Tech Paladin

This is a multi-part series about my journey on the road to becoming a real PC owner and user. As a Mac guy tired of being left behind when it came to new games, both in terms of software and hardware, I finally decided to take the plunge and build a gaming PC.

Time for the basics. At its most basic hardware level, a computer needs a processor so it can actually do anything, some RAM so that the processor can process more than a few megabytes at a time, a hard drive to store data on, a motherboard to let that stuff talk to one another, a power supply to fuel everything, and a case to dump it all inside.

On top of this, of course, I’d need an optical drive to actually install the operating system for the first time (and probably all the subsequent times in the future as well if you’re using Windows). Since this was going to be a gaming rig, my new computer would also require a beefy graphics card. As I wasn’t interested in stringing ethernet cables all over the place, that meant I’d need a wireless card to connect it to my home network. Happily enough, I already had a keyboard, mouse, and speakers that functioned perfectly well, so I kept those. Finally, I’d need an actual operating system to install. Necessity dictated that some version of Windows was the only choice for games, and I happen to have been lucky enough to already have several licenses of various versions of Windows handy.

There were a couple of restrictions I imposed on myself to guide my search before I actually started surfing for parts. First of all, the case itself would have to fit on the second shelf of my little rolly-caddy thing (hey, what would you call it?) and function normally when laid horizontally:

This put some serious cramps on size, but that’s okay since most of the larger cases tend to look more like car accidents due to all their flashing lights and caution-tape-like aesthetic anyway.

Second, I wanted this thing to be cheap. Not knowing how much to spend on the screen, I decided to shoot for under $500 for the actual computer itself. If you think about it, I sort of cheated, because of course the screen would be extra and would most likely tack on several hundred dollars, but for some reason I wanted to focus on the price of the actual computer itself, so I did. For the record, that’s a full computer consisting of a case, power supply, motherboard, processor, RAM, hard drive, optical drive, beefy graphics card, and wireless card, and in order to keep below that budget, I’d have to spend an average of $55 or less on each component. Time to hit the internet!

Next up: Shopping time!

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 29th, 2008 at 10:32 pm and is filed under Mac OS X, Windows. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.