Over the last year; I’ve been researching a PC build. Usually the story goes that I start to put money aside and then I book a holiday (Hello Mexico, Dec 2014!) so that becomes an economic priority; then something else comes along (Hello, Orlando, June 2015).. so before something ELSE comes along – like the big move – I’m making the replacement of my ageing laptop my new obsession.
So this series of blogs is going to take you through my research. Everything from CPU choice to the balance between waiting and getting it now. I’m not the richest wanker in Manchester, so it’ll take a good few months getting the parts a bit at at time. over the past year I’ve been looking at different stuff and the internet is full of information that’s frankly overwhelming, so I’m going to try and keep this simple for those who are also thinking about their first PC build and who also don’t now what a RAID configuration is. (I didn’t get it until this morning – and these are things to consider)
There are things that I need to consider:
1. Budget
2. Use
3. Lifespan
I don’t want to spend any more than about £1200-£1300 on the initial build. This doesn’t include the GPU (Graphics card) as I am waiting for the new Nvidia GTX’s to come out – and the card I’ve got my eye on at the moment should drop in price. (Currently it’s the GTX 780 Ti and it retails for about £500)
2. Gaming. I want to be able to play current games on high-ultra settings with a good frame rate (FPS) 4K screens are coming down in price and I want my build to be able handle this (this is very much a GPU issue and I’ll talk later about GPU SLI configurations, how it works putting more than 1 graphics card in a build.
3. Lifespan – 5 years. This is a significant investment, and I want it to last. it’s easy to replace the odd component as required – however the guts of the build (Motherboard/CPU/Primary SSD) need to give me 5 years without need of replacement.
Anyway, that’s enough for now. I’ll keep returned back to this (probably weekly) looking at different aspects of the build and hopefully this’ll be of some help to those who need it.