First Desktop Build

I am thinking of building a desktop for my family since my Lappy is in the shop again and it is a total pain in the ass to be without it. I haven't done a ground up build before and this is just going to be kind of a backup for me and a family computer the rest of the time.

I think that a pretty minimalist build makes sense because my kids don't play anything more demanding than Minecraft and if I won't be using it except occasionally for work and play then low graphics settings won't bother me.

Any advice from the more experienced before I go shopping components?

 

Thanks Enigma. You are awesome. I don't know that I have ever talked to you in TS, but anytime I'm in this tech section you are like the first to jump in and be helpful. Cheers.

I might sink the money on an ok GPU that is a couple generations old now (something like a GTX 460 maybe?) just so games are playable when I use it, but I'm not planning to go hog wild.

I might take a gander at the boneyard in my office (we have a couple desktops that broke down in the last couple years) and see if I can use the shell to cobble something decent together. It isn't so much a budget thing as it is an efficiency thing. I think we have one that had very few hours on it before a motherboard failed, so I might be able to get just about everything except the SSD and GPU for zero and be good to go from there.

 

IMO don't go older than one gen behind on GPUs. You're often better off with something newer and cheaper.

I'd look at doing either an AMD APU or something Inte i3-ish with decent integrated graphics.

 

Well,

This appears to be my starting point.

http://h20565.www2.hp.com/portal/si...ac.admitted=1409519050423.876444892.492883150

I haven't opened it up yet, but I got the tower out of the boneyard at my office. Allegedly the motherboard failed, but everything else is tip top, so I should be able to gut the stuff I don't want and put in the stuff that I do without much difficulty.

More to come when I get the time to start disassembly and purchasing.

 

350w power supply?
Media Drives?
1 TB 7200 rpm mechanical drive for whatever I don't put on the SSD?

Yeah, its garbage other than that, but there is plenty of room in it to put in whatever. It's a box with some simple infrastructure things and enough mounting space to fit the pieces and parts. Might as well be starting from scratch, but I figure one less thing to figure out for my first build will same me time. Am I missing something that makes it entirely worthless?

 

Hadn't thought about that. Good point. New power supply then.

Meh. Its convenience, not cost. Between the Media sockets and the DVD burner its two fewer things that I need to find, ship and install.

Mostly my kids are gonna be using this. They can fill up the 1 TB with homework or whatever and I'll keep the OS and anything I want to be fast on the SSD. I've got a ton of old Playstation games that I imaged that they'll be able to play off of the mechanical drive no problem. Like I said, convenience. One less thing I have to find and install.

Is burned out and getting replaced with new anyway.

So at this point I guess I am looking at needing:

Powersupply
Motherboard
CPU
GPU
SSD
RAM

Anything I am missing? I will probably be working in a budget of about $800 so it seems like I should be able to stay well under budget without much trouble.

 

I'm having trouble understanding the exact purpose of this build. You mentioned family use and every now and again light gaming.

From my perspective why even go for an SSD? If all you're going to be doing is homework,light gaming and browsing the internet, I doubt you'll appreciate the 9 sec boot times the SSD has to offer, nor will you need the high speed loading screens if all you're going to be doing is light gaming. HDDs can run an operating system just fine and you won't have trouble loading programs fast.

Just my opinion, but I don't see the point of giving 60-100$ for a luxury if your entire budget is less than 1000$.

If you could state exactly what this pc is going to be used for and what your budget includes(OS,peripherals), then I could easily make you a list.

 

It is going to be parked at my house, in my office for the family to use when I am not working at home, and should I be experiencing difficulty with my Lappy (which is my main computer for both work and gaming) then I will use it myself. Basically the majority of the time it will be a computer for my family to use, and they don't really do anything very demanding.

I am building this more because I have always wanted to do a build myself, but my need for a laptop has always made it impractical. Since I have disposable income and my family is in need of an updated PC I see this as an opportunity to learn how to do a build myself. The budget is kind of arbitrary I said $800 above, because I could buy a desktop that would serve this purpose for just a touch more if I didn't want to build it myself. That is strictly a hardware in the tower number. If I wanted to spend 3k on it, then I could, but that would be wasteful and stupid since 90% of the time my kids are gonna be playing emulators or minecraft on it and the wife will be on Facebook.



@Enigma - Thanks again. You rock dawg.

 

Your choices are great, but not for a budget build.

PSU: Good choice, but why go for 80+ Gold, when you can save almost 30$ and go with a corsair builder that's 80+ Bronze. Once again, this is budget oriented, 80+ gold is a luxury.
CPU: Awesome choice, my favorite CPU for budget builds.
Motherboard: Why go with Z97 on a pentium chip? When ASUS and other manufacturers have for the past few months enabled overclocking on H97,H87,B85 and B81 which are much cheaper chipsets.
RAM: We could take some of that 30$ saved from the PSU and get 8GBs instead of 4.
GPU: You could get a R9 270 for cheaper than that.
Storage: That's 115$ for 256GBs. Even going against my policy of no SSDs on budget builds. You could get a cheap 2 TB drive from Hitachi(which btw are pretty damn reliable) and then also get a Kingston SSDNow 120GB, that combination will set you back 130$, just a mere 15$ more for having 2 TBs more of storage and still have 120GBs for your OS and a couple of games.
CPU Cooler: The 212 Evo is the better of those choices.


Edit: http://pcpartpicker.com/p/QLbNYJ My take on your build. I even threw a SSD in there since you guys are in love with them.

 

You are right, 80+ Gold have better parts and are a bit more reliable. But honestly, power efficiency does no kick in unless the power supply is running at about the 60-80% of it's maximum load(gaming) and will no be doing so at idle. An 80+ Platinum would be the same as a Bronze if at 10-20% load unless of course the platinum one is of very very very good quality, and those cost upwards of 180$.

The concern I had about the motherboard was not of it's built quality. Generally speaking, any Z97 is better than any other consumer/non enthusiast chipset, merely because it's designed for overclocking and has better power delivery, more features and a price tag that allows good quality components to be put in.But, I can't justify a 100$ board for a pentium processor. Even if I mentioned that the pentium anniversary edition can be overclocked at all the other "lower" grade chipsets, I doubt OP would be willing to overclock his son's homework machine, and even if he does, the pentium is so easily overclocked it's pretty funny. I have heard cases of that thing reaching 4,1Ghz with the stock cooler.

The GPU, again it really "bothers" me when power efficiency is brought into the equation. When speaking about power efficiency with PCs, we're honestly talking about a 10-20$ annually. So yeah, unless you're building a media pc/router/server/NAS I just can't see why anybody would be bothered with power efficiency. Let's not forget that a typical PC idles at about 60 or less watts and only hits more than 100 if a "heavy" task is presented to it. Also, that 60 extra watts that the 270 has over is a TDP, meaning the maximum hypothetical wattage it will reach. So that means that the 270 won't reach the 150 mark unless it's running at 100%.

Hehe, funny that you mentioned that about kingston, but hey it only happened once, don't give them a bad name for it Everybody else does it too. Although I don't have personal experience with kingston SSDs, I wouldn't be all that much concerned about it, it's a cheap SSD that's just it. If we were that much concerned about quality and reliability we would all be buying intel and paying 250$ for 250GBs, which is insane.

 

I saw 350 watt power supply and was like. . . totally toaster worthy. >.> No offense.

Kingston SSDs, I've had a couple come through work. All I gotta say is you get what you pay for in that case. They are cheap.

 

No offense taken. I don't know shit about building a computer, that's why I came here to ask.

Thanks to all for the assistance. I think I am ready to start getting my pieces and parts, but will undoubtedly be posting back here as I put it together.

 

I'm a big proponent of the SSD caching feature that all the Intel boards have built in. You get pretty much all of the qualitative SSD benefit - fast boot and load times of anything you use often - but also keep large storage space without any of the multi-volume hassle at little fractions of the cost of a big SSD. And an SSD failure will cause no lost data.

I tend to like efficiency as that tends to mean it's going to heat up less and thus be less noisy and last longer.
related to that is everybody overestimates how much power they need. 350 would absolutely run the Pentium + a 750Ti (55+70W you're not using 200 more Watts on a motherboard and hardrives). Of course your current 350w is probably very crappy, so don't use it.