build your own computer

iscamaid

hi, my 14 year old son is deseparate to build his own computer. He has really studied what to get and how to do it but is held back by shortage of funds. He has been saving for about a year now but can only afford up to £400 (a very small amount I know). He intends to use it for school work, some gaming (he loves online card game sites such as Magic the Gathering) and YouTube. I would imagine that once built he would want to constantly work on it and increase spec as he gets into gaming. Gaming however is not the real reason, he is really keen on programming and electronics and he wants to build it for the achievement more than anything. Can I please use your acquired wisdom on how to build a decent one on limited funds. Any hints and tops gratefully received.

unrecordings

Some kind of local hackspace/computer recycling charity ?

that

the days where it took technical ability to work out the memory address space, irq, board conficts of all the slot in boards, configuring the bios with the correct disk parameters and setting up bad track tables and adding drivers to config.sys are long gone.

Buy him a raspberry Pi. Possible more involved than setting up a new pc, just on a smaller and cheaper scale.

Having not mentioned your sons age, but keep an eye on him and encourage him into the part of computing he enjoys - The big ones are networking, systems and programming. These areas do overlap. These areas are split into many subsection specialities.

If he is mature enough, start him on the free Prof Messer - Comptia a+ and join his study group

debitcardmayhem

I would agree with @that (daft name for quoting , EDIT Oh and he speed reads and missed the bit that says he is 14 ) , start with a pi, he can still save for more ambitious things whilst still learning some of the programming and electronics side of computing , assuming he has a TV/Monitor he can use without interrupting the family's enjoyment. I wish you well

Frozen_up_north

The days of it being worthwhile to assemble your own PC are long over, my last one was assembled by myself and has a very quiet case and fans, but the current one is a second user ex business Dell. The Dell is an i7 with 16GB of RAM and a 128GB SSD (a 250 or 275GB SSD would have been better), it was £220 delivered.

For learning about programming, as per the other reply, a Raspberry Pi and an Arduino are much more “hands on” than a PC.

System

I think everyone should build their own PC at least once just if for no other reason than to learn how easy it is to save themselves paying someone to do upgrades they can themselves.

£400 is plenty enough to get the bits to build a low spec starter PC.

This motherboard, CPU and cooler: £242

https://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/ASUS+TUF+B450-PLUS+Motherboard+%2B+AMD+Ryzen+5+2600+CPU+with+Wraith+Stealth+Cooler+Bundle+?productId=70298

This case: £32
https://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Cases/Cases+with+PSUs/GLADIATOR+Warrior+MATX+Case+-+500W+PSU+-+USB+3.0+?productId=65486

8GB RAM: £52

https://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/8GB+Corsair+Vengeance+LPX+2400MHz+DDR4+Memory+?productId=69521

This 120GB SSD drive: £19

https://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/Crucial+BX500+120GB+2.5%22+SATA+Desktop%2FLaptop+SSD%2FSolid+State+Drive+?productId=69992

This DVDRW drive: £11

https://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/24x+LiteOn+Internal+DVD+Re-Writer+-+IHAS124-14+?productId=53312

£356. It'll need a mouse, keyboard and monitor. Keyboard and mouse would be sub £10 for a dirt cheap one so it is just a case of finding a monitor or just using his TV if he has one.

For an OS you could get one of those grey market Windows 10 licenses or he could really go for it and install Linux for free, something like Ubuntu or Linux Mint which have good support forums.

He can add a large mechanical hard drive for file storage and also upgrade the graphics and memory to play more intense games as funds allow.

fuzzything

Tarambor wrote: »

This motherboard, CPU and cooler: £242

https://www.aria.co.uk/SuperSpecials/Other+products/ASUS+TUF+B450-PLUS+Motherboard+%2B+AMD+Ryzen+5+2600+CPU+with+Wraith+Stealth+Cooler+Bundle+?productId=70298

That’s fine as CPU’s go, but there is no integrated graphics (not even windows will work without an additional graphics card with this processor).

But AMD do APU’s and these include integrated graphics e.g. Ryzen 2400G - which can be got as a bundle with motherboard and fan

£229.99

https://www.awd-it.co.uk/amd-ryzen-5-2400g-quad-core-3.9ghz-vega-graphics-asus-b450-plus-motherboard-cpu-bundle.html

I would recommend the youtube channel Paul’s Hardware, where the guy goes through the process of choosing parts to suit different budgets (including $500 builds) through to filming the whole build process

https://www.youtube.com/user/paulshardware

onomatopoeia99

Only reason to build your own now is if you want a specific combination of parts that you can't get off the shelf. There's no saving to be had on a typical computer over buying a prebuilt one - we swapped to buying Dells over a decade ago when it became obvious that what they would supply as a fully built computer with Windows installed was cheaper than us buying the equivalent bits and building it ourselves.

Now, building to your own spec is a completely valid reason for doing it, but if that's what he wants then he should save until he can afford the parts he wants, because if he builds to a lesser spec then replaces parts later that's going to cost a lot more in the long term.

For learning programming, the Raspberry pi would a much cheaper option, and it has plenty of interfacing potential if he wants to do some soldering.

Cisco001

For PC with £500 or under, it is not worth self-build route as it is hard to beat the price (mainly due to expensive MS OS)

Cisco001

Tarambor wrote: »

https://www.aria.co.uk/Products/Components/Cases/Cases+with+PSUs/GLADIATOR+Warrior+MATX+Case+-+500W+PSU+-+USB+3.0+?productId=65486

Never compromise on quality of PSU!!!

System

fuzzything wrote: »

That’s fine as CPU’s go, but there is no integrated graphics (not even windows will work without an additional graphics card with this processor).

But AMD do APU’s and these include integrated graphics e.g. Ryzen 2400G - which can be got as a bundle with motherboard and fan

£229.99

Thanks for seeing that, I assumed the motherboard did with it having DVI and HDMI ports. Its been a while since I had anything to do with AMD. At least a cheap Geforce GT710 is only £20