Building The Rig - Part 1

Part 1 - Pre-shopping Research
Part 2 - Buying & Assembling
Part 3 - Troubles
Part 4 - Look! It Runs Crysis!!1

This has definitely got to be one of those defining moments - building a rig from scratch. And a high-end gaming rig, no less. It sure has been an emotionally filled week, from deciding the hardware specs all the way to getting it to run smoothly, without crashes.

The sole purpose of the rig is gaming. With a clear objective, choosing the parts was just a matter of making sure everything works well together and within budget. Got onto lowyat forum to get opinions, especially for mobo(motherboard). Got the lowest clock speed for the best dual core processor series, quad-core was out of the question since games are optimized for dual cores. RAM was performance stuff, big no to value RAM. Choosing PSU meant looking for reputable brands and calculating power needed.

After giving rough estimates, providing we didn't get a monitor, graphics card fund was at RM1000, which was enough to get us the best single core GPU. But Kenn reasoned that if we chose the lower end GPU, we could still get an LCD. In the end, however, we decided the monitor could wait, graphics would come first.

I proudly present my rig's specs, along with the price o.O

Hardware
Intel Core 2 Duo E8400 RM600
Gigabyte EP45-UD3L RM399
Kingston HyperX 2GB RM210
Palit HD4870 Sonic Dual RM899
Gigabyte Odin Pro 550W RM380
CoolerMaster 334 casing RM150
Seagate SataII 500Gb RM185
Samsung DVDRW RM 80

The price was rounded up to RM3000 including a surge protector. Don't be jealous, you're now RM3000 richer than me and my bro.

Now, on the fund. There was absolutely no way we could've gotten such an expensive rig if it wasn't for the money that was supposedly for a trip to Bali. Kenn & I had a RM1000ea, but early on, we knew we'd pass the Bali trip for a rig. I mean, you go to Bali for, what, 3 to 4 days, get darkened by the sun, take some pictures, then come home and forget about the trip in a couple days time. A gaming rig with the price tag of RM3000 on the other hand, will have a gaming lifespan of up to 4 years, 2 years if you're a graphics whore. With a windfall of 2k, we each added another RM500 of our savings, and whala, the gheyest gaming rig amongst everyone else we know(for now, at least).

And for the very first time in our gaming life of 12 years, new releases.