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Yesterday, I received all of the parts needed to build my first ever computer. Some of you may have seen my thread made about a month ago where I listed the parts I was getting. I made a lot of changes to the list, but feel the final parts I settled on were pretty decent.

All in all it was quite tricky to be honest. Putting the parts in was quite easy, but I got quite confused with the cabling. After a few Youtube videos though, I managed to get everything sorted, did a test boot, and everything worked fine. One problem was that my optical drive was IDE, and as my motherboard doesn't have an IDE port, I had to go out today and buy a new SATA optical drive, so I finished hooking that up today, and successfully installed Windows 7 Professional.

I know a lot of you have probably built computers millions of times before but for me it was quite a big task, and I feel I've done a pretty good job. It's an amazing feeling knowing that I picked all of the parts, and then put it all together myself.

I ran performance scan (or whatever it's called), where it gives you a rating depending on the performance of different parts. For my Alienware, which I bought last year for £750, the rating was around 4.6, which I thought at the time was quite high. Today when I ran a scan on my new build, the rating was 7.6 (the maximum is 7.9). I'm not sure how big of an indicator that it, but surely that's a pretty damn good rating??
I've installed the OS on my SSD, so boot up time, and general computer usage is incredibly quick.

Here's a list of all the parts I bought:

Intel Core i7 2600K
Gigabyte GA-Z68A-D3H-B3, Intel Z68
Corsair Cooling Hydro Series H60
16GB (4x4GB) Corsair Vengeance Blue
650W PSU, Antec TruePower New Modular
64GB Crucial RealSSD M4, 2.5" SSD
500GB Samsung HD502HJ Spinpoint F3
Lite-on SATA DVD reader
HIS IceQ Radeon HD 6870
Cooler Master CM Storm Enforcer Black Midi Tower
LG IPS235V IPS LCD LED 23" HDMI Monitor
Logitech keyboard + mouse

Altogether it came to around £1,100.
Ignore the poor cable management lol....

Wow, that look great.

Thinking of doing this myself one day.

(02-10-2012, 02:14 PM)☆ Norris ☆ Wrote: [ -> ]Wow, that look great.

Thinking of doing this myself one day.

Thanks. You should definitely build your own if you get the chance. It's been a fantastic experience.

Built many myself...
Even pulled one down and rebuilt it for a tut here a long time ago.
You will always get better value building your own and if done properly a good pc.
Well done Fragma and congrats on a damn nice system mate.

Damn, I've been looking into getting a decent i7 for all my PC's. That's a damn nice PC though. - I myself am going to rid of one of my old(ish) PC's and set aside about a grand to get a beast up and running.

This sounds great. Congratulations on your achievement, feels a lot better than picking one up from the store

Specs look pretty good, you could download GeekBench (or similar) to get a better idea on how your workstation compares with your old AlienWare, I'm sure you will be pleased with the results.

Thanks for the comments guys. I just can't wait to start downloading software onto it and using it properly.
It made me realise how much of a rip off Alienware is.. Also, my Alienware hinge recently broke, which also caused the screen to stop working, so I need to get that fixed. Shoddy worksmanship.

By the way, when I do post some pics up, don't laugh at how awful my cable management is

After the first time I built my PC I never went back to a store to buy another. I cant believe how much money these stores are making. I bought the parts for my PC around 3 years ago, £700 ($1000 ish) would have cost me £1200 ($1900 ish) to buy a similar PC instore.

With the cash I saved, bought myself a new monitor, keyboard, mouse, speakers, headphones etc, then I went to University and left it all to my brother ... just sitting there not getting any use.
I originally bought it all for gaming, but I lost my gaming head after going to Uni lol.

Anyway, I hope you do post up some pics, and for the cable management, zip-ties do the job

Looks pretty exciting Congrats on the new pc and nice rating!

It does look nice but IMO, I think Server in my mind XD
I've went from gaming to doing something better in my mind which is coding & everything along them lines.