Saturday, November 1, 2008

Gaming PC Build

Well here it is finally my first post on a build that I've actually completed last Sunday October 26 2008. I'm just gonna start with the different pieces that I bought rather then the process of putting them all together, hopefully I will post that tomorrow but the latest it will be is by next week.

Let me first start that this is not my first PC that I've built (just my second from scratch, I have done a bunch of upgrades to different machines but not full builds), so for this build I decided to save some money by using a full tower case that I've previously used, a used Benq DVD burner and a 500 watt ultra power supply. 500 watts was just enough power for the build that I had in mind, I may have to upgrade later but it should be fine for awhile.

The most simple piece for me to pick was my 500 GB Hitachi SATA 2 300 HDD. The last hard drive I had purcashed for my previous machine was just about the time when they started to introduce SATA 150 but for some reason I had decided to go with a 250 GB Western Digital ATA. This was my first experience with a SATA drive and I must say that their is a huge difference between SATA and traditional parallel ATA. All the brands for hard drive where pretty much that same price so I managed to pick this one up for $70 CDN. I picked that size of HDD just because it was the best value because a bigger drive would cost significantly more and a smaller driver would not be much cheaper.

The ram that I decided to use where a 2 GB kit of Patriot Extreme Performance DDR3 - 13333. My previous build when they also had just introduced DDR2 so I had decided to use some new DDR2- 533 with that system so it just seemed that I would follow my pattern and upgrade to the new standard. Only reason that I had decided to pick up some Patriot ram was because it was currently on sale at my local Canada Computers. With the sale price, they only managed to put me back about $60-65 CDN. They are pretty cool looking with there aluminum shielding to reduce heat.

The video card that I would have to pick would be very important to my machine if I were to use it for gaming so I spent a lot of time to do research on what was the best value. I decided to pick an ATI Radeon 4850 for the value. I had read a lot of good reviews on these cards and they were about $100 cheaper then the 4870's. I had been interest in a nvidea card but the 280's are damn expensive. Just not something that I can afford. Canada Computers did have another sale on the Palet Radeon 4850 for $150 but by the time I had got there they had sold all ready. In my dismay I decided to just get the Saphire version since I have heard good things about there products. This card does use the new PCI express X2 which is the new standard along with direct X10. I would be interested in crossfire in the future but was not an option at my current time on my budget and from what I've read from the reviews I would not need it. This ended up the most expensive part of my machine and more expensive then the original one I wanted at $200 CDN.

The CPU was the next really important part that I would need to buy. I like to go on account that I've had a long history of bad experiences with Intel (a 3.2 GHz single core and a 3.0 GHz dual core D, both which seemed never to work) and my dad had just purchased a new AMD based machine so I was more then interest in getting a AMD X2 6000+ or a Phenom X4 9850 but after doing some catching up on some new developments on CPU's i had decided against it. I had know that the AMD duals cores destroyed the Intel D series but I had not heard any news about the new dual core duo's. Turns out Intel has turned the tables. I looked up a article from TomsHardware.com (which is a great site if your interested in computer hardware) that they had create a chart of all the new CPU's for 2008 Q3 on a bunch of benchmarks. No AMD was even in the top ten. At about 6th I found an affordable looking Intel core 2 duo e8400 at $150. I looked into more and found people were going crazy for it. Turns out that it can be overclock insanely not that I was interested in overclocking my gaming PC. I did wanna try a AMD for the first time, but I decide to go for the better Intel core 2 duo e8400 at $200 CDN.

The most important part for an PC is the motherboard. I can't really explain why I decided to go for a less know and less popular ASRock motherboard. It was sorta based on a cheap motherboard of theirs that I was interested in that I didn't even end up buying. I've had two Asus motherboards and they had only been trouble for me so I thought I would try something new. I decided on the AsRock P45R2000-WIFI. My timing was perfect with the recent release of the new Intel P45 chip set (Sept 2008). This motherboard has option for both DDR2 and DDR3 ram separately like the another of the models I was interested but this one had 4 DDR3 slots rather then the other that had 4 DDR2's. I know it might be weird in a gaming computer to use wifi rather then being hard wired but it was an important selling point for me rather then buy a wifi card separate. It put me back about another $200 CDN for it.

So in total the system cost me about $800 CDN which really isn't bad for a gaming PC especially considering how much of a monster I thought this machine would be. I had previously bought a new 22" Acer monitor from Canada Computers for $200 CDN so I very interested in getting this rig up and running. Next post I will get into the installation and the setup for my new gaming PC, look forward to it soon.

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