Build your own PC for Christmas

PUTTING TOGETHER your own PC has been getting easier to do over the last few years. Most of the component manufacturers have geared themselves up to making sure that it's something even a raw rookie can do in a couple of hours. And there are plenty of people out there who think that it's something every IT professional should do at least once.

To help you on your way if you need a new machine this Christmas, the following bits of kit are ideal. There are three different systems you can build with this lot, an ultra-cheap general purpose machine, a budget games machine and a killer system. The cost of the final systems is shown towards the end of this article, all of the costs shown are without sales tax (VAT).

The Ultra-Cheap General Purpose Machine
This machine is the real basic system. It's not going to be any good at playing the very latest games but it will do fine for surfing the Web, running office applications and it will still cope with some gaming. You could probably get away with editing camcorder footage on it too, provided you don't skimp on the hard drive capacity (an hour of camcorder footage takes up about 12GB).

CPU: AMD quietly introduced some new Durons a few months back and the 1.6GHz version will set you back about £38 including a heatsink and fan. Intel's nearest equivalent is the Celeron 2.4GHz which, praise be to marchitecture, is about the same speed but costs half again as much. Duron it is then.
Motherboard: the Gigabyte GA-7VT600 1394 is the beast to go for. It's modern, cheap and has all of the right connections. You can read a review here. It'll set you back about £55.
Graphics: the ATI Radeon 9200SE fits the bill pretty well. If you hunt around you can find a card based on this chip for about £25. It won't play the latest first-person shooter games but it will still cope with some more sedate 3D games. It's fine for playing back DVDs.
Total: £118

The Budget Games Machine
You want to blast the living daylights out of some snot-nosed l33t twelve year old online? This is the machine for you. It's not going to be the fastest games machine on the planet but it'll work well with any game that's out and about at the moment. It also should play a fair game of Half-Life 2 when that finally arrives.

CPU: the Intel Pentium 4C 2.4GHz (800MHz FSB version) and AMD Athlon XP 2800+ are almost exactly the same price, both being in the £105 region. But the Intel wins in most games and has some decent overclocking potential. Pentium it is.
Motherboard: the best value out there is the Abit IS-7, a cracking bargain with high performance at only £75. Remember that you'll need two sticks of 256MB memory as this is a dual channel board.
Graphics: another winner for ATI here, the 9600XT is the way to go. A fair bit faster than the 9600 Pro but you can still pick one up for about £110.
Total: £290

The Killer System
For some people money is no object, this is the system for them. This is the processor, motherboard and graphics combination that will kill everything else out there.

CPU: there was only one choice for the processor, it had to be an Athlon FX51; the Pentium 4EE is too rare, more expensive and has no clear advantages. But, at £520, you might want to wait for the FX53 to arrive.
Motherboard: the obvious choice is the Asus SK8V, a motherboard with everything. Mind you, at £140 you're paying for everything. Remember that you'll need two sticks of registered DDR400 memory, it can't use ordinary DDR.
Graphics: this is a tough call. In some cases the ATI 9800XT is the winner, in others the nVidia FX5950 Ultra is the winner. However, nVidia still hasn't fully won back the trust of the gaming community after its shenanigans earlier this year so the 9800XT makes it a clean sweep for ATI. Add another £320 to the bill.
Total: £980

The Inside Story
Memory is the first thing that you'll want. These days, 512MB is recommended. You can get away with 256MB if you're just going to be running office applications and doing a bit of browsing but, even then, 512MB is a better bet. The motherboard/CPU combinations above except the Athlon FX use standard DDR400 and, at the moment, you should expect to pay about £50.

A hard drive is obviously a must for any system and, these days, you really should be looking at a SATA drive to go with that nice new motherboard. The drives are slightly more expensive than the older parallel ATA ones but their extra performance is worth the money. Expect to pay about £55 for an 80GB device.

This time last year a floppy drive was still an essential but, unless you really need one, you can safely skip it these days.

It seems that everyone wants at least a CD burner these days but biggest on the wish-list is a DVD ± writer. Last year it would have been considered at luxury item but you can now pick up a perfectly decent one for less than £80. Or you could get a combined DVD/CDRW for about £50. The DVD ± writer seems a much better deal as it's likely to stay current for much longer and can still burn CDRs. Pick of the crop at the moment is the LG GSA-4040B.

Outside
Cases are one item where you're not going to be short of choice. Expect to pay about £30 for a case with a 300 Watt power supply for a basic, beige box. If you're building a top-of-the-line machine, you'll want a better power supply, probably a 400 or 450 Watt. From there on in, there are cases with windows on the side so that you can see your messy wiring or boy-racer style added neon lights, brushed aluminium cases if you want to spend a fortune and just about any other style you care to name. The only exception is if you want something that will look good in your lounge at which point you'll find that almost every standard ATX case on the market has about as much panache as a Trabant with go-faster stripes. If external style is a must, you'll want to start looking at bare-bones systems. You can find out more about those at sites like SFFTech.

If you need a monitor to go with your system, and it's something that is not included in the final price at the end of the article, take a read of the INQ monitor guide.

Choosing a mouse is fairly simple, it just depends on your budget. Forget the old 'ball' mice, optical is now cheap enough that it's a must. You can pick up a basic Microsoft Wheel Mouse Optical for about £8 and, unless you want a real zinger of a rodent, it should do fine for just about any purpose, be it business or games. If you simply must have the best mouse on the market, the Logitech MX 700 Cordless Optical Mouse at around £40 is incomparable, easily the loveliest input device out there.

Lastly there's the keyboard. If you're not a typist, and it's frankly embarrassing how many IT professionals aren't, just about any old piece of tat for a fiver will do. If you are a typist there are two routes to go, many typists recommend Cherry keyboards and they can be reasonably priced. Otherwise, for sheer comfort and long hours at the screen, the Microsoft Natural Keyboard is the way to go, it's split in the middle to reduce wrist ache. Either of these more professional options should cost you less than £20.

Adding it All Together
Going for the cheapest options all the way, but keeping the DVD writer, the budget system comes out at £346 excluding VAT. That's pretty good for a machine that will might not be the latest technology but can still burn a DVD, run office applications with ease and still just about play a game of Battlefield 1942.

The games machine comes out at £518 excluding VAT, assuming that the you can live with a standard case and without the Logitech mouse. It's got enough oomph to deliver high frame rates in any game that's out at the moment and has some nice overclocking potential, just right for a hardware dabbling gamer.

The killer system costs a bit more. At the price it seemed churlish not to spec an aluminium case, a full 1GB of RAM, the Logitech MX700 mouse and a decent keyboard. Call it £1425 to you gov, plus VAT. But it's a system that would knock just about anyone dead, even someone who needed a full on workstation.

Conclusion
It's quite possible to build yourself a decent system at a fairly low price. The prices given in this article are slightly conservative, you can get cheaper if you shop around. And there's something nice about knowing just exactly how your system fits together. At least one reader built a budget machine around our last guide and that machine is still a respectable system a year later.

The great thing about it being Christmas time is that, if you do build a system, you can claim it's for the kids. Even if you and the l33t twelve year old are the kids you have in mind. µ