Well today I seen the specs of a pc made by alien ware, having missed the fond days of creating dream desktops with their customise features I decided to give it a go. Nowadays I’m a little more informed on what I need so I was critical when selecting the options even though it was quite addictive more indulgent to choose the ‘’best’’ parts. I removed the silly extras, gaming mouse £80, Keyboard with new ‘misleading term’ feature! £100, Microsoft office only £150! (Student = £50)
So I eventually dodged jumped and manoeuvred my way through all the extras and personalisation such as the avatar and wallpaper, useless since you can just Google for them. Though it does make it seem like you are in charge and its all for you (very nice selling ploy). Now I reached the print out stage, happy I hadn’t went over the top, scrolled to the price and it came out at £1800. I could go out and buy car and insure it for that price, probably get a couple of tanks while I am at it. Sure its alien ware and it will be a little excessive but I scraped the lowest spec within reason and it’s just slapped me in the face for all my hard work.
Now I am in the process in getting or wanting to migrate into a new desktop for university. I have about £1000 on the very highest limit possible; of course, I don’t want all to spend all that on a pc, that’s a whole lot of clothes, ale and two weeks food there. (Okay maybe one but give me a break! I have a huge metabolism to compete with!)
I have tried the likes of curries, pc world and comet, Prices differ even though there all under the same company and shipped from the same branch. Dell got close but always lacked something in the end which was a little disappointing. For the rig I have now, I enlisted the help of a small what you would call indie computer shop. For half the price, they doubled the specs of the mainstream shops.
I don’t have the technical knowhow on compatibility for cards, board and ram, hell for being on a ‘geek’ forum I’m not very good with algebra calculations (I killed that side of me in choosing art) So the question is how can companies get away with pricing crap at such excessive rates? I pondered that for a while then I realised most the population doesn’t have a bloody clue what half it does. To this end and not wanting to be completely ripped off when I decide to build my own rig I decimated Google and wiki links in a bid to get a step up. I failed with only a headache and a lot of useless knowledge to show for it. I didn’t want to post here till I got a grasp at it but you guys have a lot more firsthand experience at this than a person who thinks only 4 electrical shocks a week is lucky and not setting something on fire is a achievement.
To sum up what I want to ask;
-Without the option for trial and error, how would you go about building yourself a new computer?
-What is compatible with boards, cards, ram?
-Power supply and correct cooling, also linked to the cards, I know that anything over Geforce 8500 needs a larger power supply but how do you know what to use is there some sort of system to it?
-In addition, for future reference for any others who want to build their own computers, could you point out any wholesale/discount/cheap parts sites that deliver to England, UK? I know of Newegg but Its USA only.
So yeah that’s pretty much it lol,
As a point to make this a little more formal i structured it to a point. Its the least I could do with so much text and asking for a so much lol
Thanks for any help,
Conor
