Building My PC 1 - The Intro

I believe there exists a list of activities a geek must do during his lifetime. Near the top of that list you will find, “Build your own computer.” As that check box remains unchecked to date, I decided to remedy the deficiency during my winter break. Aside from geeky bravado, I also thought this effort would earn me a PC far superior in performance, price, and reliability to anything Dell could cobble together.

The project started as any good engineered project does, with requirements, research, Googling, trade-off comparisons, and more Googling.

Requirements

I actually had only a few requirements. I wanted to come in under $650 shipped. I wanted an 

Intel chipset (reviews and research later reaffirmed my hunch that Intel had the best processors for the buck right now). I wanted a quiet rig that wasn’t an eye-sore (i.e. any setup that glowed bright blue and competed with the vacuum for noisiest household appliance failed to meet requirements). Other than that I figured I’d start to see what’s out there and figure out that vaguest of terms called, “Best Value” along the way.

Sources

I wound up using very few, but what I deemed reliable and comprehensive, sources.

1. Loyd Case (www.extremetech.com) did a series of Build Your Own PC on dl.tv. I watched all his pre-build segments. He offered a lot of sage advice, and it felt like getting coached by one of the really cool senior engineers at work. Key take-aways include the decision for the Antec Sonata III case and the Arctic Cooling Freezer 7 Pro cooler.
2. Tomshardware.com had a lot of reviews on “Budget” videocards, memory, hard drives, and processors. This site helped me with the SAPPHIRE Radeon HD 4670 decision thanks to their monthly roundup of video cards organized by price range. They had a useful roundup of 2 x 2GB memory cards that helped me sort through brands even though I ultimately went with 2 x 1GB. They pointed out Seagate Barracude offered the optimal 500GB SATA drive (plus it rang up $5 cheaper than the Western Digital). Finally, I spent a LOT of time tossing back and forth between the Intel Quad Core Q8200 and the Core Duo E8400. More on that later, but tomshardware.com helped me clarify which one best suited my needs.
3. http://www.learnthat.com/computers/learn.asp?id=141&index=14 This site provided a decent, albeit slightly outdated, introduction to assembling your PC. This site helped me figure out steps of the decision making process (1. Processor 2. Motherboard 3. Everything else)
4. Newegg.com provided tens to hundreds of user reviews for just about every piece of equipment I did and did not purchase. 

Procurement

For pricing and ordering I stuck with newegg.com all the way, except for the processor which rang up cheaper on tigerdirect.com. Given the choice between the two sites I’d recommend Newegg  for their superior navigation. To see for yourself, open up both sites. On Tiger click on “CPU” on the left. On Newegg hover over “Computer Hardware” and float down and click on CPU. Note that Tiger just lists everything on one page. It’s comprehensive, but compare that flow to the user interface on Newegg. On Newegg you can start paring down the results quickly and find your optimal chip. Click “Intel” and then click “$100-$200” and you’re down to 8 processors. Click E8400 and Q8200 and you can preview my processor quandary. I used that tree-trimming process over and over again. If Newegg delivers their products quickly and in working condition I’ll be a customer for a long time.

Once I knew what I wanted, what sources would help me make the decision, and where to buy, I proceeded with picking the parts. I'll pick up there in the next post.