to be an ATX motherboard which are compatible with most cases.

That just about covers motherboards, a rough price guide at the moment would be around £70 (£190) for a decent motherboard.

Finally on the motherboard subject make sure you know what RAM your motherboard takes, for most people this will be 4x DDR2, some very expensive modern boards do DDR3 but the RAM for these is very costly so I would avoid for now!

My personal recommendation for good motherboard is an MSI motherboard due to previous good experiences with them, however read the reviews and decide for yourself what you prefer!

What RAM (Random Access Memory)

Every computer builder no doubt has their own favourite type of RAM personally I favour Corsair as a brand. Make sure to get some quality RAM, and ensure it is compatible with your motherboard - DDR2 in most cases. Also make sure you are buying Desktop memory and not Laptop!! Don’t settle for the cheap RAM, even Corsair do some pretty cheap stuff! For a desktop today I would recommend 2GB (especially if you will be getting Vista!) (2x 1GB) of 800MHz RAM. If you are going to get a 64bit system then consider 4GB but ensure everything is compatible, some components will through a hissy fit at 4GB! I will discuss whether to get 64bit or 32bit later on.

That should take another £40 (£230) approximately out of your budget.

Thats some of the most important components out of the way now! In Part 2 I shall cover, Hard Drives, Optical Drives, Cabling and other extra components you might consider!

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