Building a new PC, piece by piece - advice needed

[Mutley]

in the next couple of months, I intend to start building a new PC. My old PC is really not cutting the mustard anymore; its been tweaked and overclocked and it's on its knees...
The new PC is intended for gaming as well as general applications. I'm not going to buy bleeding edge components, but slightly lower or maintstream.

Here is what I need:
o Case (Midi)
o Motherboard
o RAM
o CPU (prob. AMD)
o PSU
o Graphics card
o LCD/CRT
o Hard disk drive/s
o DVD RW drive

I intend to take things like DVD ROm drive, sound card, keyboard and mouse from my old PC, and sell the other parts such as CPU, RAM, PSU etc etc. I don't see the point in selling the whole PC when I can use the parts.

I can't afford to buy all the parts I need in one go; I will be buying the parts month by month. So my question is this:

In what order would you buy the parts, and why?

Thanks!

[nvening]

See this thread

http://forums.hexus.net/showthread.p...ht=build+month

[JPreston]

Yeah it makes no sense as you would not have a working PC until you had bought pretty much everything...by which time the prices will all have dropped.

Only thing you could do is buy say a case and PSU now since they will not necessarily get much cheaper.

You can use the case as a coffee table or handy storage box and the PSU as a paperweight, assuming it's of reasonable quality

[Silent Shark]

In order to have a working PC you need:

o Case (Midi)
o Motherboard
o RAM
o CPU (prob. AMD)
o PSU
o Graphics card
o LCD/CRT
o Hard disk drive/s
o DVD RW drive

+ the keyboard and mouse from your old PC.

So basically your entire list.

The only leeway you get is if you intend to get more than 1 of the following:
o RAM (more than one stick)
o Graphics card
o Hard disk drive/s
o DVD RW drive
and maybe...
o LCD/CRT

but you'll need at least one of all of those to get started.

I'd buy the case, motherboard and processor first, followed by the PSU, as everything else plugs into those, so you can start to assemble the PC.

[MSIC]

I know that I keep bleating on about this, but i think that a decent case, keyboard & mouse, speakers and monitor are MORE important than the internal components.
These are the things that affect the experience of interacting with the computer and make it pleasing or not, rather than a 5% difference of boot-up times.

If you have genuinely decent parts from the old PC then certainly re-use them, but if they are more than a few years old you may be surprised what a difference of new quality components can make. This is also certainly true of the soundcard.

That said, none of these items will help your benchmarks....

[KowShak]

I know that I keep bleating on about this, but i think that a decent case, keyboard & mouse, speakers and monitor are MORE important than the internal components.
These are the things that affect the experience of interacting with the computer and make it pleasing or not, rather than a 5% difference of boot-up times.

If you have genuinely decent parts from the old PC then certainly re-use them, but if they are more than a few years old you may be surprised what a difference of new quality components can make. This is also certainly true of the soundcard.

That said, none of these items will help your benchmarks....

I agree that you need a "decent" keyboard, mouse and monitor, they have to work properly and be functional but they don't have to be the latest wireless desktop and biggest fastest widescreen LCD to be "decent".

Don't skimp on price and buy rubbish, you'll not enjoy the experience and will end up replacing low quality parts. If you spend all of your money on a really expensive graphics card you won't be able to afford a processor that'll keep up with it. Buy a balanced setup.

[merlin2001]

agree with what said above about decent quality of inputs - and also don't forgot the chair you sit on - a little extra spend on the chair can make for a much more comfortable experience! -
on to specifics - your obviously want to migrate slowly from one pc to the next, so you need to think through what you can replace and when to make sure you have a working pc all along the way - so i would recommend as 1st purchase is a AsRock Dual SATA MB S939 m/board + CPU. It has both AGP and PCI-E, so you'll be able to slot in all your current cards and update the GFX card when your ready. other bonus is that it uses a 20pin PSU, so your current PSU will prob. still work. (assuming you have the 12V connector)....

[Mutley]

This is all good feedback....keep it coming....

Some more background.

The PC that I have is quite old - motherboard is an MSI 645DX (SiS chipset), RAM is PC2700 DD, PSU is Enermax 340W, CPU is Pentium 4 2Ghz (northwood - O/C'd to 2.5ghz), graphics card is a 6600GT (not very old)., soundcard is a Soundblaster Audigy 2.

The monitor is quite old - a Dell 17" trinitron. Good for its time, but showing its age.

The case is a custom Dell case designed for a P3 750. I futher "customised" it when I rebuilt the machine into the P4 incarnation it is now. Its no good for a new PC.

I like the idea of the ASRock; it gives me an intermediary step, and its cheap, so I could replace the whole motherboard later on...

[project187]

right the simplest thing to do is buy the most changin bits such as gfx and cpu last obv at some point you will have to choose a socket type and go wwith that but i mean just wait right till the end to get the gfx card they go down most of all m8

[DanceswithUnix]

I would get a Shuttle first. It doesn't have to actually work, you can still sit and admire how lovely it looks

OK, I'll get my coat...

[Mutley]

I would get a Shuttle first. It doesn't have to actually work, you can still sit and admire how lovely it looks

OK, I'll get my coat...

I was thinking of just buying a component a year. Maybe this year I'll get the case....

[DanceswithUnix]

Seriously, I know this can be tricky when your budget is limited and you are trying to manage a major upgrade step. I had the same problem upgrading from socket A to my current S939 setup.

I upgraded the ram to 1GB matched pair DDR400 as that was socket-A compatible.

Then I upgraded the power supply to an Akasa as it was quieter than my previous PSU and had the 24 pin connector.

At that point I was stuck, and the next round was CPU, motherboard and graphics card in one hit. If the ASrock dual board was around at that time I probably would have used one of those instead as it is cheaper and would have allowed me to defer the graphics card for a while. Of course the graphics card is what I really wanted out of the whole upgrade, but didn't want to buy another AGP card.

Of course times change and I wouldn't go that route right now. With Socket AM2 out in around 6 months and using DDR2 memory I would only have been able to buy the PSU as the RAM would be outdated by the end of the build. I would probably just save the money and wait it out.

[MSIC]

I was thinking of just buying a component a year. Maybe this year I'll get the case....

[Yorkshire accent] I DREAM of being able to buy a component a year. In my day, me dad would buy me a stick 'o' RAM once every ten years, I still don't 'ave a motherboard and i 'ave to use me cat as the case. Ooooo you don't know 'ow good you 'ave it. [/Yorkshire accent]