We finally have a custom budget gaming desktop that was cheaper to build than to just buy an Alienware X51! I installed Ubuntu as it’s the most common distribution of Linux and the most recommended distro of game developers like Steam. Of course, to make full use of the graphics card, I also installed AMD’s proprietary graphics drivers (to learn how, read Installed Ubuntu on Your Laptop? 6 Tweaks You’ll Nee
That’s it from me. I hope you enjoyed this little visual build-log. If you’d like to try the same thing yourself, keep an eye on FreeCycle , or head down to the city dump and find old some old PCs to play with. Just tearing them apart fully, mixing a few components, and trying to make them work again is a fantastic learning experience. Comments are welcome, but I might not be able to answer any specific hardware related questions for your particular bu
Some cases have USB ports on the front, which need to be connected to the motherboard to be functional, the pins for which are situated next to the switch pins we just connected. If you’re unlucky, you’ll have a bundle of 8 cables which must connected one by one to the matching jum
Most DVD drives need to be installed from the front, so that means taking the front panel off carefully and avoid pulling the wires for the power switch. It’s also better to connect any cables now before it’s slotted in, as things can get quite tight back th
You can reduce the cost of your upgrade by discarding with unused or unnecessary features. For instance, you more than likely don’t need a floppy disk drive anymore and probably discarded it years ago. More to the point, however, do you need an optical drive? If you’re building a gaming machine and purchasing purely online, the answer is probably no (and if you do need an optical drive, a USB device might be more suitable if it is purely a device used occasionally that can be picked up after you have upgrad
Overall power draw can sometimes be an issue, as well. Video cards are the primary troublemaker. Be sure to check the power requirements specified by the manufacturer before buying a new video card. If your current supply is below the requirements you should upgrade it before installing new hardw
Computers are complex, however, and this can lead to headaches when trying to upgrade. Nothing is more frustrating than finding out that you have a compatibility issue while you’re in the process of installing new hardware. Let’s review 4 potential trouble spots you should check before digging into your desktop’s intern
Another extremely wise tactic is to only upgrade what you need to upgrade. This means avoiding spending your hard earned funds on new keyboards, a mouse/trackball, new monitor or even a new tower, unless it is absolutely requi
Sapphire Radeon HD 7770 GHZ 1 GB DDR5 HDMI/DVI-I/DP PCI-Express Graphics Card 11201-17-20G : AMD and NVIDIA graphics cards are pretty much head to head, so I just stuck with a graphics card from AMD because I have plenty of past experience with those. I actually picked the graphics card last, because I wanted to spend as little as possible on the remaining parts, and then spend the rest of the remaining $500 budget on the graphics card. Placing such an emphasis on the graphics card is important because plenty of games today tend to be GPU-limited, so major improvements in the CPU will only yield an extra frame or two per second at best. With approximately $113 dollars left to spend, explanation the Radeon HD 7770 was the best graphics card I could find. Based on the specs that it includes, it’s already better than the Radeon HD 6950 that I use for my own gaming desk
Similarly, you may get away with reusing old storage devices (such as a hard disk drive used as a data store rather than for installing games or applications), power supplies (as long as they’re suitable for new motherboards, drives and graphics cards), card readers or case-mounted USB h
Since I only have a single IDE CD-ROM and single hard disk to show you today (as well as only a single physical IDE connector on my motherboard), I’ve opted to make the hard disk as Master and the CD-Drive as sl
When buying, also look out for rebates (also known as “cashback”). This is an opportunity to purchase at the stated price while receiving a percentage of the price as a rebate. Remember, however, that these offers require you to jump through some administrative hoops in order to get the money, but if it proves a good saving then it is certainly worth do
Every two-to-three years I decide to upgrade my PC. This isn’t a spur-of-the-moment decision as I plan my builds to run for around that length of time, choosing components such as RAM , CPU and graphics card so that the computer will be able to run the best games and applications (although not necessarily at maximum performan
On the motherboard end, the socket looks like this. On my fairly modern motherboard, the cable is actually colour coded so you know which end plugs where – but more than likely your old PC won’t be, so you’ll need to figure which end of the cable is longest and plug that into the board. There is a notch on one side of the connector to prevent you plugging it in the wrong way, so make sure you align t