Hardware

The New PC Build My old PC was built in 2007 and was showing it's age. One of the memory chips failed reducing it to only 2GB. The 3D card was hopelessly outdated even 7 years ago. The case had been damaged by fed-ex in shipping. Get the insurance if you ship electronics! Half the USB ports were no longer functional. The old dual core 2.66 Ghz Processor was slow. It was long overdue to replace the PC.

The Case I started with a case, The Rosewill Challenger. It's got USB 3.0 for faster file access on my external USB hard drive. It's got 3 fans, Front, Back and Top, Plus the PSU fan on the bottom and the CPU fan in the center and whatever fan the graphics card has brings the total to at least 6 fans. Good airflow is critical. This case has that bottom mounted PSU so I had to be sure and place my PC on a table where the rubber feet can keep it elevated for proper ventilation out the bottom. On carpet it gets muffled and overheats with this design.

The Power Supply I got a 520 watt PSU which should be plenty to run everything I plant to ever install in this system. Some enthusiasts put 1600 watt power supplies in their computer to power a Titan graphics card or other power hungry overpriced components. I Never buy the top end electronics. I always wait for the prices to come down as newer better parts come out and then I build it myself to save a lot of money and learn a little something along the way.

The CD Drive I just took the CD-RW drive from my old PC, It's been working fine so why waste money on a new one when I can harvest it like an organ and transplant it into the new body.

The Motherboard The next step was picking out a Motherboard. AMD or Intel is a tricky decision. AMD gives you much more bang for your buck but they are outperformed by the more expensive Intel I7 chipset. I found a good mid price AMD chip that I liked so I went with an AMD mobo that supports their latest and greatest AM3 technology. I watched some videos on PC building to refresh my memory on how to do everything right. I had thought it was important not to use a magnetic screwdriver but apparently it's ok with most newer parts. It makes installation a lot easier if you aren't constantly losing important screws in the bottom of the case.

The CPU This AMD 8-core 4.0 Ghz processor is fantastic. It isn't the best in gaming but the 8 cores can really improve multi-threaded programs. Most of what I use is multi-threaded software. Photoshop. Lightwave. They can use those 8 cores very effectively. It's a good idea to install as much as possible onto the motherboard before putting it into the case where space becomes very tight when you start adding components.

The CPU Fan Most CPU chips come with a fan and radiator that attaches to the CPU to keep it cool. I spent $25 on this and for scale, the default fan is the size of a fist while the one I bought is easily 4x bigger. Bigger is better, more pipes and a bigger radiator means more heat is drawn away from the CPU. It's even upgradeable, I can add an additional fan to the other side of it. bonus.

The Memory I got this single 4GB chip of Kingston brand 1333 mhz memory. It was just about the cheapest memory I could find. for most ordinary conditions 4GB of regular ram will be enough for the job. Lots of programs don't even know what do do with more than that. In the future If I want to max out my PC I can get 32GB of fast gaming memory but It's gonna cost at least $400 so it can wait. I figure this leaves room to grow and upgrade the system in a few years when it starts to be outpaced by newer computers.

The Solid State Hard Drive This little gem is amazing. I think a little $100 128GB SSD is probably the single best PC upgrade you could make. For the money it makes a 60% improvement in performance in windows and in all your installed programs. I think I am only using less than 50GB now. I put most of my photos and videos and other files on a traditional hard drive, which I cannibalized from my old PC. The old drive even still has windows installed on it, I didnt even format it, I just took it out of one PC and stuffed it in the other without a problem. If my SSD should ever fail I may even be able to boot the PC to windows from that second hard drive. It's untested though. It might not know what to do with the changed hardware.

Installing the SSD The SSD is tiny, I made sure my case had a spot designed to hold it. If you don't have a case like this though, you may need to buy a part that holds the SSD but fits the standard drive bays.

The Mouse & Keyboard I took the mouse+keyboard I was using and kept using it with the new PC. For days I struggled with a technical problem which was eventually solved by my buddy Dark and his 200IQ superbrain. I was getting a laggy unresponsive mouse and at first I had no idea what was the problem. I thought it could be a driver issue. I thought it could be the USB port I was using. I tried USB 2.0, I tried USB 3.0, I tried the front, I tried the back ports, nothing resolved it. Eventually I realized that the keyboard was freezing as well so then I figured out it was a signal issue with the wireless USB dongle that logitech uses. There was interference. I noticed if i moved my mousepad closer to the dongle it would respond. I ended up moving the PC from the floor to my left, over to the table to my right and then I moved my router as far as possible away from the logitech device. So moving the PC close to the mouse AND moving any interference further away seems to have fixed the problem finally. I was really tearing my hair out trying to solve the problem for days. grr.

So in conclusion I'll show you the completed build. I put my tired old 3D card in it for now and I'm using my 23 inch LED monitor through HDMI and it works well enough.

The Full Installation

The Full Installation Close Up

At some point I will get the final important piece, a newer 3D graphics card and then this PC will be a beast! But that can wait for another day. For now I'm quite happy with the performance of my computer. Here is the Windows performance index as it stands.