I previously had a Dell Latitude D830 as my PC. It was a decent laptop, with a good screen and durable body and a pretty great keyboard. That said, it was getting older. The 2.00Ghz Intel Core 2 Duo and 2Gb of RAM were not giving me the kind of speed that I wanted, and the 160Gb hard drive has been at capacity for around a year. I toyed with the idea of upgrading the RAM and hard drive, but ultimately decided that it would be a significant monetary and time investment that just wouldn’t create worthwhile results. I could have shopped around for a new laptop, but I wasn’t sure. This laptop is a laptop that stays permanently on my desk. If I need a computer to go, I use my iPad 2 or my several year old MacBook Pro. I had no need for another laptop.
So, why don’t I just build my own desktop? I shouldn’t be too hard, would be comparatively inexpensive, and could give me the kind of performance that I wanted, not that Dell or HP or Toshiba wanted me to have. It wasn’t too hard to build the computer, and now I have one with pretty great specs. I use computers frequently and for many different tasks, but gaming is something that I have no interest in, so I took that into consideration when building my rig.
I started out by picking the processor. The processor would determine what socket type the motherboard would need, and was therefore the basis of my build. I am a big Intel fan, so I didn’t even give AMD a look. I knew that I wanted a chip from the Core series. The i7’s were cool, but I just needed speed and performance for regular tasks, not games, so I decided that a Core i5 was the way to go. I went with the highest end processor in the series, and I love it. The rest of the computer began to fall together after that.
Parts List:
- Intel Core i5-2500k 3.3Ghz (Turbo Boost to 3.7Ghz) Sandy Bridge LGA 1155 Socket Processor
- Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 Z68-Based Motherboard
- Crucial 16Gb (4x4Gb) DDR3 1300Mhz RAM.
- Seagate Barracuda 1Tb 7200RPM 3.0Gb/s Internal Hard Drive
- LG CD/DVD Burner with LightScribe Disc Drive
- Antec 900 Case
- Antec High Current Gamer 450W Power Supply
- Cooler Master Hypter TX3 Heatsink/Fan
- Asus Nvidia GE 210 Silent Graphics Card
- Antec 120mm Fan
- Windows 7 Home Premium