There's absolutely no benefit to building your own PC if your budget is under $500. It's difficult to compete with $399 bargain-basement Dells in the build-it-yourself department. Sure, you can build a complete PC for under $400, but it'll suck...much like the $400 Dell, and worse because you'll be shelling out an extra $100 for the OS that was included with the price of the Dell.
You can download Redhat for free. Try that for about a week and you'll be begging for somebody to take your $169 and give you WindowsXP Pro.
A blue screen of death on your Dell is nothing to get alarmed about.
A blue screen of death on your hand-assembled bleeding-edge gaming PC is a reason to hunt down and kill the geek at nVidia whose hack-ass ******** Detonator driver is referenced in the BSOD text. It's a personal thing. Nobody is ever allowed to harm your home-built PC. Or get near it. To install Bonzi Buddy on somebody's home-built machine is to invite death. No. To welcome death with open arms. It's a "pride in ownership" thing. Like owning a Harley. or something. I dunno.
The real beauty of building your own PC lies in the fact that you can get high-quality hardware for less than the cost of pre-assembled PCs. Trust me, you can't get cheap parts as cheap as Dell gets them. You want 1, Dell wants 435,500 of them. Guess who pays less for that part.
If you want the very best PC, you almost HAVE TO build it yourself. There are very few retailers that offer fully-assembled truly high-end machines. None of the top names like HP, Dell, or IBM have desktop machines that can compete with a home-built PC assembled with leading-edge hardware. Six months before you see it on a Dell, you'll see it available on the hobbyist retail market. Hell, I've had USB2, gigE, Firewire, and SATA since this time last year. All courtesy of a $65 refurb ASUS P4 motherboard from Newegg.
But anyways. I could write a book on building PCs. and fixing them. and fixing my friend's and co-workers and family's machines. and all their acquaintances machines, naturally. It's one of those things that's simple as hell to do - but looks frighteningly difficult to the uninitiated. Let's put it this way, I know plenty of rather ordinary 13 year olds that can spec-out and build a computer to fit any need. Gaming has done wonders for the build-it-yourself PC hardware market. All you need is a bunch of hormone-driven teenagers competing with one-another over FPS benchmarks and non-artifact antialiasing. All the hardware in PCs is interchangeable, upgradeable, and backward-compatible. Just pick a platform (Intel, AMD, Via), pick a form factor (ATX, micro-ATX, etc), and select which parts you need. The choice of CPU and RAM will be dictated by the requirements of the motherboard. The hard drive, video, audio, LAN, optical drive, etc aren't platform-specific (nor form-factor specific, generally).
I know this kid who built his own peecee for the sole purpose of playing Soldier of Fortune. He completely stripped Windows down to nothing but TCP/IP, openGL, and kernel32. Just kidding, but seriously, nothing was functional. The desktop didn't redraw itself without a manual refresh. Not even the taskbar clock updated.
I don't know jack about online first-person-shooter games, other than how to kick your ass, I mean. But this kid knew every trick and took every advantage. He showed me the effects of his custom-made "autoexec" file. To hell with textures and lightmaps and realism! Those things are detrimental to framerates and distracting to gameplay. All I saw were basic skeletal outlines of buildings and terrain and soon-to-be victims of this kid's gaming efficiency. The muzzle flash from his weapon was minimized with a hack to "autoexec" - whatever that is - in order to maintain his stealth. While he claimed it's niether fun nor sporting, he showed me the result of "Aimbot". Just like the Marines, you can simultaneously engage dozens of independent targets with pinpoint accuracy. Your rate of kill is bottlenecked only by your ability to click the right mouse button. No. Wait. It's got an automatic-fire mode. Targets are engaged as soon as they appear in the field of view. No need to click anything.
Until then, I'd never seen a custom-built application-specific computer outside of NASA.
You can download Redhat for free. Try that for about a week and you'll be begging for somebody to take your $169 and give you WindowsXP Pro.
A blue screen of death on your Dell is nothing to get alarmed about.
A blue screen of death on your hand-assembled bleeding-edge gaming PC is a reason to hunt down and kill the geek at nVidia whose hack-ass ******** Detonator driver is referenced in the BSOD text. It's a personal thing. Nobody is ever allowed to harm your home-built PC. Or get near it. To install Bonzi Buddy on somebody's home-built machine is to invite death. No. To welcome death with open arms. It's a "pride in ownership" thing. Like owning a Harley. or something. I dunno.
The real beauty of building your own PC lies in the fact that you can get high-quality hardware for less than the cost of pre-assembled PCs. Trust me, you can't get cheap parts as cheap as Dell gets them. You want 1, Dell wants 435,500 of them. Guess who pays less for that part.
If you want the very best PC, you almost HAVE TO build it yourself. There are very few retailers that offer fully-assembled truly high-end machines. None of the top names like HP, Dell, or IBM have desktop machines that can compete with a home-built PC assembled with leading-edge hardware. Six months before you see it on a Dell, you'll see it available on the hobbyist retail market. Hell, I've had USB2, gigE, Firewire, and SATA since this time last year. All courtesy of a $65 refurb ASUS P4 motherboard from Newegg.
But anyways. I could write a book on building PCs. and fixing them. and fixing my friend's and co-workers and family's machines. and all their acquaintances machines, naturally. It's one of those things that's simple as hell to do - but looks frighteningly difficult to the uninitiated. Let's put it this way, I know plenty of rather ordinary 13 year olds that can spec-out and build a computer to fit any need. Gaming has done wonders for the build-it-yourself PC hardware market. All you need is a bunch of hormone-driven teenagers competing with one-another over FPS benchmarks and non-artifact antialiasing. All the hardware in PCs is interchangeable, upgradeable, and backward-compatible. Just pick a platform (Intel, AMD, Via), pick a form factor (ATX, micro-ATX, etc), and select which parts you need. The choice of CPU and RAM will be dictated by the requirements of the motherboard. The hard drive, video, audio, LAN, optical drive, etc aren't platform-specific (nor form-factor specific, generally).
I know this kid who built his own peecee for the sole purpose of playing Soldier of Fortune. He completely stripped Windows down to nothing but TCP/IP, openGL, and kernel32. Just kidding, but seriously, nothing was functional. The desktop didn't redraw itself without a manual refresh. Not even the taskbar clock updated.
I don't know jack about online first-person-shooter games, other than how to kick your ass, I mean. But this kid knew every trick and took every advantage. He showed me the effects of his custom-made "autoexec" file. To hell with textures and lightmaps and realism! Those things are detrimental to framerates and distracting to gameplay. All I saw were basic skeletal outlines of buildings and terrain and soon-to-be victims of this kid's gaming efficiency. The muzzle flash from his weapon was minimized with a hack to "autoexec" - whatever that is - in order to maintain his stealth. While he claimed it's niether fun nor sporting, he showed me the result of "Aimbot". Just like the Marines, you can simultaneously engage dozens of independent targets with pinpoint accuracy. Your rate of kill is bottlenecked only by your ability to click the right mouse button. No. Wait. It's got an automatic-fire mode. Targets are engaged as soon as they appear in the field of view. No need to click anything.
Until then, I'd never seen a custom-built application-specific computer outside of NASA.