The Open Sourcerer

Building your own PC…

My regular desktop computer, Twoflower*, that I use for work and play is dying… 🙁

Twoflower is pretty old now by PC terms and is becoming quite unreliable. I built it about 4 or 5 years ago I guess, although I can’t remember exactly when, and it has been a good workhorse until quite recently. But the time has finally come to move on.

I like building my own PCs and find it can also be a very cost effective way to get exactly the PC you want and, of course, you don’t have to pay the Microsoft Tax either. So, after planning and reading for a couple of months or so, I have just ordered the new bits which will come together to create Lobsang*.

I’m not a “gamer” so I don’t need a heavy duty graphics card or excessive cooling, but I do tend to run a lot of apps at the same time and some of them are quite “hungry”: Eclipse, VirtualBox Virtual Machines, Inkscape, Gimp, OpenOffice.org, Thunderbird & Lightning with as many email accounts and CalDAV calendars as I have, and Firefox with usually a dozen or so tabs open at one time and perhaps further instances of Firefox running too. I’ve also often got a remote X sessions running to a development server as well.

So, it was important to me that I built a PC that is pretty quick, can be expanded easily and will – again – hopefully last me for a good few years.

Here is my shopping list:

The notable items on here I would say are:

• Power Supply – It is a really important part of your system. A cheap “no-name” PSU gives you unstable voltages that will lead to operational and reliability problems, crap cabling which restricts airflow, inefficiency so you just waste money making heat and they can be surprisingly noisy. The reviews I read lead me to choose either this Corsair model or a 450W unit from “Be Quiet”.
• The Asrock Motherboard – This was probably the hardest component to choose. I don’t need a top-end mobo that will overclock like a wild thing, but I did want one that would provide me with a decent platform and will allow some level of growth. This board looked to be just about right and very well priced for an Intel LGA775 board. It supports DDR3 (up to 4GB) as well as DDR2 (up to 8GB) memory and will run any of the latest generation Core2 dual and quad core processors including the most recent 45nm designs.
• The Processor – I was, until quite recently, going to go for the outstanding Q6600 65nm Quad core chip but having read some more recent reviews it seems as though the newer 45nm designs are much more efficient and yet more powerful. In most review tests, this dual core E8400 outperforms the Q6600 device and has about half the power consumption. There are certain times when 4 cores are better, but seeing as I’ve happily lived with just one up until now I think two will be just fine!
• No Operating System – I will, of course, be installing a Free and Open Source OS and that will almost certainly be Ubuntu Hardy Heron 8.04.1. In fact I am planning to have a spare partition or two so I can install other OS’s too.

The rest of the items are nothing too special. I am very fond of Samsung drives and have used them for many years now. They are usually very quiet, fast, reliable and are excellent value. The graphics card is a passively cooled device that will be very fine for Compiz and the minimal other 3D requirements I have. I wanted a new case as my current PC’s case is terrible. It was cheap, looked it too and is really noisy with quite a few 80mm fans churning away constantly. This new Antec Three Hundred case looks much better, has bigger 120mm and 140mm fans (that turn slower and thus make less noise) and has better cable management so air should flow well and is quite capacious so I have room to expand too.

My main source of knowledge for this lot comes from the excellent Custom PC Magazine. Although it is heavily geared toward gamers and high end systems, their no-nonsense reviews and technical features are the best I have come across, and I’ve been reading computer magazines virtually since they first appeared. When Custom PC review a product, if it is crap they really say so. There never seems to be any of the “polite excuses” or bias toward particular suppliers or vendors – unless they make really good gear that is. My only gripes with it are I’d like it to cover more Media and power efficiency topics and feature more Open Source software. Perhaps I should suggest some articles…

For the supplier of the bits, I have gone to Scan Computers. I have used them several times before and have no complaints at all. They have a great reputation for service and they do tend to have the best prices too. Hopefully the bits will be here by the weekend, just in time for my 10th Wedding Anniversary, so how much actually ends up getting assembled before next week remains to be seen…

For this blog, I’ll take some pictures of the bits before, during and after assembly and run through the way I put together a new PC. It isn’t terribly hard and is very satisfying when it’s finished.

Update: I’ve written two articles covering the build process. Part 1 is here.

* All the computers in our house are named after characters from Terry Pratchett’s Discworld novels. So far I have used: Rincewind, Mort, Binky, Moist, Angua, Twoflower, Gladys and Vimes.