Saturday 11 June 2011

How to build your own computer: Part 1

You may or may not know the benefits that building your own computer has. It's a greatly rewarding and educational experience - you learn all about just what your computer specs mean and how everything fits together in there. But, of course, the most important reward is cost. If you just want a real fast computer, like I did, you can build a computer that doubles the specs of retail computer at half the price. If you want graphics cards, you will also beat retail computers. You just have to look for the right deal. And since a lot of people are getting ripped off by buying at retail (Apple, anyone?) I decided to write a guide on building your own from scratch.

First: What parts do you need? Fairly simple.

Necessary:
    -Motherboard
    -Processor
    -Power Supply
    -RAM
    -Hard drive
    -Case
    -CD drive

Optional:
    -Graphics card
    -RAID card*
    -Sound card
    -Extra fans
    -Blue LEDs (Pretty much required, right?)

*A RAID card allows you to use more than one hard drive and make them act like a single hard drive. You can use one as a fail-safe in case your main hard drive fails, you can use them to double your disk space or you can set up a mixture of the two.

So that is all you need! Tomorrow I'll go in to more detail about what you should get depending on budgets, white kind of computer you are building and so on. Keep tuned.

19 comments:

  1. awesome guide. I will be using this soon.

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  2. Thanks for the info, can't wait until when you've finished, i'll definitely use it when i build a computer

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  3. Great guide. Thanks a lot

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  4. Building a computer is one of the best things I know. Nothing is quite like finally receiving the parts in the mail, putting them together and booting the bad boy up :)

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  5. What kind of PC do you recommend for someone with a budget in the $600 range?

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  6. Don't forget to match the CPU sockets!

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  7. For later on: DO NOT forget to tell about the brain surgery operation called installing a CPU properly. Is important.

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  8. I'd say, a graphics card is a semi necessity, cuz some boards do not support onboard graphics.

    Just sayin! :D

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  9. I love instructable blogs! will deffinately be checking this out daily!

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  10. Realistically how much would something like this cost. How bout an average comp that can run duke nukem in this day n age
    How to Hack Life.

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  11. D3N00B1F13D™ is right. GPU is pretty much required these days.

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  12. Informative post and easy to understand, nice one

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  13. Blue LED's are the most important part

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  14. Any desktop I've had I've built it myself. It's crazy how much more you can get for your money just by spending a few hours building it yourself. BLUE LED'SSSSSSSS. Make it look futuristic ;)

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  15. custom computer - hard work, but it's very rewarding. But why the blue leds?

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  16. THANK YOU.

    This blog post is very seriously the most useful thing I've read all week, I'm actually looking into getting a new computer now. I've been told before that building one myself can save me money, but I've always passed it off as too difficult.

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  17. I sort of doubt my skills to do this but might attempt someday.
    +followed

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  18. haha my custom pc, or as call her my wife j.k. is so decked out in internal blue l.e.d.s i cant sleep if its on in my room its so bright.

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