Project: Build my *own* PC

Way back in the early days of computing, it was much cheaper to buy the components of a PC and assemble it yourself, as opposed to getting one off the shelf.  You used to be able to build a PC and make a healthy mark-up on it too.

With the rise in popularity of home computers, companies are banging out cheaper and cheaper PCs all the time, making the margins less and less but focusing on volume of sales. This all means that it’s no longer profitable to build a PC and try to sell it, but it does mean that we end up buying what these companies have spec’d up for us.

What I want to do, is to price-up and build my own PC, choosing the parts that I want, allowing me to focus my financial attention where I’d like.

My Current PC

I have a Dell Vostro 220s, which has the following specification:

• Intel Core2 Duo 2.66 GHz (E6750)
• Originally 2GB of RAM, but now 4GB
• 320GB Hard disk drive (as standard)
• ATI Radeon X1300 256MB video card with 2x DVI outs (as standard)
• It originally came with Vista Business, but I’m now running Windows 7 Ultimate (64bit)

In all, I think I paid around £450 about 3 years or so ago, without a monitor.

I actually swapped it for a laptop! My mates’ teenage son ordered it from Dell on his dad’s business account, and then decided he wanted a laptop when Dell told him that it would be yet another 3 weeks!  I stepped in, bought the laptop he wanted, and did a trade.

The PC is doing absolutely fine, to be fair and I haven’t had any problems with it to speak of.  I’d like to build myself another PC, as I’d like to use this PC elsewhere at home and have a newer one for myself, and because I can.

The main drawback with this PC, is the ‘s’ in the 220s model name; this means that the case is a slim-line case, i.e. a low profile case. This had caused me grief in the past, when trying to get more expansion cards for it, such as a gigabit network card and, more recently, another dual-output graphics card to run alongside my existing card.

The motherboard itself has one 16x PCI-Express slot, one 1x PCI-Express slot and two (I think!) regular PCI slots. The existing graphics card consumes the 16x slot, so when I wanted a gigabit card for it, I managed to get a 1x PCI-Express low-profile Belkin card off of eBay, but still new. Great, no problem, but twice the price of the same card which was of regular height.

When I wanted to scale-up from the two Samsung 23” widescreen monitors that I’m using to three, (same problem for four monitors), I purchased another dual-output graphics card, but of the 1x PCI-Express edition, meaning my gigabit card was out, and back down to the 10/100 that comes on-board. No problem, except the graphics cards drivers kept conflicting with each other, and I’d often boot the PC up to find both sets of drivers had been binned and I was back down to 640x480 resolution on one monitor. Not a good look on a big screen with high-resolution capabilities!

So, I re-sold that on eBay, and bought a matching pair of Sapphire cards, but one in 16x and the other in 1x – still had driver grief, and these didn’t work out, meaning I returned them for a refund. :o(

So, I’m back down to the two screens on the standard card that came with the PC, but having the momentary taste for a third monitor has made me want it more.  (The fourth monitor can wait until I get a bigger desk, or can afford one of those scaffolding sets…)

Also, (and it’s a fairly minor point), the most amount of RAM I can have in this PC is the 4GB that the board supports. Running 64-bit Windows certainly helps scoop up that last little bit though!

What’s going to happen to this PC when I get a new one? Well, that’s a whole other blog post..!

My new PC

So – the first question is really, “what I do want my new PC to do that my current PC doesn’t do?”

Well, obviously, I’d like more power. The dual-core processor I have is great and I can see the difference between that and my home server, which has the Intel Pentium 4 2.66GHz single-processor model.  The Quad-core processors are coming down significantly in price now, and so I’m looking in that direction with my rose-tinted goggles on.

More RAM is also a no-brainer. Currently, I often allocate 1-2GBs of RAM to Virtual PCs, meaning it’s straight off the top of the total RAM available to the PC overall, as the virtual PCs don’t share this RAM back to the host when not used; it’s allocated and reserved wholly to the VPC.

In terms of hard disk space, I currently have a 300GB drive, as I mentioned earlier. Of that, I reckon I actually need 30-40 GB of usable space, as all my personal files are stored on a network share, so I need enough space to have the following installed:

• Windows 7
• Visual Studio (Because I’m a dev-geek)
• Office 2007 (or 2010 beta)

So, I’m wondering if I can see how much a snazzy new solid state drive (SSD) is – the ones I have seen so far, tend to be around the £2-3 per gigabyte of capacity, so a 40GB drive could £80-120.  This isn’t too far off the price of a 1-1.5 terabyte SATA II drive, but I’d only be buying a SATA drive and not using the capacity of it for anything.  Also, if I were to buy an SSD, then the read/write speeds are amazing and will have a big impact on the boot-up time of my PC, as well as normal work.

Multi-monitor capability is also another area of particular interest – obviously, I’d want to get a graphics card that could handle the two existing monitors that I currently have, but I’d want to be looking at making it as easy as I can for myself to get another card of the same make/model that will simply slot-in and work, giving me the flexibility that I’d like to go to a third monitor.

The case. Ah, the case. In all of my previous PCs (and I’ve had a few!) I have always had a midi-tower or bigger, by shear chance and not by selection.  When this 220s came along with it’s slimness, it didn’t really bother me aesthetically, as it normally lives on the floor under my desk anyway.  This time, I want a case that will be the full width, saving me any future grief with expansion cards (Arg!) as well as provide lots of bays for any number of drives that I’d like to throw at it in future.

The last main thing, is a bigger power supply unit (PSU) – I currently have a 250W unit in this 220s tower and when I was looking into those two graphics cards, lots of websites recommended a 350+W power supply because of their draw on the power.  Whether this is true or not, I don’t know, but if I want a space for a few more drives, then I’m going to need a PSU that can potentially take the drives and not get louder and louder when the pressure’s on. Which reminds me, I’d like it to be quiet too – I’m not fussed if there’s a bit of a hum from it, as I’m not precious about absolute silence from the PC really, but having said that, given the choice, certainly, I’d go for the quieter option.

In terms of what I do on my PC, it’s mainly work stuff, in that I don’t use my PC to play games – I never have. If I want to play games, I’ll turn the PS3 on and go from there, but the PC has always been for ‘doing’ stuff.  Microsoft Visual Studio 2008/2010 don’t need massive graphics cards to operate, nor do web-browsers, or Microsoft Office.

So, that’s it really. Lots of processing power, RAM and a big case. Hmm. That should be interesting…

< quick dash off to the internet >

Ok. Here’s what I have spec’d up, literally from the aria.co.uk website to gather some high-level info on prices, availability, etc. (All prices include VAT, as I’m not VAT registered to claim it back!!)

Case: Zalman MS1000-HS1 Mid Tower, at £93.94

I saw this case in a .net magazine a week or so ago and was quite taken by it.  It’s big, spacious and… big.

It’s got space for 7x 5.25” drives, room for 7 expansion slots, has 3x 3.5” hot swappable drives as well as space for my suitcase. And, at 200mm x 560mm x 500mm it’s still a Mid tower.

Proc: Intel Core i7 920 2.66GHz Quad-core (1366), at £205.61

This was actually the cheapest i7 processor that aria do, but a quad-core 2.66Ghz processor isn’t really to be sniffed at, I don’t think. A mate at work has the 2.8GHz model and it sounds good from him, so a bit of recommendation in there too.

This i7 processor was the first component that I picked out, as the socket-type on here determined which motherboards that I could look at.

Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R (1366), at £133.94

This wasn’t the first board I noted, but the first one was £280, and was probably a very nice motherboard too, but I just didn’t see the point in having that and spend all that much more on it.  This GA-EX58-ED3R, other than having such a memorable name, does everything I think I need it to do – it has lots of expansion slots, it can take a daft amount of RAM for a desktop machine and it’s compatible with the 1366-socket processor that I’ve chosen.

In addition to all of that, the motherboard has an on-board 7.1 sound card and, more interestingly, a gigabit network card, negating my need for an additional card for that.

RAM: G. Skill Trident 6GB (3x2GB), at £152.74

Well, what can I say? 6GB of RAM really ought to be enough for anyone, but without shelling out a kidney for it, I thought £150 for 6GB was enough! 

This is DDR3 PC3-16000C9 2000MHz Triple Channel Kit RAM, which has lots of numbers to sound impressive, even if it’s not.  It’s a stark contrast from the 4MB of RAM I had in one of my first PCs though!

Graphics: Nvidia GeForce 9800GT 512MB, at 64,61

As I mentioned earlier, I don’t need high-powered graphics cards, as I am not going to use my PC to play games on.  The reason I have chosen this particular card, is because it has dual-DVI output slots and has 512MB of on-board RAM, which sounds like a lot to me. 

It’s a PCI-Express card too, and the motherboard I’ve selected should be able to take two of these. 

I’ve just noticed that the cards appear to be full-height cards too – something which would have ruled this option out straight away with the slim-line case of the 220s.

HDD: Patriot PS-100 32GB Solid State Drive, at £64.61

Not a bad price, I thought. Originally, I listed a pair of 1TB Western Digital SATA II drives with the intention of RAID’ing them, but then as I mentioned earlier, why do I need big drives to waste the capacity. And, if my data is stored elsewhere, why not get an SSD drive to get the PC up and running fast.

I’m sure that one day, I’ll find a 32GB SSD drive in the back of my cupboard here in my office and think “blimey, I remember spending a lot of money on such a small drive…” – just like I do when I still come across the 40 or 60GB 3.5” hard drives from days of old.

PSU: Corsair CX Series 400W, at £39.94

Well, what can I say, it’s a big power supply and it’s not a bad price. The blurb says that it’s fairly quiet… I can’t measure it in terms of decibels, or anything against what I’ve got, so it’s just a matter of price really. £40 seems fine, no? Again, no games, so no fancy one needed. Nor do I need one that has neon lights on, as you wouldn’t see it inside the Zalman case anyway!

Chip Cooler: Arctic Cooling Freezer Pro R2, at £15.26

Originally, I picked a £55 chip cooler, but scaled it back in terms of price. I know some people that would choke at the thought of putting a £15 cooler on a £200 processor, but if the processor is so powerful and does more work quicker and I’ve admitted I’m not going to be doing large processing work that often, then it shouldn’t matter. Of course, this then raises the question why I need a powerful processor, but I’ll skip that and pretend I still need it anyway.

Sundries: 2.5” to 3.5” bracket to hold the SSD drive, and a tube of CPU-paste to help transfer heat away from the processor to the chip cooler quicker. Sub-total here, at about £13.00

Phew.

So, that’s it. Obviously, I’ve left out the price of the operating system, as I have a license for that sorted already. All in all, here’s the price that it comes to: £783.55, excluding any delivery costs of course. And VAT on top of the delivery, on top of the cost of the parts.

As I mentioned though, this was all done straight from the aria website – I’m sure that I could shop around for each part and save a few quid here and there too, but that’s really a job on the day, with a fist full of cash, as the prices and parts really can differ from one day to the next.

What’s the plan? I’m going to work on getting the spare £785 together and go from there. No doubt that as soon as I do, the price of these particular components will have dropped and newer parts become cheaper, but I’ve always taken the attitude of buying as best as you can at the time you have the money, as PC parts are bad for dropping in price due to the market.

What’s the Wife Acceptance Factor (WAF)? Well, it’s a bit better than it was! When I first priced up this PC, it turned in at over £1200 – not a happy face did my wife have.  Admittedly, it is still a hell of a lot of money to waste on yet another PC for the Brett Rigby scrap-head of PC parts, boxes, etc that fills my loft. And my shed. And the space under the stairs. And even the boot of my car. (I kid you not.) 

If I could somehow get the price down a little further to around the £500 mark, that would be fantastic and I’m sure my wife would be much happier about all of this, but I fear that it would mean settling for a lesser processor, or less RAM, etc, when the whole point of looking into all of this, was to get what I wanted. My boss at work suggested buying in dribs and drabs to help spread the cost of the PC across many months.  I like his thinking, but I am also reminiscent of the days of getting enough new parts together to fit all at once. And then finding out that the motherboard wasn’t exactly compatible with the new processor, or the RAM was shot before I fitted it.

Anyway, I’ll try to blog something here and when I get this new PC.