(This build log isn’t such a build log, more of a report on my first build experience, it has all been written (and photos taken) after the build. I read the rules and it seems like this is still allowed! Not a very exciting build and doesn't do much on the e-peen side of life but just a nice little value thing)
I'm sorry I appear to have let my inner essay out and have written lots!
Okay, so my dad is an accountant. He uses computers for incredibly demanding tasks, such as excel and solitaire. Essentially as a calculator. Here is a picture of the computer he was using a few of months ago:
Good solid Amd Athlon 64 Processor 3000+ 1.8ghz and 512mb RAM but it doesn’t really cut the mustard anymore. As I’m sure you can tell: Its old and dusty. It kept on crashing/getting random errors and taking ages to do the simplest of tasks.
Meanwhile I was planning to build a computer for myself and then I realised: I could put my dad’s money on the line in order to gain some experience before tinkering and putting more expensive parts in danger. Aren’t I such a good son?
So I gave myself a brief:
- He only has to spend 500 pounds. If it costs anymore, I will pay the difference
- Can run excel
- Look neatish
- He is an avid Rome total war fan, so some gaming performance would be nice
- Include monitor and the base unit
- Not much storage space required, so SSD
- I had a spare copy of windows 7 so that wasn’t required
So after hours of looking around and help from others on the forum I settled on this:
-Aerocool Qs-202 Midi Tower Case
-i3 3220 3.30Ghz
-Gigabyte H61MA-D3V motherboard
-OCZ 550w ZT Fully-Modular Power Supply
-TeamGroup Elite (2*4Gb) 1600MHz
-OCZ vertex 2E 120gb
-XFX HD 6870 1024MB
-Cheap dvd drive
-AOC 21.5” LED 1080p monitor
Reasons for each of the parts: (bit wordy so feel free to skip this)
So here is the finished build:
Pretty happy with how it looks, I would love to have some comments on what you guys think and please suggest anything you would change?
Problems and comments: (again, rather wordy)
Overall, I would suggest a very similar build to someone looking on spending this amount of money. I would avoid that case though, shipped with a bent USB header, inverted audio and noisy fans its by no means the best. It has a lot of the features you want but doesn't do any of them well really. The performance of the machine however, is great overall for the price. I hope this review kind of thing has been somewhat enlightening to you, and I congratulate you for reading this much! I can probably do a few benchmarks if people are interested, but don't expect any world records shattered. Some feedback would be great (be-it positive or negative). Thanks!
I'm sorry I appear to have let my inner essay out and have written lots!
Okay, so my dad is an accountant. He uses computers for incredibly demanding tasks, such as excel and solitaire. Essentially as a calculator. Here is a picture of the computer he was using a few of months ago:
Good solid Amd Athlon 64 Processor 3000+ 1.8ghz and 512mb RAM but it doesn’t really cut the mustard anymore. As I’m sure you can tell: Its old and dusty. It kept on crashing/getting random errors and taking ages to do the simplest of tasks.
Meanwhile I was planning to build a computer for myself and then I realised: I could put my dad’s money on the line in order to gain some experience before tinkering and putting more expensive parts in danger. Aren’t I such a good son?
So I gave myself a brief:
- He only has to spend 500 pounds. If it costs anymore, I will pay the difference
- Can run excel
- Look neatish
- He is an avid Rome total war fan, so some gaming performance would be nice
- Include monitor and the base unit
- Not much storage space required, so SSD
- I had a spare copy of windows 7 so that wasn’t required
So after hours of looking around and help from others on the forum I settled on this:
-Aerocool Qs-202 Midi Tower Case
-i3 3220 3.30Ghz
-Gigabyte H61MA-D3V motherboard
-OCZ 550w ZT Fully-Modular Power Supply
-TeamGroup Elite (2*4Gb) 1600MHz
-OCZ vertex 2E 120gb
-XFX HD 6870 1024MB
-Cheap dvd drive
-AOC 21.5” LED 1080p monitor
Reasons for each of the parts: (bit wordy so feel free to skip this)
-Case
Didn’t want a mahoosive case so I went for something manageable but not too large. It doesn’t look bad, has nice cable management and comes with dust filters. Looked okay to me for the price but I hadn’t heard all that much about it either. Wasn’t really interested in having a windowed case and I’m sure the accountant father isn’t bothered either. However, it will be used where the window is not visible so it can still look relatively professional whilst allowing me to occasionally see how the dust is doing and admire my handiwork
-CPU
Had considered Llano but thought I would want slightly better graphics so went the dedicated GPU route, also allowing more customisation in the future. The new trinity CPUs weren’t out and about at this point and with hindsight, I could have waited about and saved a bit of dolla’. In the end I wanted a relatively fast processor and as I was going for dedicated graphics, stayed on the Intel side of life. Usage wouldn’t be too demanding so spending more on an i5 wouldn’t be justified by the performance increase.
-Mobo
Heard great things about Gigabyte motherboards and at 40 pounds or so its great value. Obviously not top of the range but had all the features required.
-PSU
Found this for a good price and really liked the look it. The fully modular cables really appealed to me due to the easier wiring as well as neat look. 550w is a bit overkill for this spec, but as it was on offer at the time it didn’t cost much more than lower powered psus.
-Memory
Snatched this up for something like 27 pounds on OC. I knew I could only run it at 1333MHz due to the motherboard but I thought why not spend the same for better RAM? This meant this RAM could be used in another build at another point in time. I chose 8gb just because it wasn’t much more than 4.
-SSD
My dad wouldn’t require much storage space so I thought 120gb would be ample. Got it on OC when it was less than 50 pounds! Bloody silly price if you ask me. From what I heard Sata-II SSDs are close to the performance of Sata-III. By this I mean, whilst there is some noticeable difference, the change from an old hdd to a Sata-II ssd is very similar to the change from an old hdd to a sata-III ssd. As the sata-III ssds were close to double the price, I thought I might as well go for this one.
-GPU
I was looking for a cheap gpu and had no favouritism towards amd or nvidia. I was really excited about getting a 6850 as it seemed great value when OC had them for something like £90. Then literally a day or two before I was going to purchase the components OC stopped selling them. I looked around and nothing seemed to match that value. Then, I found a used XFX 6870 in the b grade section for £90 too. At that price I thought it was a steal and got it. Looks alright too:
-DVD drive
Allows easy installation of windows 7 and the playing of old games
- Monitor
New monitor to replace the square flickering beast from before
Didn’t want a mahoosive case so I went for something manageable but not too large. It doesn’t look bad, has nice cable management and comes with dust filters. Looked okay to me for the price but I hadn’t heard all that much about it either. Wasn’t really interested in having a windowed case and I’m sure the accountant father isn’t bothered either. However, it will be used where the window is not visible so it can still look relatively professional whilst allowing me to occasionally see how the dust is doing and admire my handiwork
-CPU
Had considered Llano but thought I would want slightly better graphics so went the dedicated GPU route, also allowing more customisation in the future. The new trinity CPUs weren’t out and about at this point and with hindsight, I could have waited about and saved a bit of dolla’. In the end I wanted a relatively fast processor and as I was going for dedicated graphics, stayed on the Intel side of life. Usage wouldn’t be too demanding so spending more on an i5 wouldn’t be justified by the performance increase.
-Mobo
Heard great things about Gigabyte motherboards and at 40 pounds or so its great value. Obviously not top of the range but had all the features required.
-PSU
Found this for a good price and really liked the look it. The fully modular cables really appealed to me due to the easier wiring as well as neat look. 550w is a bit overkill for this spec, but as it was on offer at the time it didn’t cost much more than lower powered psus.
-Memory
Snatched this up for something like 27 pounds on OC. I knew I could only run it at 1333MHz due to the motherboard but I thought why not spend the same for better RAM? This meant this RAM could be used in another build at another point in time. I chose 8gb just because it wasn’t much more than 4.
-SSD
My dad wouldn’t require much storage space so I thought 120gb would be ample. Got it on OC when it was less than 50 pounds! Bloody silly price if you ask me. From what I heard Sata-II SSDs are close to the performance of Sata-III. By this I mean, whilst there is some noticeable difference, the change from an old hdd to a Sata-II ssd is very similar to the change from an old hdd to a sata-III ssd. As the sata-III ssds were close to double the price, I thought I might as well go for this one.
-GPU
I was looking for a cheap gpu and had no favouritism towards amd or nvidia. I was really excited about getting a 6850 as it seemed great value when OC had them for something like £90. Then literally a day or two before I was going to purchase the components OC stopped selling them. I looked around and nothing seemed to match that value. Then, I found a used XFX 6870 in the b grade section for £90 too. At that price I thought it was a steal and got it. Looks alright too:
-DVD drive
Allows easy installation of windows 7 and the playing of old games
- Monitor
New monitor to replace the square flickering beast from before
So here is the finished build:
Pretty happy with how it looks, I would love to have some comments on what you guys think and please suggest anything you would change?
Problems and comments: (again, rather wordy)
Assembling the computer was easy peasy. Being the first time toying with this kind of stuff (besides upgrading RAM in a macbook) I was nervous. I was worried that I would break something or short-circuit something and consequently I found myself stroking the case all the time but it was fine.
A major problem was that windows 7 just wasn’t running correctly. It would occasionally crash, a lot of the updates wouldn’t install and it would sometimes freeze. It made me feel bad for doing the build, as I had no idea what to do. I reinstalled windows, to no effect. Asked around on numerous forums and checked the hardware. At one point I got told it could be a memory problem. Passed memtest okay but I bought more RAM just to be sure but this didn’t solve it either. Eventually I asked a computer technician and he knew what to do instantly: update the bios on the motherboard. Felt rather embarrassed for not thinking of that. The bios was super out of date and this meant windows was very confused – and I frustrated. But it worked fine and dandy after that. Really impressed with the performance.
I’m not sure if this is really a problem, but graphics wise it performs too well. I haven’t gamed on PC apart from a few minutes here and there and as this new pc is my dad’s computer I don’t really want to use it much. Then, I downloaded skyrim off my steam account. Boy, does that game look good. It can run in ultra with high frame rates and just encouraged me to see what else it can handle. Next thing, BF3 comes up on sale for £10. Naturally, I buy it and download it. It looks amazing. Get decent frames on high settings and this trend is followed with a few other games… All the while the 120gb ssd starts to look less and less roomy, so I ended up purchasing a 500gb hdd for 45 pounds. In other words, I should have got a worse graphics card. Nonetheless, I am glad I went for the SSD in the first place for the speedy booting.
The case, whilst neat and relatively average looking, has some blooming noisy fans. It stays pretty cool but the constant whoosh of air can sometimes be a bit too much. Is there anything I can do about this? They are currently powered just by using molex connectors, not sure if there are any fan headers on the mobo. The XFX 6870 is a noisy badger too. If you heard it you would expect the computer to raise a few millimetres from the floor and hover around the place. It was nice of the kind people at XFX to have considered two put in two different fan speeds, depending on the load; although it would be even better if the two modes weren’t “loud” and “deafening”. Despite the jet engine that it is, the performance is great, just a bit noisier than what I’m used to. Lets hope my aging dad gets deaf and can’t hear it soon. (Just kidding)
Another problem was that the front panel audio was the wrong way round! This caused much confusion with my headset in the battlefield and thanks to some guidance from DampDog on the forum I switched a couple of wires around and it was sorted.
A major problem was that windows 7 just wasn’t running correctly. It would occasionally crash, a lot of the updates wouldn’t install and it would sometimes freeze. It made me feel bad for doing the build, as I had no idea what to do. I reinstalled windows, to no effect. Asked around on numerous forums and checked the hardware. At one point I got told it could be a memory problem. Passed memtest okay but I bought more RAM just to be sure but this didn’t solve it either. Eventually I asked a computer technician and he knew what to do instantly: update the bios on the motherboard. Felt rather embarrassed for not thinking of that. The bios was super out of date and this meant windows was very confused – and I frustrated. But it worked fine and dandy after that. Really impressed with the performance.
I’m not sure if this is really a problem, but graphics wise it performs too well. I haven’t gamed on PC apart from a few minutes here and there and as this new pc is my dad’s computer I don’t really want to use it much. Then, I downloaded skyrim off my steam account. Boy, does that game look good. It can run in ultra with high frame rates and just encouraged me to see what else it can handle. Next thing, BF3 comes up on sale for £10. Naturally, I buy it and download it. It looks amazing. Get decent frames on high settings and this trend is followed with a few other games… All the while the 120gb ssd starts to look less and less roomy, so I ended up purchasing a 500gb hdd for 45 pounds. In other words, I should have got a worse graphics card. Nonetheless, I am glad I went for the SSD in the first place for the speedy booting.
The case, whilst neat and relatively average looking, has some blooming noisy fans. It stays pretty cool but the constant whoosh of air can sometimes be a bit too much. Is there anything I can do about this? They are currently powered just by using molex connectors, not sure if there are any fan headers on the mobo. The XFX 6870 is a noisy badger too. If you heard it you would expect the computer to raise a few millimetres from the floor and hover around the place. It was nice of the kind people at XFX to have considered two put in two different fan speeds, depending on the load; although it would be even better if the two modes weren’t “loud” and “deafening”. Despite the jet engine that it is, the performance is great, just a bit noisier than what I’m used to. Lets hope my aging dad gets deaf and can’t hear it soon. (Just kidding)
Another problem was that the front panel audio was the wrong way round! This caused much confusion with my headset in the battlefield and thanks to some guidance from DampDog on the forum I switched a couple of wires around and it was sorted.