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cyph3r
I missed the goal with my current rig, theres no two ways about it. After paying a rediculous amount of money (of which i’m still paying every month) for a “Top of the line” HP from PC World almost 4 years ago I decided the next rig I own would be one I know I built myself. A machine I knew was worth the money I spent on it.
Addmitedly it took me around 2 years to learn what I needed to know to get into that mindset, but hey, I didn’t want to go diving in at the deep end. I started by first buying a new GPU to replace the poor excuse of a graphics card in the HP (X1800XT replacing an X600PRO), but being a complete novice I did’nt think to check the dimensions and ended up with a brand new, high end GPU that wouldn’t fit on the Asus board the HP was supplied with. After actually checking the size this time (I wasn’t going to make the same mistake twice), I discovered that the motherboard in the HP was infact of the “miniATX” variety, and finding a decent looking miniATX board with everything I wanted was a tough job. In the end I decided to just scrap the HP case and go for a normal sized motherboard. I went for a Coolermaster Centurian 532 and some 915P Chispet MSI motherboard (both cheep and cheerful, seen as I demolished the warranty on the HP by now), this was when I built my first PC, where I first saw the light of LED fans and where I first discovered how much a bitch fitting a HSF can be.
By now the HP was long gone, and in it’s place was a faster, better looking, and somehow much cheaper, gaming PC. Not long after this the first Core 2 Duo reviews started cropping up and already I found myself hunting out hardware reviews and prices, putting together rigs in my head and on paper. It was also then that I first started reading about overclocking, something that seemed like some sort of black magic or voodoo dohickery back then, with huge risks, potentially dead hardware and days of utter frustration. In 12 months I felt I had learned enough and was confident enough to start buying parts for the best PC I could possibly build. I knew I was going Dual Core with Intel’s Core 2 Duo CPU’s and that i’d need a high end motherboard and RAM kit to take advantage of it. I planned to save cash by porting as much over from the current rig as possible, things like DVD drives, card reader, HDD’s and the X1800XT I got only a few weeks before.
6 Months later (I was buying a few components each month) I had pretty much everything I needed to again completely blow my previous rig out the water. This was the kit I had:
-Core 2 Duo E6600. I wanted the extra cache this model had over the lower end Core 2’s and didn’t see the price tag of the E6700 as worth it, especially as I was planning to OC.
-2GB GeIL PC2-6400. Back when I bought this 2GB kit DDR2 was still expensive. This kit costs as little as £30 today, I paid £117 for it a year ago.
-Asus Commando Mobo. P965 were the best to pair with Core 2’s in the beginning, the P5B Deluxe was the other option, but again I wanted as much performance as I could afford, so the price difference felt worth it.
-Enermax Noisetaker 535W. There was no way I was going to use the horrid unbranded, OEM PSU that came from the HP in this rig, no way at all.
-NZXT Lexa. I liked this case, the PC would be in the living room, so I didn’t want a crazy looking case with loads of crap on the front.
-Tuniq Tower 120. Read enough reviews to see that this was about the best air cooling you could get, so I did. 
-Soundblaster X-Fi Extreme Gamer. For the price this was a golden purchase. I listen to alot of music and play alot of games, never even come close to regretting this buy.
The build went fairly smooth, a few minor hiccups but nothing major. I took the time to research how exactly to build a PC from start to finish, from applying TIM to hooking up the front panel wires to the motherboard, things that are quite intimidating for a first time PC builder. Once XP had installed and updated, AV and spyware programs were installed and my internet connection was properly setup I got about to exploring the benifits of having a high end rig. I installed all my games and was absolutely blown away! Everything was just so much smoother, cleaner, prettier. For a couple of weeks I just couldn’t get off it, and when I was I was in glee. Of course nothing lasts forever and no matter how good your rig is and how much love, money and time you put into it theres always going to be something that arrives and makes it feel inferior….
Fast forward 3-4 months and we have Quad Core CPU’s, high speed DDR2 kits that are cheap as chips, much better chipsets and motherboards and DX10 GPU’s that can stomp all over mine.
“Back to the drawing board then” I thought. By now I was pretty clued up with hardware, I knew what worked, where to get it and how to make it run much faster than it should. I had also been doing hours and hours of research into watercooling, and decided that i’d take the plunge with the next rig. Obviously I wasn’t especially keen to spend hundreds of pounds of brand new hardware only to ruin it with my virgin watercooling exploits, so I decided upon watercooling my current rig (of which I updraded to join the DX10 party with a 2900 series GPU…. yeah, ATI, I know…). The sheer number of options available bewildered me to be honest, I knew the basics of watercooling (res, pump, waterblock, radiator, all connected by tubing), but I didn’t want to buy parts that I wasn’t sure were compatible with each other. In the end I looked at the low-end, all-in-kits that companies like Thermaltake and Gigibyte provide, but realised quickly that there was little chance of me fitting an entire waterloop inside my tiny Lexa (it would have, but it would have been hard work).
In the end I settled for a Thermaltake Kandalf LCS Tower Case with built-in watercooling. This collosal 20KG lump of steel appealed to me with it’s looks, sheer amount of space and relatively low price tag, aswell as the easy to setup watercooling kit inside. In the end it was all alot easier than I expected, I assembled the loop, leak tested overnight and installed the next day without a single hitch…. to be honest I felt a bit silly for worrying in the first place. :p
Anywho, that brings me here, tonight, writing this plog, in the same situation I was when the first Core 2 CPU’s were launched. I a want faster, more advanced. better looking rig, I want to feel what I felt when I built my first high-end super rig.
I want MY Dream PC.
Love the post, I could relate to everything you said,I would often look for computer sales ads in the daily papers compare the specs then research to find the best set-up,Then my missus “bless her” went to Psee world and bought me a all singing dancing package deal everything but the swivel chair it had a rather slow intel celeron processor but it was alright and was quite happy with it, hell fire I was about to invest in a high end Dell when the C2Duos were just coming but couldn’t find one with a E6600 cpu at the time and like yourself decided to build my own,anyway to cut a long story short i eventually built this little beauty
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