One of my friends wanted me to build a PC from scratch, with the parts HE wanted (rather than a pre built one). So I thought ‘lets blog it from the very beginning to the end’.
The challenge – a decent PC (not for gaming but one with a bit of grunt and the ability to run some virtual OS’s too)
The budget – about AUD$500 but as a guide only. There was room for movement (just as well)
So the research began. AMD or intel CPU? What sort of motherboard? How much RAM? What sort of graphics card? And certainly how big a power supply to run it all? And after the hardware was sorted out, what OS did he want to run?
After much deliberation, we decided on the following hardware (or very similar):
AMD X4 Phenom II 9650 CPU (the general consensus was a quad core of some kind)
Gigabyte motherboard
4Gig RAM
Sunflower case of some sort (a workmate told me they are pretty good)
ATI graphics card (at least 512M)
1TB Seagate Barracuda HDD
SATA DVD burner
As far as the OS was concerned, my friend decided on wanting to run OpenSuse 11.1 as the main OS, and probably Vista X64 in a virtual image for the stuff he could not find Linux equivalents for.
So, off to the shop I went with him to buy all the gear.
Next post, I will share what harwdware we ended up getting and the total cost …..