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Technology Thread: Building a Desktop Computer

TWDeac

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I'm in the process of planning a new desktop system build and have been posting random thoughts in the CT. I figured it would be nice to have a centralized location for some of these things for those of you who are interested in computing.

I'm currently running an old core 2 duo E6600 with a Asus Commando LGA775 motherboard, EVGA 8800GTS 640mb video card, and 4GB of PC2-6400 Corsair Ram.

Needless to say, this stuff is showing its age and I'm in the market to upgrade by 11/11/11 for Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. For those of you with a modicum of technical expertise, I'd highly recommend building your own PC for your next desktop computer. You not only save money, but you get much more bang for your buck and you can customize it however you like. It also gives you a great deal of satisfaction to know that you built the computer that you are using.

For most of us, there are really only 7-10 parts that need to be installed. A computer case, motherboard, CPU, power supply, memory, optical drive, hard drive and video card.

Case:

This is where you can really go nuts with your computer if you have an interest. There are so many different types out there that there are bound to be some that fit your interests. They are classified by size and form factor. Mini, Mid, and Full Towers in ATX form factor. I am partial to full towers because it gives you ample room to work inside the case and places to hide wiring. It also gives room for multiple graphics cards, larger CPU heatsinks and more HDDs and optical drives. The sky is really the limit.

Xclio A380

A380PLUS.jpg


Antec Skeleton

Skeleton_quarter_400.jpg


Acrylic Case
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Power Supply:


This is absolutely the most important part in your computer. Without clean power, your components are as good as dead. Also, cheap power supplies have a tendency to die in spectacular fashion, taking out $1,000's in expensive components. You can find PSUs that vary from 250w to 1500w. The wattage is important, but you should never buy a power supply just because it has a bunch of wattage. Luckily, today, we have certifications that manufacturers can receive. In general, you want to look for a unit that is at least bronze certified. Gold is ideal if you want to be sure.

This basically certifies that a power supply can supply energy efficiently with a minimal amount given off as heat under load. For example, a 1000w that has 40% efficiency at 100% load is not worth the metal of which it is made.

Do not be stingy on power supplies.

Here is an awesome PSU wattage calculator by Antec. Calculator

Coolermaster 1000w RSAOO-80GAD3 with Gold Certification
41WdedB3lML._SL500_AA300_.jpg

Motherboard:

I guess the motherboard can be thought of as the nervous system of your computer. You plug everything into this component.
gigabyte_conroe_motherboard.jpg


There are a multitude of different types of boards. You need a different one for different types of processors/memory/graphics cards. Generally, you pick this component and build around it, selecting components to fit into the board. You need to make sure that all of your other components are compatible. This may sound like a chore, but it really isn't that hard.

Things you want to double check.

Socket type: Is it AMD/Intel? For example, an LGA1156 board will not fit a LGA1155 processor. Just as an Intel processor won't fit into a AMD board.
Ram: Most new boards will take DDR3 ram.
Video Cards: As long as you use a PCI-Express graphics card, you are set for the most part.

CPU: Central Processing Unit

This is the brain of your computer. Almost all computations run through the CPU. It plugs into your motherboard and it must be cooled in some fashion. These objects are fantastic indicators of the progress we have made over the years in computing. The high-end processors of today are millions of times faster than the ones that powered the Apollo modules. It really is quite awe-inspiring. Since I began building computers, the die size of each cpu has decreased from 200nm to 32nm. Wow! We are soon going to be at the point where quantum effects are ruining our efforts to shrink the CPU dies.

There are only two brands that you can even consider for your CPU chip. Intel and AMD. Intel is far and away ahead of AMD in almost every category at the moment. It has been that way essentially since the Core 2 Duo's were released in 2006. It hasn't always been this way, for a period in the early 2000s, AMD was top dog as they were the first to really delve into 64 bit chips.

For the average user, you really only need to look at the clock speed in GHZ, number of cores(barely) and the amount of pins. Intel's current flagship chip, the Sandy Bridge core, is LGA1155, meaning it has 1155 pins. This obviously corresponds with the motherboard and necessitates one which has 1155 pin holes ;)

Some of today's CPUs even have the video card on-die. This is a pretty cool evolution for those of us who don't play video games.

This is a Intel Sandy Bridge die. Keep in mind, there are 1 BILLION transistors on this chip. :eek:

Sandy_CanardPC.png


Memory:

Memory can be as simple or as complicated as you want it to be. For most of us, we will want to look for the type, DDR3 in most cases today, and the amount. 64 bit windows opened up a world of possibilities in regards to the amount of ram you can you. If you want 4x8gb sticks of ram, you can have at it. Sure, the returns are probably dubious, but this is America!

It gets more complicated as you do things like overclocking. Then you need to look at timings, clock speed and voltages but for the average joe, its ridiculously easy to pick and install ram.

G_Skill-Ripjaws-8-GB-Kit.jpg


Video Card:

This is one of my favorite aspects of desktop computing and one that many of you laptop people miss out on. Today's videocards are enormously powerful and really beautiful pieces of machinery. High-end cards have more than a billion transistors and are powerful enough to run programs themselves. (Folding@Home)

I started building computers when AGP was the normal interface and one graphics card was the rule. Then came PCI Express 1.0 and 2.0 and we ushered in the era of having up to 4 of these huge graphics cards in our computers. The most powerful cards are routinely around $600 so you can imagine how much money enthusiasts spend to achieve peak performance.

There really is no logical reason for a normal consumer to have 4 cards, though. This is primarily a way to achieve super high benchmarking scores or to run intense simulations or multiple monitor setups.

I can't find a size comparison that shows scale, but this is AMD and Nvidia's flagship cards GTX 590 and HD 6990 compared side by side. Trust me, it is hard to fit these in most cases.



nvidia%20gtx590-vs-hd-6990-size_x720.jpg



Hard Drives:

This is probably the most relevant topic to most of you. There are currently two types of hard drives. SATA physical drives and solid state drives. SSDs have been all the rage lately and rightly so. Essentially, they are huge flash drives that provide blazing speed to consumers. Install your operating system on one of these bad boys and you'll get boot times in the seconds. They are insanely expensive at the moment, but they will come down in price as fabrication becomes cheaper.

For now, they are really only feasible to use as your OS hard drive. Everything else goes on physical drives and with capacities reaching 3gb, it is warranted.

I remember buying my first 120gb drive for $100 at Staples. I now have nearly 5TB of storage in my computer that was bought for well under $500.

I love Moore's Law and its application to the economics of technology.

SSD.jpg

hdd_s.jpg


Cooling:

You have several options for cooling your desktop computer. All based around your usage. A normal consumer that uses a computer for internet browsing, angry birds and Microsoft office, won't have a great deal of need for a phase change system. If you want to game, benchmark, or overclock, your options become much more diverse and interesting.

Below is the stock Intel cooler. It is a very basic design with a copper core and aluminum outer body with a heat pad that interfaces the CPU surface with the copper core. Great for angry birds.

sb-16-big.jpg


This is a aftermarket Zalman heatsink and fan. Purely copper, it conducts heat much better than the stock Intel heatsink. Great for gamers or mild overclocking.

zalman9700-onmobo.jpg



One of my favorite cooling methods is water cooling. In the picture below, you can clearly make out the green input/output lines. There is a radiator and fan mounted to the back of the case(left side of pic), the cool water from the radiator is output into the waterblock on the CPU (dead center), heated water is removed from the waterblock into the reservoir(bottom right side). The coolant is most likely distilled water mixed with antifreeze.

IMO, this looks awesome, however, in practice, it really isn't much more efficient than high-end air cooling and it is much more of a headache.
sideopen%20water%20%20cooled.JPG


Phase change cooling is basically hooking up an air conditioner to your CPU face. Most of these systems can achieve around -30 to -100 centigrade which is pretty cold compared to the previous methods of cooling. This is a must have for any serious overclock or benchmarking.



20503d1182608374-diy-phase-change-how-to-finishedunit.jpg


Last but not least is liquid nitrogen cooling. This is by far the most extreme method and solely reserved for those with deep pockets. It is extremely important to insulate the CPU and motherboard from condensation while benchmarking with ln2. This is the reason for the insulated tube over the cpu. Basically, you buy a dewar of ln2 and you pour it into the tube while benchmarking, keep adding more as it evaporates. The temperature difference is such that if you run out, or something goes wrong with your system for transferring heat, your components will fry and possibly crack because they just aren't made to withstand the amount of heat that they give off when pushed to their limits under ln2 testing.

start1.jpg


I hope you found this informative. Again, this is probably a niche topic where not many people will have interest, but I enjoy doing this stuff so ask away if you have any questions :)
 
I used to build my rigs but about 8 years ago or so it seemed that doing so stopped being particularly cost effective. The sum of the parts tended to be more expensive, or at most about $100 less than a complete system.

Perhaps it is cheaper at the super high end, I avoid bleeding-edge like the plague and go for "good enough for today's games". I am in the market for an upgrade so I'll cost out both options to see how the a la carte version compares to the pre-built.
 
will that thing be able to do transporter detail?
 
I bought my last desktop from Dell when I was in college, but ended up rebuilding the whole thing right before Windows 7 came out. It was definitely easier to just upgrade components than to buy a whole new PC.
 
I used to build my rigs but about 8 years ago or so it seemed that doing so stopped being particularly cost effective. The sum of the parts tended to be more expensive, or at most about $100 less than a complete system.

Perhaps it is cheaper at the super high end, I avoid bleeding-edge like the plague and go for "good enough for today's games". I am in the market for an upgrade so I'll cost out both options to see how the a la carte version compares to the pre-built.

Its cheaper even at mid-range. Where have you been buying your parts?
 
I used to build my rigs but about 8 years ago or so it seemed that doing so stopped being particularly cost effective. The sum of the parts tended to be more expensive, or at most about $100 less than a complete system.

Perhaps it is cheaper at the super high end, I avoid bleeding-edge like the plague and go for "good enough for today's games". I am in the market for an upgrade so I'll cost out both options to see how the a la carte version compares to the pre-built.

IMO, I do it because I know exactly what I'm getting wrt to components. The power supplies/mobos they use in most of the pre-built machines just make the proposition too sketchy sometimes. It usually comes out to about the same price, though if you are patient and put it together piece by piece (oh hai slickdeals) then you can usually come out a couple hundred dollars better off even in the mid range.
 
I bought my last desktop from Dell when I was in college, but ended up rebuilding the whole thing right before Windows 7 came out. It was definitely easier to just upgrade components than to buy a whole new PC.

When I was still new to all of this, I was trying to upgrade a Dell (2001 maybe?) It was a miserable experience due to proprietary connectors, etc...

I'm not sure if they have changed their ways, though.
 
This thread reminds me, I need to upgrade my PS and get a new video card before 11-11. I may add another 4-8 gigs of RAM if I see a good deal on it between now and then as well.
 
This thread reminds me, I need to upgrade my PS and get a new video card before 11-11. I may add another 4-8 gigs of RAM if I see a good deal on it between now and then as well.

I've seen a few memory deals come through slickdeals.

I'm definitely holding off until September or October to build so that I can get the bleeding edge components.

You may want to do the same on the video card. Get teh PSU now, though.
 
Yeah, mah priorities list is PS>Video Card w/ RAM on an as-is basis. I haven't had the disposable income to pick up on those deals lately, so I'm hoping they cycle through again.
 
Its cheaper even at mid-range. Where have you been buying your parts?

(oh hai slickdeals)

This is how I used to do it. Waiting patiently like a lion stalking prey and hitting refresh on slickdeals every hour or so.

Back in ye olden days, when I'd start with an empty case and a bunch of boxes with gear in it, I'd get most of the parts at computer shows, which I don't even think exist any more. This was when I was finding it more cost effective to build.

I do agree that adding/upgrading components is still cheaper than buying a whole new rig and a great way to extend the life of your machine
 
Yeah, mah priorities list is PS>Video Card w/ RAM on an as-is basis. I haven't had the disposable income to pick up on those deals lately, so I'm hoping they cycle through again.

Come to think of it... I've never seen a PS deal come through.

That isn't something I'd buy off of there anyway as I'm pretty particular about those.
 
Yeah, not many PS deals. I'm debating whether or not to pick up something as powerful as 1000w, which I'm not even close to needing, but will be able to use it in the future, or if I should go with something in the 700-800 range.
 
Yeah, not many PS deals. I'm debating whether or not to pick up something as powerful as 1000w, which I'm not even close to needing, but will be able to use it in the future, or if I should go with something in the 700-800 range.

I'd probably go with 700-800 range. By the time you need a new one, there will hopefully be better technology out there.

Unless, of course, you're planning on doing crossfire or sli.
 
Nah, current mobo doesn't support that, and I'd not a huge proponent of the crossfire/sli movement. I don't think the gains justify the cost. I like just having one really nice video card (or am aiming for that anyway).
 
Nah, current mobo doesn't support that, and I'd not a huge proponent of the crossfire/sli movement. I don't think the gains justify the cost. I like just having one really nice video card (or am aiming for that anyway).

Samesies. Its just a huge racket IMO.
 
Wooooot. Ordered a new monitor and video card yesterday. Can't wait to finally have two monitors. I think it is going to up my efficiency by 50%-60%.
 
SSD drive will have to wait until next year for me.. or maybe Xmas if I'm lucky. :*(
 
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