Building a new PC – PART 1: Planning

It has been five and a half years since I built my last PC. As my previous computer was getting a bit dated and ZombieTron’s PC kept shutting down due to overheating all the time I figured it was time to get a new one.
Our new PC had to meet the following requirements

• Quad Core CPU
• Minimum 4 gigs of RAM
• Small form factor
• Capable of playing the latest PC games and play HD movies
• Silent and cool
• Windows 7 Ultimate X64

  Before even considering building the PC myself I first checked what DELL, ACER, HP, IBM and a couple of other big hardware companies had to offer in the £700-800 price range. Finding something in this price range was impossible as most computers were only dual core or they were simply too big.
  I decided to do a self-build and our budget was £700-800. The next morning I went to the bank to apply for the loan… just kidding

  After a couple of days of research I managed to find all the components that matched our needs. And all within our £700 budget!

  Here is the component list:
  Case: Silverstone Sugo SG07B Mini-ITX BLACK
  Motherboard: Gigabyte GH-H55N-USB3, H55, Socket-1156
  CPU: Intel i5 Quad Core (i5-750)
  Memory: Corsair XMS3 DDR3 1600MHz 4GB CL8
  DVD Player/recorder: Silvertstone SST-SOD01 DVD Slim Combo
  GPU: HIS Radeon HD 5770 1GB GDDR5 IceQ 5

  The Silverstone Sugo SG07B Mini ITX case is probably the best Mini ITX case currently available which is also reflected by the price of £160. This was the most expensive component in the build. More tech talk about this in the next episode.

  Ideally I would have gotten 8 gigs of RAM which is the maximum supported by the motherboard. This would have been the only sensible choice if I was going to be using virtualization (running several virtual machines on one psychical computer).   But since this would have blown our budget and I have no plans of using virtualization I did the sensible thing and got 4 gigs only.

  Before ordering everything above online I made sure (again and again) that all components were compatible. This is especially important when buying online as returning things is a nightmare. It is also important with Mini ITX builds as there are lots of size restrictions in these builds. You may also have noticed that there is no hard drive in the list above.  The reason for this is that I decided to re-use a 5 year old 250GB Matrox SATA drive. (which may have been a bad idea… more about this in part 2).

  Stay tuned for the next episode in the saga…