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So with my Christmas, birthday, and part-time job money saved up, I took to the Internet to shop for parts. This was by far the most complicated part of the process. While I had an idea of what parts I needed (a motherboard would be obvious, a power supply unit incredibly necessary), what specifications and what brand gave a ridiculous number of options. Looking at the UK computer sales sites Scan.co.uk and Aria.co.uk, they had an uncanny knack of not letting me compare different items for cost or performance. Against all personal standards, I would have killed for a computer nerd equivalent of Go Compare.
In the end, I found a website dedicated to building computers that gave clear indicators of what items I would need to put together a cost effective machine. It didn't take long to search for those, and result in the following:
Motherboard: "Gigabyte MicroATX" £64.66
Processor: "AMD Athlon II Quad Core 640" £75.90
RAM: "4GB Hypertec Hyperam" £27.59
Hard Drive: "500GB Western Digital" £29.70
Power Supply: "Corsair VX 450w" £55.74
Case: "Asus MicroATX Tower" £22.84
(In addition to this, necessary accessories like a monitor, a wireless adaptor, and a keyboard and mouse.)
Factoring in delivery costs, the total of it all came to £411.
Waiting eagerly over the weekend, the parts finally arrived in two separate deliveries. The disadvantage to shopping from multiple sites was my goods not all arriving at once. A bit skittish about going into building my computer entirely blind, I nagged my housemate doing a Computer Science degree to help me out.
As it turned out, there wasn't much that I couldn't do solo. While all the parts were from different companies, the instructions that came with them all were simple to understand, and didn't conflict with each other; everything fitting into place with screws, wires plugged in with satisfying clicks. Following each instruction correctly with no problems gives a slight feeling of pride and achievement; as if I was building an IKEA flat-pack bookshelf, but one I could play video games on.
But not everything went to plan. Next time I'll talk about my graphics cards, the finished product, and advice for other beginners wanting to build their own machine.
What sort of use are you intending this PC for? Work, media centre, gaming machine? You mention FragSoc, but running on integrated graphics you're really not going to be doing much in the way of modern games. If you're looking for a gaming machine, there's far better guides you to follow than TechReport. How long did you spend researching the build process and components before you bought them?
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