Custom PC

• FORUM
• Email this
  to a friend
  

• Submit Your
  Own Prices
  
  
• Sign Up to
  Our Newsletter

Buying a PC can be a daunting task, with some many different options out there and so many different places selling the humble PC. This article simply describes the steps I went through when looking for a PC, and I hope that it helps you to do the same.

First of all I better point out that I am a reasonably advanced PC user, so words like CPU, DDR memory and Front Side Bus don't scare me too much. That said, I don't have a huge amount of spare time, so I was not prepared to start wiring and soldering my own PC together!

I am also one of probably a large number of people now who simply wanted to replace their desktop unit. My keyboard, mouse, large LCD monitor and all the other accessories all work fine for me, its just the main PC itself that needs upgrading. Why? Well my old reliable DELL was starting to become less reliable, the Power Supply fan made a terrible grinding noise, the CPU was looking a little data and was certainly power hungry (Pentium 4 chip right at the peak of the gigahertz wars with AMD) and most importantly my graphics card blew up, and any new card I put in the machine blew up also.... Time to get a new PC!

My first port of call was the likes of PC world, who actually seem to offer pretty good value for money nowadays. Reasonable PC packages for less than £400. However as I mentioned I don't need a complete PC package and so didn't feel like spending out on the little extras that you get in the box. Also I didn't want to get wooed by the 3 Terabyte hard-drives and the high end graphics card. I'm after a good solid reliable machine made with high quality components, not a PC with the biggest chip number, hard disk and memory.

Instead I went online and had a look at some PC specialist companies on the web. Two sprang up immediately, PC-specialist.co.uk and cougar-extreme.co.uk, both offered really simple customisation of base units and you could strip out all the unnecessary accessories. In the end I went for cougar-extreme.co.uk as I found a couple of highly complimentary remarks about them on the web. Good value for money AND good customer service apparently.

Choosing my PC

Now the all important task of building my PC online. As stated my aim was to get good quality components, and to build a fast PC that was cost effective. To this end I tended to upgrade from the basic components, but not go for the top end, high capacity and expensive components.

The PC CPU

For the CPU I chose an Intel E6550. I think Intel are the best at the moment and the E6550 offered a fast chip (2.3Ghz) and also a fast front side bus meaning that it talks to the memory chips a lot quicker. A step lower is the E4500 chip, but this is quite a lot slower and not much cheaper (£30). A step higher is something like the E8500 but that price starts to increase a lot (£70 more than the E6550)

The PC Memory

For the memory I chose 2Gb of Corsair DDR2 memory (800Mhz). This is a fair dollop of memory and should easily cope with anything Windows XP can throw at it. It is also slightly faster (800Mhz) than the standard stuff and so should work well with the faster CPU front side bus. I went for the brand named stuff as unbranded memory can sometimes cause problems. It is very rare, but hard to diagnose if you've got dodgy RAM. Total additional cost was around £30, compared to maybe £20 for the cheapest 2gig memory you could get.

Hard Drive

For storage space I wasn't after a large harddrive as I intended to use my old DELL PC's hard drive for some data storage. However the standard 80gig Hard drive sounded a little small. I plumped for a 400Gig drive in the end, costing an additional £30.

Other PC parts

For the PC case I opted for a cheap metal case, I wasn't too worried about looks, and for the Power Supply I took a Colors 550watt silent PSU, again I wasn't too worried about what spec I got on that. Graphics car was an ATi 2600, a little pricey I felt at £50 extra but I wanted the dual DVI output to run my existing LCD monitors. Finally for the motherboard I chose a Gigayte P35-D3R. This has a fast enough front side bus to run my CPU properly but didn't come with anything particularly fancy like inbuilt RAID or wireless. The D3R's are supposed to be robust and reliable motherboards. This was a £40 upgrade from the standard Conroe motherboard.

I also took a DVD re-writer simply because I only saved 60p if I didn't want it!

I didn't need a copy of Windows XP as I already have a licensed version that I could put on my new PC

Total cost of PC was £330 + VAT.

The PC arrives!

The PC arrived a few days later and I was eager to try it out. As soon as I switched it on I was disappointed to find that the Colors PSU sounded like a small jet engine! Certainly not the ‘silent' PSU that I was expecting.

I was a bit annoyed by this but carried on regardless and quickly set up the new PC with Windows XP and installed all the required programs. Well I say ‘quickly', it actually took me pretty much all weekend, installed software just seems to take ages. At this point I started to think about the PC world computers, okay so they were a few pounds more expensive, but at least they came pre-installed with a lot of stuff. However I consoled myself by thinking about the higher quality components used and how my PC should stand the test of time.

After a few days of use the Power Supply noise really started to annoy me, so I phoned up cougar-extreme to complain. They were very very helpful and offered to take the PC back to replace the Power Supply or to send me a new one. After some discussion I decided to get a replacement sent out to me and even decided to upgrade it (for another £20) to a Corsair PSU. Seeing as the only component that wasn't branded was the one that was causing me trouble I decided it was probably worth the expense.

The great thing about cougar-extreme (apart from the fact that they answered the phone and were very helpful) was that apparently I would not invalidate their warrenty if I opened the PC case and swapped out the PSU myself. Not many companies offer that!

Changing the PSU

A couple of days later the new PSU arrived and I quickly swapped it over. Just a matter of undoing a couple of screws and connectors, taking the old PSU out and then doing the reverse for the new PSU. Couple of screws, check all the connectors and away we go! The new PSU was much much quieter and I was a lot happier. I also used the opportunity to put my old hard drive in as a backup to copy important files to.

Noise and Power Reduction

Unfortunately the whole Power Supply noise thing got me paranoid about the total noise from the computer. With one noise removed a load more became apparent. Firstly a could hear a ticking noise from my Hard Drive, once every few minutes it would sort of tick and scratch away. I tried changing a load of settings in Windows to see if it was the operating system accessing the drive, but nothing would fix it. For a while I thought it was the new Hard Drive and was getting worried that there was a problem with that as well, but a quick test of unplugging my old hard drive showed that it was the culprit! A little searching on the web also showed that a ticking hard drive like that was probably about to break soon, so good job I did get a new PC when I could

CPU fan

The next area of noise annoyance was the CPU fan. The system came with a pretty standard Intel CPU cooling fan that would whir like mad whenever the PC was being used for mildly intensive tasks. I initially thought that I would have to get a new CPU cooler to fix this problem, but after a bit of research I found a better solution.

I downloaded a program called ‘smartfan' which gave me direct access over the CPU fan speed. I then found that if I turned it down to around 800RPM I could pretty much eliminate the noise completely. 900RPM was pretty noisy, and strangely 700RPM was worse still!

With the CPU fan fixed and the 2nd Hard Drive disconnected, my PC was nice and quiet.

Over and Underclocking

By downloading smartfan I had discovered that there is a whole other world out there for controlling and tweaking your PC. Gigabyte make a program called Easytune 5 that allows you to play with all the parts on your motherboard - fan speed, CPU voltages, clock speeds, memory speeds, graphics cards etc.

I downloaded the program and had a tentative play with the controls. It seems I could overclock my PC a fair whack and run an awful lot faster than the system was designed to. However as I have already stated, I wasn't too fussed about a super fast PC, so what I found more interesting was the ability to UNDER-clock my PC. I soon found that I could drop my CPU core voltage from 1.35volts down to 1volt, as long as I dropped the overall system speed (the Front Side bus) down 20% as well. This had a remarkable affect and dropped my CPU temperature by around 10 degrees.

Intrigued by this I put a power meter on the PC and tested out the effects of underclocking. It seemed that under normal use my PC was taking only 80Watts of power (seemed low to me!), but my underclocking I could easily get this down to 65Watts, okay so its not a huge amount in the grand scheme of things, but I certainly didn't notice any difference in performance and was pleased that I could shave just a little off my power bill

PC Conclusions

Buying a PC from an online specialist was a pretty rewarding experience for me. I got exactly the PC I was after and certainly didn't pay over the odds for it. However it did take a while to spec out, install the software, fix the fan noises and generally tweak the system, so if you aren't an IT buff then you might be better off popping down to the high street and getting something off the shelf and working instantly in your living room/study .