Saturday January 3
 
12:52
 
Built My First PC

My project for this new year has been to build my own PC. For days I was torn between an Intel Core i7 setup and building something for price/performance. In the end I went for the price/performance.

I avoided the i7 for three reasons.

Firstly, while there’s no doubt that an i7 system would be fast, at the moment the market it too immature. For example, Gigabyte and Asus motherboards range from about 24000 yen to over 40000 yen, but it’s almost impossible to tell what the differences between them are: sites have only reviewed premium models, and that review that are out there are inconsistent or indicate BIOS issues; manufacturers sites and boxes don’t include photographs. And there seems to be some strange decisions out there – for example, the cheapest Gigabyte board has 4 memory slots – crazy since the i7 memory controller is optimised for 3 or 6 banks for memory.

Secondly, if I go for an i7 then I’ll be wanting max speed – so everything I buy will need to be the fastest. 10,000 disks or SSD, the best graphics card and memory, etc. To not get the fastest would defeat the purpose. That will cost a bomb.

Thirdly – and perhaps this is more important – I’m Scottish, and I can’t resist a bargain.

Going for price/performance appealed in so many levels to me. If I make mistakes, I can make them on the cheap. I can whack in 8GB and see whether it really gets utilised. Most importantly, it will be fun to do and I’ll still get a machine which would be in no way “past it”.

My criteria was:

- RAID support
- eSATA port
- SATA and PATA disk suport
- Digital output via HDMI/DVI; two heads preferred
- Support for upto 8GB DDR2 RAM
- Dual core processor faster than my laptop (2GHz Dual Core) 
- Hardware HD decoding 

This is what I got:

- ASUS M3A78-EM motherboard: Raid, eSATA, HDMI/DVI/VGA/Displayport output, Hardward HD (ATI 3200HD)
- AMD Athlon X2 5200+ (2.7MHz)
- 8GB DDR2 800Mhz memory
- Case with front and rear fans, side ventalition for CPU fan, and 420W

For the DVD drive, I used a USB DVD writer that I already had. For the hard drives, I reused two PATA drives that I had available.

No one could argue that compared to an i7 this system screams, but the price – wow. The whole lot cost 26,000 yen. With today’s exchange rate, that’s 290 USD – but that rate really distorts the real price of this. To put the cost into perspective looking at cost of living in Japan:

- 26,000 yen is the cost of 26 pints of beer in a pub
- 26,000 yen is the same as 2×1TB USB hard drives
- 26,000 yen is 22,000 yen LESS than this year’s Christmas dinner – table for 3 people in a restaurant
- 26,000 yen is the price of a return train ticket between Tokyo and Osaka (approx 500km)

In short, 26,000 yen is nothing. It is throwaway money. And that’s quite important – because at the moment I don’t know how long I’m going to be in Japan. Should I move, a desktop might end up finding itself packed up in a box for several months.

In reality, however, the cost was less than 26,000 yen. The day after buying this new setup, my USB hard drive failed. It was only two weeks old so instead of replacing it, I just refunded it – I don’t need it now that I have the two PATA disks installed. The refund was 13,000 yen – so this whole setup cost just 13,000 yen. Bargain.

In honesty, I would have preferred an Intel. However budget motherboards for Intel either do not have HDMI/DVI or they have terrible HD support. The price of a similar intel build would have been 10000 yen more, without dual digital output. And as the price starts to edge up, I would soon find myself saying “well it’s not that much more for a quad core”, and soon I would be back to buying an i7 because “it’s not that much more”. I wanted cheap, fun, and something that when I do move to an i7, I wont have regrets about throwing away.

Expect lots of PC related posts over the next weeks.