Building my own PC

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This is something I never thought I would do, but I inherited an empty tin from a friend and, going by the articles and videos I've seen, it looks a lot easier than I thought.

I've bought a motherboard. £42 shipped and it has the following features:

- integrated Radeon HD3000 graphics with PCIe interface for dedicated graphics card
- support for up to 32GB RAM
- support for up to 3TB HD
- six SATA2 slots and an IDE slot for older devices

The initial build I have in mind has the following specs:

- AMD FX-6300 CPU
- 8MB RAM
- 100GB SATA2 compatible SSD for OS storage
- 1TB HDD for personal storage
- DVD drive
- internal disk drive (for Atari ST support)
- 32-Bit Linux OS (most likely Ubuntu)
- 750w power supply

When I bought the mobo, I was unaware of the GPU issues with Linux. I've done a bit of Google research since then and, although AMD have dropped Linux support for the 3000 series, there is an open source Radeon driver available so I'm hoping the integrated graphics on the mobo are good to go for the initial build. For the time being, it's about me learning how to build a PC and branching out to Linux so the heavy duty 64-Bit stuff can wait for now.

Having said that, I want to future-proof this PC as much as possible. The 6300 is good enough for 64-Bit, the RAM can be expanded up to 32GB, the HD can be increased up to 3TB, the DVD drive can be replaced with Blu-ray and a dedicated graphics card can be fitted.

Any thoughts or advice you can give would be greatly appreciated; especially on the subject of Linux and graphics cards.

Don't know much about linux but you will want a 64 bit OS just to run new programs correctly. I don't know how "future" proof you plan on going with a 32 bit hardware. You will be limited to 4gig memory, there is a way to detect and use more but after 4 it gets pretty slow. 32bit supports up to 1tb as the limit and again it can do more but you get problems after it.

To save some money the 750watt PSU is overkill a 500 would do fine unless you are using SLI cards and the heavier 64 bit hardware.

With that CPU choice I am assuming it is an AMD board but in the future Ubuntu has much better support for the Intel processors and Intel already is more bang for the buck.

I assume you have a PCIe 2.0 slot with a board that cheap and I use a NVIDIA 560 and it is still running games today fine. A very reliable card. I have only ever used NVIDIA cards so they would be the only ones I could recommend.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.a ... 6814121565

Newegg does not have them in stock it is a fairly old card. The 2.0 slot stuff is getting phased out but if you can find one try to get a 2gig memory I hadn't noticed the one I linked was 1gig and that is pretty low.

I just bought a Gainwood GTX580 from a computer shop on E-bay that was advertised as from ex warrenty stock, all boxed and sealed as new, though you can see its a reconditioned one, I paid £150 for it, but it wouldnt work in my Dell XPS as they have Bios issues, a friend at work tested it in his rig and it works fine for him, yours for £125 if you are interested.

[in a reverberant, ghostly voice] Buy a new motherboard, Nambo .

EnglishInvader: Building your own machine is the best way, in my humble view. Don't scrimp on the Power supply, better to start with more available power than you need, that allows for expansion later on.

If you are going Ix, may I recommend a smallish SSD for the swap volume, about twice the maximum RAM the mobo will accept is a good figure. The little ones are going for 40 or 50 notes on The Scan Website (Clickable Link). Having said that, it works for any OS which provides a pagefile system.

AMD is so reasonably priced. I paid 150 quid for my FX 8150, it's worth going for the newer 8350 in my opinion, because despite what the critics say they effin rock. Lots of RAM and lots of cores on the GPU. My old P4 machines, built with OS drive + data drive + swap drive and the above mentioned, still acquit themselves well ten years on and they provide a handy fallback when my 850 watt PSU goes south (probably because I should have gone for 1kW)

Just my view. There are so many ways to skin this cat, if you have a solid "mission statement" then follow your instincts. But don't scrimp on the PSU...

My Dell works fine at the moment, at a later date I will build a new PC from scratch rather than changing the mother board in the Dell which can be a pain.
Whatever way I go, the only reason I bought the GTX580 was because that was the best card I read of somebody managing to get to work in a Dell XPS, so I figured it would work in mine, but it didn't, once I get something with a better Motherboard Iam going to at least a 700 series card.

Thanks for your replies. I need to think about what I want a bit more. Are Linux and high-end gaming what I'm really looking for?

Even though the board is a bit behind in modern gaming terms, it's still light years ahead of the 10 year old XP laptop I'm currently using. It would be nice to have things like Steam available to me, but I don't think I need to branch out to the latest games and most of the games I would buy would be the low-end, budget retro stuff that should work on the older systems anyway. If the integrated Radeon can give me a nice chunk of the older games (PS2 standard and lower, maybe a little bit extra), I'll be happy.

I guess Wafflemarine is right in that 32-Bit will be a massive bottleneck for the specs I have in mind, 64-Bit is the way to go. My main motivation for Linux was that I didn't think I could afford a Windows OS, but I did a bit of research and there are legitimate copies of Windows 7 for £40 and a Windows OS would take a lot of the pressure off in terms of finding a compatible graphics card and getting the computer up and running. I may still experiment with Linux, but not to the extent that it becomes my main OS.

Points on your original build:
- 750W power supply is way overkill, you can get a 400-500w 80+ bronze unit and it would be way more suitable to your needs and allow for a video are in your future
- sounds like an outdated chipset and motherboard, make sure it is the right socket for the processor you buy
- sure you didn't mean 8GB of ram? Also you need a 64-bit os to access it all and their is little point otherwise, also there is no point in using a 32bit os nowadays, also you need windows for most games
- i guess you don't live in the US so I don't know where you can buy things or what they cost
- post the motherboard you have, if it's DDR2 I would recommend returning it, I am guessing its a new board built with an older chipset and microATX, amd 760g does match what you described, it is old and slow though, but ddr3 and am3+ which leaves you well off
- follow proper electrostatic discharge procedures, ground yourself, grip things around the edges and not connectors

The 8MB RAM is a typo. I meant 8GB RAM.

This is the motherboard I bought. The description says it's a DDR3:
http://www.ebay.co.uk/itm/141088301382? ... 1423.l2649

I guess it's not too bad, it is and outdated chipset and I haven't heard of AMD having plans for new high end chips. If you wanted an fm2+ system would have far superior integrated graphics and probably perform similarly for your needs. I would only go am3+ if you wanted to get a separate video card right now, the integrated graphics are going to be really slow on this.

A few comments here:

If you have an AMD Motherboard, only an AMD CPU will fit the socket. --Intel and AMD sockets have been incomatible with each other since AMD abaondoned the Socket 7 with their old K6-2's, though the Super Socket 7 that the K6-3 used was backwards compatible with the intel Pentium 586.

If you have a 64 bit cpu, go with a 64 bit OS and applications, unless you are running less than 4GB memory. A 32 bit OS will not be able to address more than 2GB of RAM unless you have Physical Address Extentions enabled for it to address a max of about 3 or 4 GB memory, not the 8GB you plan to install in the machine. --In short, use a 64bit OS with a 64bit CPU.

I've done a bit more homework and it makes no sense for me to keep this board. There are plenty of other boards of an equivalent price that have the SATA3 and PCIe 3.0 slots that would make my PC more future proof.

Fortunately, I didn't buy a CPU for this board and I can return the board for a refund.

High-end gaming and Linux don't mix terribly well yet, so the games you can play will be limited, but should keep expanding. Most newish Nvidia GPU's should be compatible with Linux (I think) with few, if any, issues. AMD tends to be more problematic.

Getting and SSD for swap seems like a waste to me... I don't game but I think 8 gb of ram should be plenty and swap shouldn't be necessary unless you plan to hibernate and even then a separate drive seems like overkill.

Intel CPU's are generally more powerful and efficient than AMD's as well.

I think the main modern hardware you have to be careful about in regards to Linux is network/wifi cards and cd/dvd/blu-ray drives. Other than those, I doubt desiring Linux would limit you much.

The low end SSDs can be bought quite cheaply (in and around £40) and I've been told that it can greatly increase the speed of the OS. A separate drive also allows you to reinstall or replace the OS without losing any personal data.

Yes. But there are better ways to use it than as swap, which is how it was originally suggested. But yeah, putting your root (and boot if separate) partition on an SSD would probably be worth it.

There have been a few changes since my last post. The motherboard I bought went back and I've bought some other parts:

- used Asus M5a97 motherboard with Athlon II 2.8 Ghz CPU, cooling fan and 2GB RAM (£50)
- used 160GB SATA hard drive (£10)
- Radeon HD 5450 graphics card (£20)

I decided to focus on a budget build rather than future-proofing. It's my first build and if I'm going to make mistakes it's better to make them with cheap/used parts rather than expensive ones. Plus, I think PC building will be an ongoing thing anyway; as soon as I've got it up and running, I'll be thinking about increasing the RAM and putting Windows 7 (64-bit) on a ssd; initially, I'll just run live Linux distros like I'm doing now.

The only expensive part I'm going to buy at this stage is the power supply. Corsair seems like the way to go and it's just a question of how many watts I need. The Radeon graphics card requires 400w as a minimum, but will more power be required for the rest of the computer? If so, would 450w be sufficient or would it be better to go for 500w? I'm not sure of the right balance between under-power and overkill.

A 32 bit OS won't let you use more than 4 GB RAM (including those reserved for the OS). The Radeon drivers for Linux (if you use the proprietary drivers, that is) are quite good, but you might want to check out Mint or Debian instead of Ubuntu. If you use Ubuntu for what you'd typically use a Windows computer for (gaming, 3D modelling, art, Silverlight movies, and so on), it's neither fast, nor particularly stable.

A lot of games these days run well in WINE (id Software's engines are even optimized for it), so don't be shy about the GPU. WINE is rather seamless compared to "emulators".