Pumpkin - 6 months after

This one's about the PC I built just over 6 months ago now. What lessons have I learned from it and what advice would I give to people looking to build their own PC ?

Firstly - if you're not bothered about gaming, then there's no reason to be building or buying a desktop PC. Laptops do videos, browsing, messenger'ing, iTunes playback and the rest just as well as a desktop. The only advantage a desktop PC has it that you can fit a proper graphics card plus you'd be using a proper keyboard and mouse. I use my laptop ahead of the desktop for everything but gaming and checking the emails in the morning.

So - you're going to be gaming so you want a desktop anyway ... Why go custom built ?

Easy - you select every component, you can prioritise where the money gets spent. And it's not the obvious places where I'd advise extra money to be spent or money to be saved. Let's start by picking on something to compare against, or rather - butcher its spec. Novatech's Destroyer V3 is about the right price level.

The most important thing to PC buying is not spec or bundled software (which is often annoying). It's reliability. That's where the main focus should be in picking the components and it's worth spending a bit extra here to get a better foundation.

Case - nothing wrong with the Novatech case here. It's probably quite a decent case. If you're selecting a case make sure - the feet are rubber (to absorb vibration and make it quieter) and that they won't fall off (they often don't go back on right if they do). Removable motherboard trays are for enthusiasts and add no value for most people. I'm not intending to take my desktop to bits again, so a removable motherboard tray would be gold plating.

Power supply - Novatech supply their own here. I'd argue with that. If a power supply breaks, it will damage every component in the machine. Spend extra on a quality one. You also get more reliability out of it. Saying that though, the 600W Novatech psu is only £2 saving on a quality assured Corsair unit.

Cooling - bigger is always best here. A bigger cooler means its fan doesn't have to spin so fast. Fast fans = noise, lots of it. Spending a bit extra on a cooler also means the machine will be happy in hot conditions. That said, my desktop is quite happy at the moment and I should look to reduce its fan speed a bit ...

So - grab a £40 cooler instead of a hard disc that's the next size up. It'll improve reliability plus it'll keep the noise down. Dunno what the cooler is in the Novatech machine, it could well be the stock cooler ...

Hard drives - when I bought my bits, hard disc prices had gone through the roof and then some. So I was forced to go Plan B and borrow the hard disc from my old machine. Plan B involved getting a small Solid State Device drive to run Windows on, combined with the 250GB drive from my old one. It's one of the best building decisions I've ever made. Seriously. The machine will reboot in under a minute and never experiences hard disc slowdowns. It still does the same amount of hard disc chatter as any Windows machine but because the drive is so much faster, you don't notice.

Here's another plus a bit, minus a bit ... A 60GB SSD (no smaller, Windows eats 41GB of my 60GB drive) costs £65 for the Crucial m4 that I have. It transforms the performance of the machine. It's an essential component. The Destroyer machine comes with an Intel i7-3770 cpu costing £230. A step down to the i5-3570k cpu costs £180. It's better to have the cheaper cpu plus an SSD than to have the marginal performance benefit of the more expensive cpu. All that said though, the Destroyer also has an SSD, it's just bigger than is needed (i.e. +£50)

I have my fingers crossed that the upgraded work machines that are supposedly on the way have SSDs instead of normal drives. All our data lives on the network, so there's no point in us having big conventional drives. The SSDs are also cheaper. Will we get SSDs ? I doubt it. I have too little faith in the people providing our machines to expect good sense.

Duh - what that mean ? Outside of technobabble, my home desktop can start up and open the emails quicker than I can put my tie or shoes on in the morning. At work, I could make a coffee in less time than it takes the machine to start up. Same with the laptop at home. And after the non-SSD machines are in Windows, it still takes ages for them to sort themselves out.

All that said - what spec would I recommend for a decent game machine capable of running Skyrim well at 1080p and max detail ? Here we go, right now it's :

Intel i5-3570k processor - above that and you don't get any gain worth the money
8GB Ram - memory is incredibly cheap. 4GB is the minimum now but at £44 for 8GB ? Get more.
Drives - get a SSD as the boot drive, you won't regret it.
Graphics - nVidia 560Ti. AMD/ATI graphics have poor software these days. But watch out - nVidia have a new chip design coming out called Kepler which will change things again.
Optical drive ? I wouldn't honestly bother with blu-ray on a PC, you can't take screenshots because people are too paranoid about copying. Plus download is taking over from optical discs as a delivery mechanism.
Cooler - get the biggest that will fit but don't bother with water cooling. Water + electronics = bad news.

Think that's enough for now. Remember - PCs are so powerful these days that spec is fairly irrelevant. What's most important is usability, reliability and quietness.

Usability - get an SSD, they improve smoothness more than any other component
Reliability - comes from making sure the power supply is up to the job
Quietness - big cooler being run slowly

PS If anyone reading this in the Bristol area wants a PC built, lemme know. Will Build PCs For Food (as long as you're buying the bits).