Let's build a computer!

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Zyx
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Let's build a computer!

Post by Zyx »

About a month ago I got a sudden urge to build myself a what could only be called an enthusiast level PC. The two original motivations were Borderlands 2 and Splinter Cell: Conviction, two games my otherwise capable 2009 MacBook Pro just can't handle at all. Borderlands 2 won't be here until September or so, but I've been planning to have a good old LAN gaming meet next month with a group of friends. And well, I did use my laptop there last time as well and well, we do mainly play Unreal Tournament 2004... however, gaming on a 15" screen does suck. And the laptop keyboard isn't that ideal either.

Anyway, a couple of years ago I resisted the urge by building a computer for a friend instead. It was fun building it. However, there's so much new fun tech available these days that ... I just.. have... to experiment... with. Like SSDs.

So, to make matters worse, I have a tendency to go quite deep into things so I've been doing a quite a lot of research the past weeks into the minutiae of PC components. Yes, all down to how the power supply unit works internally. To make things even worse, Intel will be introducing it's new processor line-up in couple of weeks and Nvidia just launched new graphics cards. Then there was the Thai flood late last year that double the prices for normal hard drives...

I set myself an initial budget of 1k€ and, well, my annual bonus was just paid out, so... let's see what I end up with. My plan is to build a quite silent, power-efficient, mATX sized thing that should last for a long time.

It looks like that the modern motherboards and CPUs have pretty much all built-in so building a PC these days is really dead easy. And the connectors these days are not as blood-thirsty as a decade ago. The trend that I don't like is that all the parts are designed like they were performance parts for teenage boys' Japanese cars. Well, apparently they're parts for teenage boys' computers instead. Look for example the assault rifle shaped heatsinks on memory. I didn't even know that RAM chips needed heatsinks, but apparently it's a thing. :shock:
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Zyx
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Re: Let's build a computer!

Post by Zyx »

Okay, so let's go further down the rabbit hole...

CPU + Motherboard

The CPU wars are as they've always been, you pledge allegiance to either AMD or Intel and pick whatever your budget agrees with your wants. Back in the day, AMD had both the enthusiast and budget market and Intel was just more expensive. Those days are now long gone and AMD has still the budget segment but their current generation has failed even on the mid-range. Though AMD's processors have a bit better graphics, as they bought out ATI a while ago, they went for the number of cores and, well, there is so far very little that benefits from more than 4 cores. Intel's integrated graphics, on the other hand, have always sucked but most people have a discrete graphics card anyway so it hasn't mattered in the high-end. Right now, Intel has the advantage on price/performance ratio.

All this power comes with a cost, heat. All retail CPUs come with a heatsink and a fan. They're perfectly capable, but people wanting better cooling or more silent solution get their own. Some go as far as liquid cooling solutions - and not just water but also liquid nitrogen. Yes, that same liquid nitrogen that has a boiling point of -196 degrees Celsius.

These days, everything can be found already on the motherboard. Yes, even hard drives. This has two implications: first, you can get away with much smaller case than the classic full ATX tower, and secondly, assembling a working computer is simple as couple of screws and locking the CPU in the motherboard. Network (even wireless), sound and video come straight from the motherboard. The integrated sound is also so good these days that there's no reason to get a Sound Blaster, only the professionals want their expensive sound cards. I have no idea what special needs you need to be able to use all the expansion slots on a normal ATX motherboard - especially when most needs can be covered with a USB device instead.

One nice thing with new motherboard chipsets is that they don't actually have that small, crappy and noisy fan anymore but are passively cooled. One reason is the things are way more power efficient and the other reason is that a lot of what a motherboard chipset did has been moved into the CPU.

I don't think a modern motherboard has any external connectors that comes with screws. A DVI connector is/was probably the last of the breed of lots of pins and and screws.

On the inside, it's becoming rate to find anything else than PCIe expansion card slots. So, if you're still hanging on to that 3com ISA Ethernet-card, I'm sorry to say you can't find any use for it other than being a doorstop.

Motherboards used to all be on a green PCB, but these days it's almost impossible to find a plain one. I remember when red PCB was fancy.

Oh, and the BIOS as we know and love is almost gone. Its job is now done by a thing called UEFI, which has a lot of fancy features like the ability to use the mouse in the settings screen.

Memory

Virtually indistinguishable between models, but somehow comes in many varieties and speeds and fancy heatsinks. As overclocking the CPU has become easier, memory features don't play any role anymore.

Some prefer to get memory chips that match the colour of their motherboard. Maybe with fancy heatsinks.

Most just pick whatever is the cheapest.

Case + Power

There used to be a time when all the computers were beige boxes. These days, you'll be pressed to find one in beige. They're all black. Some might even have windows so you can see how the blinking leds make everything pretty. Some focus on being silent, others in having good airflow and some focus on being dirt cheap.

The latest trend is to have the power unit at the base of the case, instead of being at the top like in the old days. Some go even further have the whole thing inverted so that even the motherboard is upside down. I think all of them have dropped the 3,5" floppy drive slot, but most have still at least two 5,25" slots. For what?

The normal ATX tower is still the crowd favorite, but a lot can be achieved in the smaller mATX (which, despite its name means the motherboard is just 6 cm shorter than the normal) and Mini-ITX (that actually is quite small) form factors.

You can get a case with power unit installed, but most people buy them separately as the power needs are quite system, or ego, specific.

If there's one thing that globalization is good at, it's creating mediocre crap at really low prices. On the other hand, what marketing is good at is selling way over what the consumer needs. Fortunately, in most of Europe, you really have to go out of your way to find the really cheap and exploding power units. Get a crappy power unit and you can easily fry your whole computer.

The one trend in computing in the recent years have been towards more energy-efficient components. You wouldn't believe this if you looked at the kind of power supplies are sold. 750 W to 1 kW sounds like a lot when you compare that even high-end laptops use something between 11 - 18 W when idle and the power adapter is rated between 65 - 90 W. What's more, the display is counted in these numbers for laptops.

In reality, a high-end single GPU + CPU desktop will use at high load something between 250 W and 350 W and because all modern components have energy saving features, much less in normal use. This truly is the part that really baffles me the most, because there are no advantages of getting a way too big power unit, yet it looks like the market is filled at around 600W mark.

One great new trend in power supplies is modular cables. As the number of additional devices has dropped (who has a floppy drive these days?), many of the cables would otherwise unused and take up valuable space especially if you have a small case.

Storage

I think the smallest (normal) hard drives mass produced at the moment are 750 GB. Think about that for a minute.

The new kid on the block is the SSD drive, which is basically a huge USB memory stick. No moving parts and all semi-conductor means these guys are insanely fast but like huge USB memory sticks, they're prohibitively expensive. A 64 GB SSD costs as much as a 500 GB HDD, and that's only because the HDDs are really expensive at the moment.

One nice thing is that the SATA connectors used these days are much nicer than the IDE connectors. The DIP switches are also gone.


So, congratulations. You have now all the parts required for a working computer, possibly even one that can run all the current games well. The most difficult part is routing all the power cables around the case to their right locations without causing a mess.

But isn't modern hardware really boring now? The only thing you can possibly connect wrong is the motherboard's power/reset cable to the the front of the case. And even that doesn't matter.

I guess that's why people fill their cases with blinking leds and liquid nitrogen. Otherwise your computer is almost as interesting as the innards of a Volvo station wagon.
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Pager
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Re: Let's build a computer!

Post by Pager »

I like your breakdown Zyx.
Zyx wrote: I remember when red PCB was fancy.
You should have seen the look on my face when I saw blue... :lol:
Zyx wrote:I guess that's why people fill their cases with blinking leds and liquid nitrogen. Otherwise your computer is almost as interesting as the innards of a Volvo station wagon.
I think Volvo is starting to gain the edge on this one.
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Zyx
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Re: Let's build a computer!

Post by Zyx »

Do you has what it takes to join the Homestarmy? The guts? The determination? The five bucks? Join today!
excpomelo
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Re: Let's build a computer!

Post by excpomelo »

I think Storage shoud use SSD
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