Help with building a PC

[Mongrel]

Seriously- A friend showed me his homebuilt system about a month ago. He has been working on it since April. It's an impressive beast, but has a spec. damn near identical to a machine currently available by mail order from Tiny (UK outfit).
The difference is that Tiny sells it for £999 , whereas it has cost him (by his own estimate) £1100 in parts plus the value of his time. Economies of scale and competition are pushing pc prices down all the time.

I used to work Tech Support for Tiny, before they went into liquidation and Time brought the name. Trust me the extra £200 is money well spent.
Most big name manufacturers are looking to cut their production cost as much as possible and since they buy such large quantities they can specify exactly what soes and doesn't get put on them, we used to call it the "Ker-Plunk" manufacturing process.
Start off with a perfectly good, basic motherboard (they used to use MSI), now start taking components off that are only there for redundancy, take off anything else that is deemed unnecessary until the board won't work - put back the last component and voila, £3 saved.
Then use good chipset but no-name manufacturer for things like graphics cards, stuff it in an unwieldy and awkward case that has terrible cooling and advertise it as "The latest 3d graphics" and then ship it to you with no OS disc, just a hidden partition on your hard drive.
The big manufacturers (Dell, HP etc.) will often go a step further and use proprietary connections, PSUs for instance are a nightmare for out of warranty Dells.

Building your own PC means that you can put in brands that you have found to be trustworthy - even though they may cost a little more, you'll have a better understanding of your machine and you can build exactly the right machine for you and yes, sometimes it just does come down to colour

I'll keep on saying "You get what you pay for"

 

[egslim]

Seriously- A friend showed me his homebuilt system about a month ago. He has been working on it since April. It's an impressive beast, but has a spec. damn near identical to a machine currently available by mail order from Tiny (UK outfit).
The difference is that Tiny sells it for £999 , whereas it has cost him (by his own estimate) £1100 in parts plus the value of his time. Economies of scale and competition are pushing pc prices down all the time.

Yes, his PC has a 64 bit AMD you can use as a space heater and the graphics are indeed impressive, as is the thermoregulation setup, which looks like the bridge of a starship by itself.

I don't know what he did, but building a pc from scratch shouldn't take more than two or three hours. And that's fairly generous. After that it takes about one day to install all software - though you can do this on an as needed basis, of course.

OEMs like Dell and HP will generally install lots of junk software. It's like moving into a new house where the walls and such are covered with advertisments. Not to mention spyware. It slows the machine down and is annoying. Doing a complete reïnstall solves this, and makes you more familiar and comfortable with your pc.

From a hardware perspective, OEMs rarely offer the best configuration for your needs. They have a different "general" config for every price segment. This means that in order to get a decent graphicscard you'll have to pay for a load of other, unnecessary stuff as well.

I have found even adding a peripheral like a printer leads to incompatibilities , with both manufacturers blaming the other.

Was this by any chance with an OEM pc?

 

[FreeChile]

Some of the economic benefits may come as new things come out. Other than that, it is actually more expensive to build--depending on what you are building. You could probably build a state-of-the-art machine for less than 1,500 dollars whereas you would have to pay over 2,000 for the same thing. But as new stuff comes out and you wait for that to drop in price, it is cheaper to adapt it to your system than to buy a new system. Here, knowing the internals of the system saves you time and morney. Both in selecting what you need and in not having to give someone money to install it for you. For example, when DVD writers drop in price, I intend to buy one and install it myself. I did the same when CAM corders dropped in price.

 

[Soapy Sam]

egslim- Waiting on parts- and returning a faulty graphics card- were the big delays. He buys stuff in the U.S, (much cheaper than the UK) and has it mailed.
My PC was a Brother A15. We are talking 1995-6. Win 3.1.
HP inkjet.
Both devices worked, just not with each other. Changed drivers, cables, plugs, nada. Finally swapped printers with a friend- a very basic Epson. Worked like a charm. But that cost me days of wasted time and frustration. I've had similar problems over the years with a USB2 port and an 8X AGP card which should have run (albeit at 4X rates) in my motherboard. NVIDIA. It didn't. Hey- I learned about beep codes though!

I've thought about upgrading my motherboard recently, but that means new memory, and drivers and reinstalling 3 years of XP upgrades and on and on... I think I'll buy something about six months behind the cutting edge. Proven,
old technology. Vacuum tubes. Brass handles. Something with style...

 

[Darat]

...snip...

I've thought about upgrading my motherboard recently, but that means new memory, and drivers and reinstalling 3 years of XP upgrades and on and on... I think I'll buy something about six months behind the cutting edge. Proven,
old technology. Vacuum tubes. Brass handles. Something with style...

Even though I love the latest technology (I mean why do marketing people need to do anything more then put "new" on the advert?") at the moment I would never recommend a casual user to go for the very latest and fastest version of technology "X".

New versions of technology are very rarely significantly faster, an extra say 5fps in Doom III at a “higher then makes any difference resolution” is not significant when the previous "latest" technology was managing 50fps.

One step down from the latest will net you a huge saving compared to the latest stuff. (And I bet with a PC that is configured as most people home PCs are i.e. not optimally you'd be hard pressed to tell the difference in performance.)

What about one of these?

 

[JR "BOB" Dobbs]

Do you have a difference engine? That would be most impressive.

Back on topic, the extra four connectors for the motherboard (speaking from an Intel perspective) is typically for the processor, and will be located near where your processor is located (although I didn't see it in the picture of your motherboard). Some motherboards have a place for four extra pins in the main power plug that will run power to a spare molex connector in another location on the motherboard (typically for modified cases that have accent lights and where wire management is paramount). If you don't see a plug. If there isn't a spare plug for the extra pins, I wouldn't sweat it. As was mentioned, it's probably a generic manual.

 

[voidx]

Just a small comment to add on custom built PC's. The price point is not always a large difference to be honest. However, performance is. A custom built PC with hardware that fully complements each other will often result in much better performance and stability for the same price as a manufactured PC. Of course this assumes a certain amount of knowledge. But as mentioned a PC should be put together within a couple hours. Many manufacturers get lower prices by sometimes using slightly more generic namebrand components, or using namebrand components, but using them in a wide variant of of different setups. Using just a little knowledge to make sure you've got the best RAM, CPU, PS, HDD and everything else for the motherboard you're operating on makes a noticable difference in performance for the same price.

As for compatibility...the arguement is easily...if you know what you doing, hence building a PC in the first place, you'll have researched compatibility before buying. At least in Canada, if the part doesn't work or isn't compatible, you simply return or exchange it.

Basic overclocking yields more performance, but at a little extra cost, more case fans, better heat sinks, but usually is not too cost prohibitive. Extreme overclocking such as water cooling scenarios are not cost effective. While you can drastically over-clock a CPU, as my brother has done, he'll be the first to admit that it'd be far cheaper too, simply buy the latest generation chip. In that instance, its purely for the hobby of it, and I must admit, his setup is very impressive. He even has quick-connect hoses, like you use on garden hoses, to easily and quickly disconnect his water hoses when he needs to work on the PC.

So in summary, with knowledge, for basic PC's, custom built can yield more performance and likely more stability than a manufactured PC for the same price. But the knowledge is key.

 

[egslim]

My PC was a Brother A15. We are talking 1995-6. Win 3.1.
HP inkjet.

Now that was a little before my time. But it seems in those days OEM pc's had a lot of propietary tech built in, more than they do now. So I think that is where the problem came from.