First of all, I want to apologize for the lack of posts lately. It has been a really busy few weeks lately and I just haven’t had the time to sit and fully focus on a blog but rest assure I will be putting time aside to focus on this.
Now that I’ve addressed that let’s start. So for any of you that follow my personal account on Instagram and Twitter (@liammmbrewer) you will know over this past year and a bit I’ve built myself a new PC and have been messing about with bits here and there. This was due to a friend buying a custom selection of parts but pre made build from a company online and after seeing him on his I wanted one myself but after pricing one up for them to build it was a lot of money so after a lot of YouTube videos and advice I decided to try and build one myself for two main reasons.
1. To see if I was capable of building one and to learn more about what the parts do and how they affect a system as I know a bit about software etc but not the core components.
2. To find out how much cheaper I could build either the same one I priced up on the website or similar.
After I’ve completed it I thought I would provide some Pro’s & Con’s of doing this yourself along with a bit of advice for anyone planning on doing this yourself.
The Pro’s:
1. You can buy parts that work for you as if you buy a PC that is pre made normally if you want a certain part higher spec it normally means you generally need to have everything higher spec. Where as when you build one you can pick and choose which parts are high spec and not according to what your needs are.
2. You don’t have to dread the massive outlay of money straight away especially if you are in no massive rush to complete the build as you can buy parts gradually or buy the main components and build on from there.
3. When building you have access to the latest hardware and don’t have to settle for 2 year old processors or a hardrive rather than an SSD which surprisingly a lot of main stream companies do to keep there prices down so technically the system is out of date before you even purchase it.
4. Expandibility of the system (depending on the motherboard you get). Meaning that you can upgrade parts when and if you want. For example you can buy 4gb of ram to see you by but after say a year you want to upgrade to 8gb or 16gb then that isn’t a problem or if you want to upgrade from an i3 processor to an i5 again it’s easily possible. I’m not saying that you can’t do this in a pre configured/built system but in some cases companies solder on the parts to make them difficult to change or they use a custom made motherboard to not allow flexibility in adding or upgrading due to lack of ports.
5. No bloatware and software that takes up storage,memory and process power that you will never use or don’t even know what it is. Every PC I’ve ever purchased from a high street company does come with this, this is usually down to an agreement the company has with other companies to share there software on the machines or to have links to websites that is linked to the company but as you will be the one installing that Windows version on your system this means it will be a pure copy with no add-ons which saves you the hassle of deleting all this rubbish and also saves the time of researching if or if not you can delete it or not.
The Con’s:
1. Even when it’s built it isn’t a turn on and start using kind of machine. It takes quite a lot of time installing all the software you would generally use and setting all the software up.
2. The biggest problem by far is If something goes wrong or you do something wrong with your hardware when installing or after installation, it is down to you to replace it (unless it’s a warranty type of issue).
The conclusion from my point of view is that it does depend on the user and the uses that you going to use your computer for. If you want something cheap and cheerful that isn’t essentially that future proof then stick to the pre made build from the high street but if you fancy a challenge or want something that built for your needs alone then I would recommend a custom build everyday of the week.
My advice for anyone wanting to build a computer or getting a friend/family to build it on your behalf is to do the research, work out a budget and then work out what type of PC you need and then pick your parts wisely. Once that has been decided work out if the parts are compatible with each other by using a website like PC Part Picker. Lastly and by far when your nice new shiny bits of tech arrive, TAKE YOUR TIME in assembling, there is no rush and my personal advice when assembling is assemble outside the case to check everything works. As the one time I didn’t do this the power supply was a dud so I had to take everything out to send that back and trust me that wasn’t fun.
I hope you have enjoyed this post and it becomes helpful to the fellow budding PC builders out there or the people who are just curious.
Liams Tech Guide 