I mentioned a few weeks back I was considering my choices for how to upgrade my aging computer equipment, and of the choices, building my own custom PC would be the most rewarding path to take. I swithered a bit on whether I really wanted to do this, but in the end I gave in to the temptation to build something entirely my own.
Great, I know what I want to do, now how do I get there? It’s been several years since I built a PC1, and I haven’t been keeping up with the trends, or what’s the latest and greatest in terms of performance, price, or anything really.
I had a few ideas of what I wanted – it needed to be small, as space in the office is at a premium. It needed to be as powerful as I could afford, so it would last a decent amount of time until it needed major upgrades, while being flexible enough to tackle many different types of task – development, gaming, photo (and potentially basic video/audio) editing, for example. In a perfect world, I wanted it to be as quiet as possible and look good.
The last few weeks have been spent doing research, going back and forward over potential configurations using PC Part Picker before settling on an outline of what I wanted. I took it over to /r/BuildAPC for a sense check, and was told my best bet was to change the graphics card for something more powerful than I had picked out. I rejigged a few things to make that possible, and ended up with the spec below:
The graphics card might still be swapped for another, similarly specced one, but otherwise this is what I’ll be building in a little over a week’s time, when I have some time off. I’ll be talking more about the build, closer to the time, as I have a few things planned which will make it a bit more interesting than just a straight PC build
- It was in 2008. I checked my order history. ↩
It’s been 4 years since I built my current PC. While it runs perfectly adequately, I’m starting to get the itch to build or upgrade again.
I will reuse the SSDs, power supply, and graphics card, but any upgrade will involve a new motherboard, CPU and RAM. I’m leaning towards AMD this time around. Zen 3 looks great.
My case is reusable, but it will limit me to a Mini-ITX system – which will push the price up due to the “miniaturisation premium”. So looking at upgrading that too could be worth it.
I should really upgrade the monitor too; it’s around twice as old as the PC. But again, it’s perfectly fine for most things.
Actually pulling the trigger on any upgrade is probably 3-6 months off, *at least*, so I do have plenty time to research parts and wait for price drops.