Fraken-Byte Design Phase

Hey all,

In this blog post I'm going to talk about the mental process I went through in deciding what the parts list would be in Franken-Byte. I would start with what I needed/ wanted the computer to do, then research parts and their costs to see if my $1000 budget was realistic or would I need to limit what I could do with the computer in order to reach my budget. In the next blog I will talk about the various "build" designs I went through as well as what I picked in the end and why.

Purpose:

First and foremost I needed to decide what I was going to use this new computer for. At the moment I'm mostly using my laptop to check e-mail, draft, download media to my NAS drive, and play the occasional game.

With an under $1K cost target I may have to make sacrifices on hardware and functionality. Sure, I could blow 2K on the machine and just put it on the card, but I’d rather put the effort into research and get the right tool for the job instead of some overkill computer I’ll only use to half of its potential. And hey, who wants to toss away an extra grand of hard earned cash?

So I want to pump video to my 37” LCD TV. That means I’ll need a dedicated video card (despite the progressing ability of today’s CPUs to do graphics) and a wireless keyboard and mouse.
I like to watch media on my computer but already have a 2TB NAS on my home network. This means that I’ll want a better LAN port (1GB/S or better) and I don’t need a huge hard drive as I have large amounts of file storage on the network.

I want to game on this computer. Originally I was going to wait for Star Wars: The Old Republic MMO to come out, find out its hardware requirements, and then design this computer to play that game. Since that thought, I’ve started playing games online at the Steam service. I’m enjoying the games and decided to gear towards that standard and assume that when SW: ToR came out I would still be able to run it on my machine.

So if I want to game on this build, I want to have a LAN line over WiFi network connection. I’ll need a mid to high end video card to run the demanding graphics of today’s games. I’m also going to want a quad core CPU, maybe not necessary for most of today’s games, but good for future proofing the system. Also, it sounds like I’m going to want to look at extra cooling in my computer case (and air filters to keep out cat hair).

Now that I know what I want this rig to do, I can start looking at what parts fit the bill. Might as well start by researching the parts specked for the Maximum PC “Sandy Bridge for under 1K” and figure out what they are and why they picked them.

Until next time,
CYA
Bren