30-11-15, 01:49 PM
People have more or less mirrored my views on this already; I love my PC's and have built all but my first.
The actual assembly is straight forward enough and typically will only require a screwdriver (some newer builds don't even require that!). The real interesting and complicated stuff that will determine just how efficient / stable the end result is in the choosing of each individual part. They each have a knock on effect with others and certain items from different manufacturers work better with other items from other manufacturers... it's rather complex - probably to the same scale as trying to tune a performance race engine.
Everything from the case for your PC can have an impact on performance (size, airflow and noise can be big factors). I would recommend the same as BBROWN1664; a budget to build a PC from scratch is a good way to go and there can still be plenty of room to upgrade later.
Most custom systems are better value for money once you hit about £400-500; below that you can often find deals on pre-built systems. The catch being that you often lose customization options. I'd say a mid-range gaming PC is probably starting at £500-800. More advanced systems go on in to the thousands; my last "update" to my system was around £2,500~
There is a magazine I subscribed to a for a few years called Custom PC. They had sections each month showing the recommended components they would use to build a PC from various price ranges including the price and source of the part. This might be a great idea to buy the advised parts and let me assemble it and upgrade in the future? I'll pull out one of my old mags and upload a photo so you can see what I mean. I believe they still do an offer of 3 issues for a £1 then it moves on to quarterly billing
The actual assembly is straight forward enough and typically will only require a screwdriver (some newer builds don't even require that!). The real interesting and complicated stuff that will determine just how efficient / stable the end result is in the choosing of each individual part. They each have a knock on effect with others and certain items from different manufacturers work better with other items from other manufacturers... it's rather complex - probably to the same scale as trying to tune a performance race engine.
Everything from the case for your PC can have an impact on performance (size, airflow and noise can be big factors). I would recommend the same as BBROWN1664; a budget to build a PC from scratch is a good way to go and there can still be plenty of room to upgrade later.
Most custom systems are better value for money once you hit about £400-500; below that you can often find deals on pre-built systems. The catch being that you often lose customization options. I'd say a mid-range gaming PC is probably starting at £500-800. More advanced systems go on in to the thousands; my last "update" to my system was around £2,500~
There is a magazine I subscribed to a for a few years called Custom PC. They had sections each month showing the recommended components they would use to build a PC from various price ranges including the price and source of the part. This might be a great idea to buy the advised parts and let me assemble it and upgrade in the future? I'll pull out one of my old mags and upload a photo so you can see what I mean. I believe they still do an offer of 3 issues for a £1 then it moves on to quarterly billing
![[Image: 242673.png]](http://badges.fuelly.com/images/smallsig-uk/242673.png)
![[Image: 174802.png]](http://badges.fuelly.com/images/smallsig-uk/174802.png)
TV Shows and Movies (9.5TB of disk space at the moment with protection against disk failure), then I decided I needed some more processing power but didn't want to spend any money on parts, so dug out my old server which was way over-powered at the time, but is useful now. Set up the OS on a spare SSD I had lying around, everything else was intact so that's now providing my media collection online (needed to be powerful to transcode the movies which is what my newer server was struggling with).