Is there really a huge advantage in building your own PC?

I've been to sites like Ebuyer and Aria, and to be honest the amount of parts, and their functions, confuses the hell out of me. Not just the range, but also knowing if every part is compatible with other parts and so on, it's so complicated for someone like me who's not particularly interested in the workings of computers... And that's not even getting started on putting the thing together. It seems like a lot of work/effort/knowledge involved, would it be worth it?

Just wondering. It seems like buying a system would be so much simpler. I have no idea how much I'll even be producing on it, cos when I go to uni I'd like to make the most of the experience, you know socialising and all that stuff. So I don't know if I'll have much time to produce. Then again, the computer will probably have to last me a few years at least, during these I could get more into production and I just don't know yet, so I need at least some power for it to last me a while and stay up to date.


Sorry if it's my problem's lot to understand, I appreciate the help loads and thought this would probably be the best place to ask...


EDIT: if you're gonna give me links, try to make it UK-based stores, i'm sure the US ones are great and all but they're not much use to me...

EDIT 2: AMD or Intel? I know some people can be quite opinionated about that debate but ideas are welcome...

And how important is a video card? Somebody said I should get a 128MB one, but that would hike up the cost even more...

Last edited by DjSimonB on May-21-2005 at 22:53

if you know how to build one. you can save a shit load of money. I bought a PC that was on alienware same one. which came out to 2,400$ on alienware.com and made it plus added 2 more gigs of ram and it came out to be 1,350$.

AMD 64 FX
orginally 120Gigs of HDD Space but i added 3 400 gig SATA Drives and made it 1 huge Raid drive. which is 1 tetrabyte of hard drive space
4 gigs of DDR400 Dual Channel Ram
Soundblaster Audigy 2
Geforce 6800 SLI (2 geforce 6800 cards working together)
and water cooling.

the new AMD 64 bit beats the shit out of the Pentium 4. But you haev to have a 64 bit windows to run it.

this is what i have and runs fine

2.8 overclocked to 3.4
512ram
3 hard drives 40, 30 and 200 usb
128 dual video card
motu 2408 firewire
xp home
run cubase sx with no problem

quote:

Originally posted by DjSimonB Is there really a huge advantage in building your own PC? EDIT 2: AMD or Intel? I know some people can be quite opinionated about that debate but ideas are welcome... And how important is a video card? Somebody said I should get a 128MB one, but that would hike up the cost even more...

Well you sound as tho you don't want to hike up the price too much, so like my purchase 2 months ago, bang-for-my-buck was the biggest advantage of building my own pc.

The system I built, and runs EVERYTHING damn fine is as follows:

http://www.shopgenie.co.uk/110002.h...10250&popups=no

First you need a CPU:
AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 (£99.47)

Then a Socket 939 motherboard:
Gigabyte GA-K8NS Pro (£65.20)

Some memory:
Corsair DDR PC3200 2x256 MB Value (£36.37)

A video card:
Radeon 9550 128 MB (£39.99)

And finally, the cheapest ATX case you can find.
Midi Tower Case ATX 400W (£18.74)

Ontop of that you may need to find someone to put it together for you. Even with the cost of that tho it should work out CONSIDERABLY cheaper then a computer from say "dell" not to mention twice as good.

quote:

Originally posted by jupiterone the new AMD 64 bit beats the shit out of the Pentium 4. But you haev to have a 64 bit windows to run it.

do not mislead the poor guy. i have athlon64 2800+ and it is much better than my old athlon 2200+ on standard windows xp pro sp2. i would reccomend to go for athlon64, whether one has windows64 or not.

3500+ is cheap and good..recommend!!!
1gb ram is must!!!

other parts as you wish as you need!!

you can build good audio pc if you dont need it for gaming becouse good videocards cost 700 euros

___________________
-keep it hard-

quote:

Originally posted by h.vox do not mislead the poor guy. i have athlon64 2800+ and it is much better than my old athlon 2200+ on standard windows xp pro sp2. i would reccomend to go for athlon64, whether one has windows64 or not.

Recommend a Socket 939 AMD 64. Don't get the Socket 754 AMD 64's, as they are nowhere near as efficient and fast with memory.

quote:

Originally posted by Rob Recommend a Socket 939 AMD 64. Don't get the Socket 754 AMD 64's, as they are nowhere near as efficient and fast with memory.

dual channel memory architecture does not even remotely offer twice the efficiency with memory (the difference might be about 10-20%), and that is the only difference, apart from much more expensive cpus which offer 1 mb cache instead of 512 k. anyway, i definitely would reccomend socket939 cpu, even though i own 754. but if the money is really tight .......

quote:

Originally posted by Rob Well you sound as tho you don't want to hike up the price too much, so like my purchase 2 months ago, bang-for-my-buck was the biggest advantage of building my own pc. The system I built, and runs EVERYTHING damn fine is as follows: http://www.shopgenie.co.uk/110002.h...10250&popups=no First you need a CPU: AMD Athlon 64 3000+ Socket 939 (£99.47) Then a Socket 939 motherboard: Gigabyte GA-K8NS Pro (£65.20) Some memory: Corsair DDR PC3200 2x256 MB Value (£36.37) A video card: Radeon 9550 128 MB (£39.99) And finally, the cheapest ATX case you can find. Midi Tower Case ATX 400W (£18.74) Ontop of that you may need to find someone to put it together for you. Even with the cost of that tho it should work out CONSIDERABLY cheaper then a computer from say "dell" not to mention twice as good.

Thanks for that

Would still need hard drive, OS, CD drive, monitor, soundcard, mouse & keyboard (tell me if i missed anything) but it still seems pretty reasonable. And maybe a bit more memory.


The thing with the socket 939 cpu's I've seen is that they generally don't seem as fast (GHz wise) compared to the 754's. Do they make up for that in other areas? Cos I'm not sure how important the GHz is.

How much better is 3500+ than the 3000? Big price difference.

Yeah I know nothing about processors

man 3500+ is minimum.. thats only 2gig cpu becouse of coll and smarf function... my cpu hasnt became over 43 degrees.. thats cool..and smart

1 gig memory is minimum!!!! for sure!!

you can build good audio pc with 1000 euros

___________________
-keep it hard-