I Built My Best Computer Ever!

by Gene
(Houston, TX, US)

I had rebuilt plenty of computers before but never built one from scratch because I had always been put off by deciding which motherboard to buy.

Anyway, my old Gateway motherboard died (this was the third time in six years) just before Christmas and I thought about buying yet another replacement on E-bay but decided to just build a new computer from scratch.

I was short of cash at the time, all the money had just gone on kids toys and turkey, and I hadn't a clue about motherboards. I went to Fry's electrical store and a really helpful guy walked me through the choices.

In the end he realized my plight and suggested a ASUS P5N-E Motherboard. It was about $120. The rest of the hardware, tower with power supply, 2 Gb of RAM, Pentium dual core something or other, and a 250 GB disk, Sony DVD burner, came to a total of $400. I went home and put everything together. But there were problems. After writing to Asus, they told me I had put the RAM in the wrong slots.

I think they said I should have put the 1 Gb slabs in 1 and 3 and not 1 and 2. After that the box ran like a charm. The only time it has been restarted is for XP updates (and that is now 6 months) or for installing additional hard drives or a dual boot system, see below. Otherwise it has been rock solid.

The motherboard has onboard graphics and sound, and both are acceptable but not brilliant. Good enough for flight simulators or playing music but not really fast games or hi fidelity sound quality. After buying the Asus board I decided to do some research on Wikipedia. It seems Asus is a pretty good company and the sales guy did a good job of advising me.

The system is not blazing fast but it is good enough for me and I do some pretty heavy duty calculations on it. Stuff that used to take about a day to calculate is now down to 15 mintues.

I have since converted to dual boot, XP and Ubuntu and both work fine with it.

For me the most incredible thing was how it was all so easy to get things up and running, none of those horrible jumper settings to figure out like on old motherboards. Other than the RAM it was all plug and play. It must have only taken 20 minutes to half an hour to have it from boxes of parts to a complete system. If you are thinking of buying or building I would go with building, I'll never buy again.