Month: May 2016

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Building a new computer

After several years of indecision, I finally decided to build a new computer.  The off-the-shelf offerings have gotten so good that I’m not sure it really makes sense to build your own (e.g. this Dell i7-6700K/32GB ram system from Costco), but when I mentioned the idea of building a computer to my son he seemed pretty excited, so that tipped the scales. A friend tipped me off to pcpartpicker.com which really simplifies the building of your parts list, and even has some handy compatibility checkers to ensure everything works with everything else.  It definitely saved me a lot of time building lists in Google Docs and manually checking compatibility.

Since the last time I built a PC, Amazon’s really gotten more competitive with Newegg, and for many items I found Amazon to be a few dollars cheaper than Newegg.  Since I have Prime and the Amazon Rewards credit card (plus have higher regard for Amazon’s customer service), I ended up buying every component from Amazon.  I ordered the pieces yesterday and they should arrive tomorrow.  Hopefully I’ll have a followup post documenting the build.  In the meantime, here’s the parts list for our new Frankenbox:

Probably the components I’m most excited about are the M.2 Samsung SSD and the fully-modular power supply.  Most of the other technology hasn’t really changed over the past 15 years.  Hopefully we’ll get the thing built over the coming week and I’ll take pics and document it for posterity.