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Building Your Own Desktop Computer

In this post, I’ll be going over a few things to do when building your own computer. After years of learning other things too, building a desktop for myself today is trivial. First time I built my own desktop was a little difficult but it isn’t really as hard as some people expect it to be. The TLDR is to just get the parts and put it together. You will of course need a screw driver kit so make sure you have one of those.

Use Case

You have to figure out what is the purpose of the machine. Gaming, workstation, basic web server, acting almost like a “bootloader” for your web browser, etc. All of these have different requirements and you shouldn’t overkill in some parts because you couldn’t figure out what you wanted your computer for.

Compatibility

Some hardware support features some others do not. Search up what features you want and if the hardware you are intending to buy supports it. A few examples are TPM, latest versions of PCIE or DDR SDRAM, IOMMU support and so on.

There are many other things and you have to make sure all parts are compatible with each other otherwise you will face issues later on.

Budget

Figure out how much money you are looking to spend and how much on each part. If you don’t keep a close eye on the budget, you will end up spending more money than you wanted to or some components you purchased won’t be as good as you need them to be acting as a bottleneck. A very useful website to look at build guides and to put parts together to figure out the price is pcpartpicker. You don’t need this site but it is nice to have.

Finding Parts

Look around where you want to buy your parts. Some places are more expensive or have worse shipping times than others. You may want to go into second hand hardware but you should be very careful there especially for things like graphics cards, power supply units and hard drives.

A big recommendation for people in the UK is cclonline.com. Test your hardware soon after purchase to make sure it isn’t a scam. For secondary storage, check SMART. Do all the tests relevant for the hardware you purchased to make sure it is legitimate.

The pcpartpicker website tells you a lot of the parts you need but I’ll list them below too. For your use case, you may want some other hardware too. You may not need all the hardware below depending on use case as well such as a video card as the integrated graphics you have may be enough.

  • CPU
  • CPU cooler
  • Motherboard
  • Memory (RAM)
  • Storage (secondary storage)
  • Video card (graphics card)
  • Case
  • Power supply
  • Monitor
  • Sound card
  • Wired network adapter
  • Wireless network adapter
  • Headphones
  • Keyboard
  • Mouse
  • Speakers
  • Webcam
  • Microphone
  • Case accessories (card reader, LED controller, DVD/CD Writer)
  • Case fans
  • Fan controllers
  • Thermal compound
  • External storage
  • Uninterruptible power supply
  • Cables (some required cables may not come with the hardware you purchased such as a SATA cable)

You have to be sure about various things such as CPU cooler being able to handle the TDP of your CPU, power supply being able to serve the computer at max load, motherboard being able to fit into case and so on. Do so for all components in your machine.

Make sure the parts you choose are the quality and speed you need. This will take a long time to research such as with speeds of SSD, type of key switches on your keyboard, lower latency or higher speed RAM and many others. Look into all of them for your use case.

Put It Together

This is something people think is the most difficult part but I think research and deciding what parts to buy is a greater challenge. Follow the manuals to be able to put everything together. For cable management, you may want to buy zip ties to help. Some people don’t care and behind the back panel is a horror show. The general process is put case fans in, put CPU into socket, thermal paste + attach CPU cooler, put IO shield for motherboard in, case accessories in, power supply unit into case, RAM into motherboard, put motherboard into case, place secondary storage in, PCI devices in including the GPU. You should be screwing things in where needed. The last thing is to connect all the cables up (unless putting some parts in make places to plug in inaccessible) which isn’t always easy so read the manuals that come with your products. A common place people mess up is with front IO cables so read the book carefully. Generally, the order of putting things together doesn’t really matter but it can become more difficult to set things up if you don’t.

BIOS Modification

Your BIOS is where you can change a lot of settings for your computer.

You may want to look into replacements like coreboot and that is a process. You may want to go with the one your motherboard has come with.

Before you enter the BIOS to make various modifications, please update it. Tom’s hardware has a good page on updating it. The TLDR is download the latest BIOS version for your motherboard, put it on a flash drive with a common format like FAT, enter the BIOS (some common keys are F1, F2, F10, Delete, Esc), go to update BIOS and select the file on the flash drive. While updating, you must make sure the computer does not switch off. You may want to use a UPS to make sure. Some older motherboards may have a worse process like having to attach an IC test clip and flashing a new version in a much more manual way. Look up for your motherboard. If you don’t have the patience for the process, you don’t have to update but you may be missing some features your computer supports. Also, if you put very new hardware that works in a way that your current BIOS version doesn’t support, you will have a bad time.

Make all the needed changes on your BIOS to have what features you want enabled. Make sure that it is the configuration you need and your hardware is able to do well under the configurations you make (especially if you want to go into overclocking and start messing around with voltage).

Operating System

You need an OS. The general recommendation is windows. There are others like linux, BSD, plan9, minix, haiku, ReactOS and so many more. Choose what is right for you.

Download the ISO from the correct website and copy it to a flash drive. Make sure the flash drive has ample space. A few options to do this with are balenaEtcher, refus and dd.

Once copied over, plug the flash drive into the desktop you have put together, power on, and it should boot from the flash drive. If not, enter your BIOS again and change your boot order. FYI, you should be using UEFI boot. Go through the relevant installation procedure like partitioning what disk, software to install, etc. Once you are through and you have your system booted from the drive you chose in your computer, you can disconnect the flash drive.

With systems like windows, you may have to / want to activate the OS so buy the license key for this.

Drivers

Find all the drivers need for your hardware. Common ones are GPU and network card drivers. There are less common ones too like to control the RGB lights on your RAM sticks. Search for all the hardware you bought and install the relevant drivers.

Conclusion

If you want to make changes to your system in the future, you are very much free to. Repair, upgrade and use the computer as you wish.