My experience building my first custom PC.

So as you guys know from my last few post i finally got a computer that would play wow. This all came about because my parents were getting rid of their desk top and i figured that with a few upgrades it would be wow worthy. Unfortunately i was wrong and I began looking into upgrading to essentially a new system for super cheap.

The plan was to use the case, hard drive, power supply and disk drive in a new build. I would purchase a cpu, gpu, ram and mother board these would replace the parts that were old. I began my research i knew that AMD had the best bang for you buck in cheap processors. So i began doing research i found the AMD Athlon II X2 240 Regor 2.8GHz 2 x 1MB L2 Cache Socket AM3 65W Dual-Core Processor to be the processor that would fulfill my needs. IT was fast and highly over clock able which meant it would probably be usable for several years. I then picked a MB that would be upgradeable in memory and have at least 1 pcie 2.0 x 16 slot. The Mb i found to fit my needs was BIOSTAR A770E3 AM3 AMD 770 ATX AMD Motherboard. It had 4 memory slots a pcie 2.0 x 16 slot and was an AM3 MB. Which meant it could hold any of AMDs current generation cpu. I then purchased CORSAIR XMS3 DHX 4GB (2 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1333 which left me room to upgrade later. The last part i needed was my GPU i did a good bit of research and found that a 4670 ati card would fill mos t of my current gaming needs. I decided to get BIOSTAR VA4673NH51-B Radeon HD 4670 512MB 128-bit DDR3 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP. It let me have good graphics and did not require a large PSU which meant my hammy down PSU should work. After picking all my parts i ordered them around 2 in the afternoon on Wednesday.

They arrived during the day on Thursday. Which was the day of my speech class final. I was anxious all day to began putting my parts in unfortunately fate decided to step in. The old case would not fit my MB. The mother board tray was different and the standoff holes did not align. So my plans to build my computer stopped. I had to buy another part, and the PSU wouldn't work either since it only supported 20 pin MB power connector. I then had a restless night of impatience. The next day at lunch i went to a local pc shop and purchased a COOLER MASTER Elite RC-310 case and a generic 500w PSU which was 100W faster than the old one. I rushed home and began working. Around 45 minutes later i had the MB( which already had cpu and ram installed onto it the previous night), GPU, Cd/dvd drive, HDD, and new PSU installed into the case. The moment of truth came when i pressed power. The machine booted up straight into BIOS.

This was my moment of victory, later that night i began attempting to install WIN 7. Which would have worked well except my copy was corrupted during burning. So instead i put vista on my computer until i can DL a copy of win 7 professional 64 bit ISO to create a new disk. My machine also got its first OC just to see if i could do it. I changed the CPU frequency to 250X 1.40 volts which puts my CPU clock at 3.5 ghz. Its extremely fast and runs cool around 30C at most times with stock heat sink. I haven't diagnosed its temperature under long stress loads yet though.

All and all I'm super happy with my new rig. It allows me to play modern games with little or no lag. Its also highly upgradeable allowing it to stay current and be able to play newer games. Hopefully i can get many years of use out of my system. My next planned upgrade is going to be a new HDD and Dvd/cd drive. The current ones are kinda slow and dated. Ill post some pics up once i do some serious wire management.