I felt like writing a post about my interest in building PC’s. I’ve a feeling, much like those individuals who used to build their own customized radios, that it’s a dying hobby. The reason for this being that the gap between the cost of a pre-made PC and one you built yourself is narrowing significantly. Eventually I see it being more expensive to custom build your own PC than to just simply order a DELL online. Also, people want mobility in their computers now, looking for slimmer and faster computers so that they can be connected everywhere they go, and a custom built PC is seldom easily mobile. People who custom build laptops are very rare, in fact, I know of no one that has ever actually done it.

Couple this with the fact that most PC Builders I know are also Gamers, and the fact that the rampant piracy of PC games is slowly killing it as a gaming platform and you can see why PC building is quickly is becoming a fringe interest. Most game developers are now moving over to consoles for the majority of their games and slow releasing only a few major PC titles a year, and usually long after their console counterparts have already been released.

Myself, I see my building of PC’s eventually stopping. As a hobby it’s no longer financially viable, and compared to the ease of use of the current gen of consoles, a lot of the aspects of building your own gaming PC can become very tedious (i.e. driver updates, stability testing, viruses, game patches, overclocking and tweaking… etc) I game mainly on my PS3 now and reserve the PC for genres such as FPS and RTS, genres that I feel work better with a keyboard and mouse instead of gamepad.

But it’s been fun while it lasted, here is a log of my adventures in PC building up till now. Enjoy and let me know what you think:

I got my first PC back in around ’98. I missed a lot of the early years of computing but finally got my feet wet with an old bank machine from a recycling center, it had an Intel P75 cpu, a 5GB IDE HDD and a 17″ CRT that I bought for IE£300. I still remember my friend saying to me “You’ve got 5GB’s of disk space, that’s amazing, when would you ever need more than that?”. It ran Windows 95 and it ran slow, really slow. I could open up a text document or play an MP3 but I could not do both at the same time. But it got me on the net, and allowed me to chat with my then long distance girlfriend in Canada using an early version of Yahoo! Messenger, so I loved it.

I kept that old PC for over 2 years until around early 2001, just before I started college, when I picked up a brand spanking new PC for around IE£1400 (a LOT of money back then, especially for a college student). This had a whopping 256MB’s of RAM, a 1.7GHz AMD CPU, a 64MB Graphics card, a 40GB IDE HDD and, most importantly, a 15″ LCD Monitor. It ran Windows 2000 and I could now play music in WinAmp whilst typing in a word document, it was a revelation. The monitor was frankly amazing at the time, sure it had a crappy response of something like 82ms and the brightness kindof dropped off at the edges. But it was flat and, unlike my previous CRT, left me room to actually use the top of my desk.

3 years of college rolled by and the computer grunted along without much hassle, then in college I joined the Computer Society and quickly moved up the ranks to become its Chairperson. In that position I got to see the acquisition and building of all the new PC’s for the society. Previously I hadn’t even opened the side of my own PC out of fear of breaking something, but now I had a whole plethora of PC’s to start meddling with.

From my experience in this society I learned how to build a working PC and that, in fact, it’s very easy. It’s a lot like a jigsaw puzzle that only has around 10 pieces to fit together. I was sold and immediately got home, dusted out my own PC and tidied up the cables to increase the air circulation.

However being a student I couldn’t afford to replace my own PC so I continued to use it, adding more RAM that I salvaged from some of the Computer Societies aging PC’s. It wasn’t until after I had graduated in 2006 that I actually got to build my own PC from parts I had chosen myself. It definitely was a learning experience because not only was I building for the first time I was also overclocking.

In the next part I’ll talk about my first build, how it went, and pitfalls all first time builders should watch out for. For now, have a look at some of my pictures below

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