Building Computers

For several years, I have found myself very interested in computer hardware. I lack this interest in computer software and programming; perhaps because I tend to be drawn towards the more more physical, tangible side of many things. A couple years back, I became interested in building myself a computer. Although many people call it "building" a more accurate term might be "assembling." When I heard people talking about building computers, I originally thought they were making the small chips and circuitry. What most people mean by "building" computers is purchasing the various components and then putting them together and wiring everything up.

Building computers is becoming more and more popular. Many of my friends have built their computers, and they highly recommended it over simply buying a pc. It is usually much cheaper than buying a pre-made computer, and it is becoming a lot easier over the years. A completely inexperienced individual should technically be able to build their own computer simply by following video tutorials on YouTube. Even though it is getting easier, it is still a very delicate task, involving rather expensive parts. Therefore, I thought it was a bit too risky to proceed on my own and enlisted the help of a couple friends, Neil and Kavi, who were more than willing to build my computer with me. They had helped each other build their computers and had studied the proper techniques to install several parts, so I felt like my computer was in pretty good hands. 

One of the things I like the best about building a personal computer is the ability to choose exactly what components go into it. When I built my computer, I set myself a budget of $750. I selected some parts that would put myself just under budget. Fortunately, I was buying parts just around Black Friday and cyber Monday, and I found some superb deals. I ended up upgrading almost all aspects of my computer for very little extra. In fact, most of my parts were 15-20% discounted. The building itself went smoothly, and it was finished after several hours. At the end, I had spent $870 building a computer composed of ~$1,100 of raw parts. A pc of comparable performance would probably have cost ~$1,500 in a store, and a mac of comparable performance did not exist, still does not exist and (sorry apple fans) will probably not exist for at least five years. In my opinion, my computer looks pretty bad-ass , but I'll admit that Macintosh computers may give it serious competition (but for 3 times as much).

I am glad that Neil and Kavi were helping me though, because there were some things that I felt nervous doing or was doing wrong. For example, I was really scared to drop the CPU onto the motherboard, because If I did it wrong, it was a guaranteed non-repairable 200$ breakage. I was also scared to apply too much pressure to some things, but I was surprised to learn that certain parts require some force to put together, like pushing the RAM into the RAM slots on the motherboard. They also caught me trying to put in parts when I wasn't touching some metal object to remove static that could potentially harm sensitive electronics.

One other thing that is nice about knowing how to assemble computers is being able to add or replace extra components when the need arises. For example, when I purchased nice headphones, I needed an amp and a good Digital Analog Converter that wouldn't squander my headphones' quality. It was very convenient to know how to add in a sound card, and I fulfilled my own needs with some money and about 10 minutes time.

My computer has handled everything I have thrown at it so far, from CAD to the most graphically intense computer games in existence. Unfortunately, technology gets old fast, and I anticipate that I will build myself a new computer when I go to college (and perhaps give this one to my brother). Nonetheless, I am already looking forward to that time when I will get to lay my hands on some beautiful new parts and assemble myself one of the most useful tools of my everyday life.

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Also, in case any of you are interested in the components, I made a list of the major ones:

CPU:                 AMD FX-9370

Motherboard:      ASUS M5A99 FX PRO R2.0

Graphics Card:   Sapphire Radeon HD 7870 GHz Edition 2GB

RAM:                G,SKILL Ripjaws 8GB (2 x 4GB)

Power Supply:    Corsair CX600

Water Cooler:     Corsair H55

Hard Drive:         Western Digital 1TB 7200RPM 64 MB cache Internal HDD

SSD:                 Kinston V300 series 120 GB Internal SSD

Case:                Raidmax ATX295

Sound Card:      ASUS XONAR Essence STX