As you might have gathered from my last entry, I built my very first computer as a present for the boyfriend. He needed an upgrade for his gaming machine and we found that his 2006 model just couldn't be upgraded any further and the latest games wouldn't run... So, we would refit it. New motherboard, new processor, new graphics card.
He wanted a top-of-the-range machine so that it wouldn't need upgrading for a while yet, so we selected the almost-best-but-not-quite (not made of money here :P ) parts.
We went with the following:
- Gigabyte EX58-UD3R motherboard
- Intel Core i7-920 @ 2.66GHz processor
- ASUS EN9600GT (with Nvidia Geforce 9600GT GPU/1GB VRAM) graphics card
- 6GB Corsair DDR3 RAM
When it arrived, we found that ah - previous computer case was a Micro ATX form and the motherboard we purchased was ATX. The graphics card required at least 400W of power and the current PSU would only supply 115W. Hmmm. Oh well, blame my n00biness. :P Out we went again, and picked out the following extra parts:
- Jeantech Arctic 600W PSU
- Jeantech Luna case with fiddly light-up bits
- Sony BD-ROM Blu-ray/DVD/CD-ROM
So! Now we build (pictures described by text underneath them)...
Parts!
The working area - ooh, shiny
In goes the motherboard
Processor
Almost there... Most of the bits in now!
Aaaand... Then I forgot to take more pictures, so here's the finished product:
The front bit opens up to reveal the optical drive etc. Yes, it lights up (not my idea...), but it worked first time, the drivers and everything installed without a problem, and everything is great :D We took the 200GB hard drive and 8-in-1 card reader out of the old computer as they were still pretty good, then reformatted the lot and put Windows 7 RC 64-bit edition on there (it previously had XP Media Center which would only see 2GB of RAM :\ ) and lo and behold... Latest games run fine, not found a single problem with it yet. We'll definitely be getting the full version of Windows 7 when it comes out as the boyfriend hates Vista and needs DirectX 10 for his games (which is only available in Vista and 7)... So, there we have it. He can pay for that though :P
I was surprised to find that it worked, to be honest... I'd never built a computer from scratch and while I did have some guidance at first, I was apparently doing so well I didn't need it XD
More pics can be seen on my Flickr account :)
Aisling
28/06/2009 at 22:27
Oooer. I'll probably never need to build my own computer, but it seems cool. What a nice gift! You get a GF award this year. :P
Melissa
29/06/2009 at 17:28
YAY FINALLY PIX! :D It looks quite shiny. Grats on building it, WOOOO!!! I hope him appreciates. ;)
Vasili
30/06/2009 at 1:03
Shiny. 8D
If you don't mind sharing, how much do you think you saved for building it your own over buying one with specs like that?
April
1/07/2009 at 12:32
Hey! I"m so glad you have built a computer for gaming because this is exactly what I want to do also! My current computer is definitely not good enough to be even slightly a gaming computer so I shall build my own.
I think it would be really great if you say, posted an article about all the different and keep us posted with how everything goes and stuff because I think it will definitely help me on my endeavour to building my own computer.
=] It looks good!
Amelie
1/07/2009 at 18:41
@April: one thing I will say is, it's not something to get into if you don't know what you're doing. While I'm the first to admit I'm hardly an expert, I had experienced people within reach and supervising what I was doing. If you do something wrong, you risk frying the nice expensive parts you bought :(
@Vasili: I'd say we saved about £1000 (about $700 USD). Looking around at pre-built systems with the kind of specs we have, the prices are really quite expensive and well out of our range. I'm satisfied that we saved a lot of money :D
Kitty
11/07/2009 at 13:43
wow! congrats on building the computer yourself, especially it was your first try. I WISH I can do it myself too but I haven't reached that level yet. :(