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Building a PC from scratch

IJ Reilly

IJ Reilly

macrumors P6
Original poster
Jul 16, 2002
17,912
1,506
Palookaville
Yeah, I'm going to do it. (I have my reasons, and no, I'm not giving up my Macs.)

Does anyone know a good source of motherboards, power supplies, cases, and all that other junk you need to build a PC from scratch?

I realize this might not be the best place to ask, but I trust my Mac brethren more than the PC rabble, to give me good advice. :)
 
yea...newegg is the best...overnight shipping (for west coast at least), great customer service, best websight i have ever bought from
 
Wow, that was fast -- thanks! (I'm really going to enjoy it? Really? :) )

I'm looking to build a mid-range PC, something around a 2.8 P4, decent video card, unobtrusive tower. Nothing extravagant. Any thoughts?

I'm wondering about how large the power supply should be, that sort of thing.
 
most likely..unless you are RAIDing drives and using several potical drives the powersuply that comes with your case is manageable..I use a 410W Enermax hard drive and i like it..but it was $80 when i bought it.
 
Dont Hurt Me said:
make sure you load up on virus protection :D I was thinking of doing the same but decided i like my free time. :eek:
Click to expand...

A smart man needs no virus protection with Windows ;)

Just a firewall will suffice.
 
I dont use a firewall or virus protection with my PC, i just use common sense, the best virus protection out there! I never had used anything..it just pissed me off with the memory and speed it uses, useless software
 
IJ Reilly said:
Yeah, I'm going to do it. (I have my reasons, and no, I'm not giving up my Macs.)

Does anyone know a good source of motherboards, power supplies, cases, and all that other junk you need to build a PC from scratch?

I realize this might not be the best place to ask, but I trust my Mac brethren more than the PC rabble, to give me good advice. :)
Click to expand...
You call that building a PC from scratch...

When Heath-Zenith was around people actually got a box of chips, capacitors, resitors, blank boards and wires to solder together.

Heck all you're doing is assembling a boxes of pre-built parts.
Any PC using monkey can do that.
attachment.php
 
My personal method for getting the best price you can is to pick out exactly what you want on newegg because they very rarely have what I'm looking for. Print out your list of junk and then (using the dual monitors I hope you have) put www.newegg.com on one monitor and www.zipzoomfly.com (previously googlegear) on the other. Look up each item by price number and order whichever one is cheaper. I've saved upwards of 50 dollars on various systems by using this method.

Personal preferances:
Processor: AMD (my 2400+ at home generally runs circles around the 2.6 P4 that I use at work)
Motherboard: Gigabyte or ASUS
Ram: Crucial
Antec cases are a good balance of style, quality, and price
Most of the Antec cases on newegg come with a decent power supply, and honestly unless you get a video card that requires a seperate power connection, and are using multiple hard drives and optical drives, you'll be OK. 350 to 400 watt range should be more than enough.
ATI 9600 XT is a very good value for the money.
Get rounded cables for the IDE drives.

My personal recommendation is to only put a hard drive in the case. No optical drives or a floppy. This cuts down on your wires and clutter, and keeps a nice air flow going through the case. Then buy USB2.0 enclosures for any additional hard drives or optical drives that you want. As soon as I check the rules for these forums again I will see if I can post pictures of my machine.
 
Sun Baked said:
You call that building a PC from scratch...

When Heath-Zenith was around people actually got a box of chips, capacitors, resitors, blank boards and wires to solder together.

Heck all you're doing is assembling a boxes of pre-built parts.
Any PC using monkey can do that.
attachment.php
Click to expand...
Aint that the truth, are they still around?
 
Allright, I'm going to see if I can post the picture of my PC baby.
 

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Elbeano said:
Personal preferances:
Processor: AMD (my 2400+ at home generally runs circles around the 2.6 P4 that I use at work)
Motherboard: Gigabyte or ASUS
Ram: Crucial
Antec cases are a good balance of style, quality, and price
Most of the Antec cases on newegg come with a decent power supply, and honestly unless you get a video card that requires a seperate power connection, and are using multiple hard drives and optical drives, you'll be OK. 350 to 400 watt range should be more than enough.
ATI 9600 XT is a very good value for the money.
Get rounded cables for the IDE drives.
Click to expand...

Okay, getting down to specifics, which AMD mobo do you like? I see newegg's got the P4 2.8E for $179.00. I'm having a hard time locating an AMD board with same sort of specs (esp. bus speed). Also, I'm not seeing a manufacturer's name on the boards. How do I know if I'm getting a well-made one?
 
Sun Baked said:
You call that building a PC from scratch...

When Heath-Zenith was around people actually got a box of chips, capacitors, resitors, blank boards and wires to solder together.
Click to expand...

Yeah, yeah, yeah... tell me about it. :D

My family's biggest Heathkit project was color TV, circa 1970.
 
Elbeano said:
Allright, I'm going to see if I can post the picture of my PC baby.
Click to expand...
Thats nice but still not as clean as a powermac. Apple does have a clean design and they were the one who brought forward the see through design (imac) how many years ago? in fact my old 333 is still going strong with my stepdaughter. :p
 
The AMD's bus speed only goes up to 400. Although technically both P4's that have an "800 mhz" bus and Athalons that have a "400 mhz" bus operate at 200 mhz anyway. I'm not exactly sure what you're doing with this machine, but unless it's video encoding or some other pure number crunching thing, I'd go for an AMD. An AMD 2500+ with a Barton core has 512k of level 2 cache. Even though the technical clock speed is like 1.8ghz it is still very speedy for being 80 bucks. The money you could save over the P4 could be put in to a better video card, and you would notice better gaming performance from that upgrade anyway, if that's what you're in to.

As far as the motherboard goes, the one that I have in that picture is an ASUS of some sort. I forget exactly, but it only goes up to 200mhz FSB anyway, so you don't want that. Get either an ASUS or a Gigabyte with the nForce 2 chipset. That will let you use any athalon processor out, and dual channel ram if you're in to that sort of thing. Other than that you're just looking at whether or not it has firewire, optical, raid, or anything else you think you might need.
 
Dont Hurt Me said:
Thats nice but still not as clean as a powermac. Apple does have a clean design and they were the one who brought forward the see through design (imac) how many years ago? in fact my old 333 is still going strong with my stepdaughter. :p
Click to expand...

It might not be as clean as your powermac, but I made it, and I sure put a lot of effort in to it. It also cost probably about 1/6th as much as a powermac. It was also a lot of fun.
 
IJ Reilly said:
Okay, getting down to specifics, which AMD mobo do you like? I see newegg's got the P4 2.8E for $179.00. I'm having a hard time locating an AMD board with same sort of specs (esp. bus speed). Also, I'm not seeing a manufacturer's name on the boards. How do I know if I'm getting a well-made one?
Click to expand...
Toms hardware has some good info on motherboards, go there. also use socket 939
 
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