Building a new PC, part 1
Apr. 6th, 2008 05:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
philmophlegmAs I've just said in my last post, I'm about to build a new PC. Partly for my own reference and partly because someone out there might (just might) be interested, I'm going to write about my build here on LiveJournal. If this is going to bore you (and I will be getting very technical), look away now.
Part 1 - Introduction
What I've been doing all weekend is speccing parts. Building PCs nowadays is actually pretty easy. There is some skill involved in working out why something has gone wrong, but you pick that up with only a little experience. The most difficult part now is deciding which components will work best together, and the more cutting edge the PC, the harder this process is.
So is this machine going to be cutting edge? Well, pretty much so, yes. It's for games (usually the most demanding of PC applications), I've got a large 24" monitor (bigger monitor equals more pixels equals need for more powerful PC to move them around in 3D games) and I got a nice bonus from work last December.
Having said that, this isn't a money-no-object build. If you were to buy the retail PC currently holding Custom PC magazine's 'Dream PC' title, it would set you back almost £7,000! ( http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/125929/scan-white-cobra.html )I'm looking to spend a fraction of that amount, but I still want great performance.
What I've got at the moment:
Scatha (my current main gaming PC) is starting to get a little creaky. There are some games that I might well want to play and know that either I would have to turn detail levels right down, or play them at a lower resolution than my monitor would like (native 1920x1200).
Scatha has an AMD Athlon 64-X2 4200 dual core processor. In this context, AMD is the manufacturer, Athlon is the brand of processor, 64 denotes that this is a 64-bit (as opposed to the older 32 bit) processor and dual core means that it is sort of two processors built into one. It has 2gb of RAM, runs Windows XP and has two NVidia GeForce 7800GTX graphics cards working together in SLI mode. SLI mode means that two identical graphics cards work together to share the load of rendering each 3D scene.
Part 1 - Introduction
What I've been doing all weekend is speccing parts. Building PCs nowadays is actually pretty easy. There is some skill involved in working out why something has gone wrong, but you pick that up with only a little experience. The most difficult part now is deciding which components will work best together, and the more cutting edge the PC, the harder this process is.
So is this machine going to be cutting edge? Well, pretty much so, yes. It's for games (usually the most demanding of PC applications), I've got a large 24" monitor (bigger monitor equals more pixels equals need for more powerful PC to move them around in 3D games) and I got a nice bonus from work last December.
Having said that, this isn't a money-no-object build. If you were to buy the retail PC currently holding Custom PC magazine's 'Dream PC' title, it would set you back almost £7,000! ( http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/125929/scan-white-cobra.html )I'm looking to spend a fraction of that amount, but I still want great performance.
What I've got at the moment:
Scatha (my current main gaming PC) is starting to get a little creaky. There are some games that I might well want to play and know that either I would have to turn detail levels right down, or play them at a lower resolution than my monitor would like (native 1920x1200).
Scatha has an AMD Athlon 64-X2 4200 dual core processor. In this context, AMD is the manufacturer, Athlon is the brand of processor, 64 denotes that this is a 64-bit (as opposed to the older 32 bit) processor and dual core means that it is sort of two processors built into one. It has 2gb of RAM, runs Windows XP and has two NVidia GeForce 7800GTX graphics cards working together in SLI mode. SLI mode means that two identical graphics cards work together to share the load of rendering each 3D scene.
