Franken-Byte

Hey all,

Well I still haven’t managed to get access to my NAS from outside the house. Although I haven’t had everyone look at it, I don’t think I’m going to get through my ISP’s firewall. Oh well, it is still handy around the house. I’m ditching that project (and pretending that it is complete) in favour of a new project.

My new project is… building a new desk top computer!

I last bought a desktop computer in 2001 (or maybe it was 2000) and switched to laptops some time in 2005. I stopped using desktop computers as they were hard to drag around and, at the time, portable memory was small and expensive. A laptop made sense as I was also touring at the time.

Well now a days my second laptop is starting to go (my year old netbook is fine though). I burned out the video card on my first laptop because I was using my 37” LCD TV as a monitor (Graphics use far outweighed the Laptops’ ability to cool itself). My second laptop video display is starting to do funky things even though I haven’t been doing a lot of external display (I think it’s a clash of drivers from another device/ program). This put me down the road of “wish I had a Desktop computer with a wiz bang graphics card…”

I started contemplating the new computer just after the start of the year. As usual with me, the idea starts as vague “wouldn’t it be nice if…” and over time developed into a “Yeah, I can do that, but I’ll need to plan, research, design exactly what I want.” About the same time as I finally decided to start down the path, I saw a Maximum PC magazine on the shelf at the store. Its’ cover article was “Build a Sandy Bridge gaming PC for under 1K!” Exactly the road I wanted to travel down and the price limit I wanted to set!

Now, I’ve never been great with computers. I’ve always been better than the average user as I’m geeky and I like to know how things work and how to use tools to the best of their ability (time permitting to learn). When I bought my desktop in 2001 (or maybe it was 2000) I had originally wanted to buy the parts and put it together myself. I thought it would be a great learning experience. Unfortunately due to lack of computer hardware knowledge and a budget that couldn’t afford to buy replacement parts if I cooked the first ones, I just bought a refurbished machine from some computer store.

I’ve done a lot of research and redesign on my new computer, Franken-Byte, over the last two to three months. I’ve been researching current technology, discovering what all the TLAs mean (Three Letter Acronyms), and asked a lot of opinions. I’ve finally come up with a final shopping list and have even started purchasing parts!

In the next few blogs I’ll take you through my three computer designs (all fairly similar) and why I chose the parts I did. I’m more recording my journey than asking for opinions but hey, feel free to chime in any way.

Note:

1) The Maximum PC article I found, and used as a starting point, can be read by clicking the link below. It was reposted in a Special Issue in March/April called “Build the Perfect PC”.

http://www.maximumpc.com/article/how-tos/build_it_sandy-bridge_powered_gaming_pc_under_grand

2) My computer’s name, Franken-Byte has nothing to do with this gratuitous use of a fog machine YouTube video (although I did like the sound track).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3ureXso723k

That's all for now,
CYA