Thu Sep 29, 2011 5:14 am
Building PCs for friends pays off!
My friend's dad does a lot of video/photo editing, website building, etc. All of which require a lot of CPU power. He had been trying to do all of this on outdated AMD CPUs. By outdated I mean his setup before I built him one was an AMD Athlon X2 @ 2.2GHz, 3GB DDR2 RAM, on-board ATI graphics via HDMI, and a case with one vent and one exhaust fan.
He was tired of using the SD reader on his printer (which would hardly ever work correctly) so he bought a 3.5" SD reader, and plugged it into the wrong port on his motherboard, setting the SD reader on fire and causing a short circuit that killed his PSU. He then got a Thermaltake 430W PSU from Best Buy and plugged it all up (and took out the charred SD reader)...but he didn't put it on the right way. The 24-pin connector on his PSU was a 20+4-pin, and the 4-pin part didn't quite make it into the socket. Thus, his PC was always freezing up, running really weird and I believe he damaged the mobo and CPU when the SD reader short circuited.
He called me the other day asking about these PCs he was looking at on Wal-Mart's website. The one he was interested in had an i5-2310, 12GB of DDR3 1333 RAM, onboard NVIDIA graphics (that turned me off of it immediately), 1TB HDD, and Win7 x64 Home Premium. It was about $700. I was like woah wait, I can build you something just like that for about $100 less. So I went over there the next day, built him a list of parts on newegg, and he ordered them. Came out to about $570 after tax + shipping. When the parts arrived, I went back over there to build it for him. I thought I could salvage the case he had been using and just put a 120mm fan on the side vent and put a new one on the exhaust vent. Well lo and behold, I go to put the new motherboard in and it's too big. I should have known, kinda expected that. So after that I went onto Best Buy's website and one about 45 minutes from his house had a few Antec 300's in stock. I was like PERFECT and I went to Best Buy with his son to get it. I get back, and set it all up and it runs perfectly fine, and all his photo/video editing software open like they were minimized. He was amazed at how fast it was, and I told him that his last setup wasn't adequate to run any of that software, ESPECIALLY with only 3GB of RAM, and that this new one should keep him going for the next few years. Here's the final parts list:
Parts he bought:
Intel Core i5-2310
GIGABYTE GA-Z68P-DS3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR 12GB (3 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 RAM
Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 1GB
ASUS DVD +/- RW
Antec 300 Mid-Tower
Parts I used from the original:
Thermaltake 430W PSU
500GB Seagate SATA HDD
1.2TB WD Caviar Green SATA HDD
Put it all together and installed all the drivers and it works perfectly. He asked how much I owed him for my trouble and I said "don't worry about it, it's not a problem." He pulls out the change I gave him back from the Antec tower which was $50, and handed it to me and goes "here's for your 'not a problem.'"
He was tired of using the SD reader on his printer (which would hardly ever work correctly) so he bought a 3.5" SD reader, and plugged it into the wrong port on his motherboard, setting the SD reader on fire and causing a short circuit that killed his PSU. He then got a Thermaltake 430W PSU from Best Buy and plugged it all up (and took out the charred SD reader)...but he didn't put it on the right way. The 24-pin connector on his PSU was a 20+4-pin, and the 4-pin part didn't quite make it into the socket. Thus, his PC was always freezing up, running really weird and I believe he damaged the mobo and CPU when the SD reader short circuited.
He called me the other day asking about these PCs he was looking at on Wal-Mart's website. The one he was interested in had an i5-2310, 12GB of DDR3 1333 RAM, onboard NVIDIA graphics (that turned me off of it immediately), 1TB HDD, and Win7 x64 Home Premium. It was about $700. I was like woah wait, I can build you something just like that for about $100 less. So I went over there the next day, built him a list of parts on newegg, and he ordered them. Came out to about $570 after tax + shipping. When the parts arrived, I went back over there to build it for him. I thought I could salvage the case he had been using and just put a 120mm fan on the side vent and put a new one on the exhaust vent. Well lo and behold, I go to put the new motherboard in and it's too big. I should have known, kinda expected that. So after that I went onto Best Buy's website and one about 45 minutes from his house had a few Antec 300's in stock. I was like PERFECT and I went to Best Buy with his son to get it. I get back, and set it all up and it runs perfectly fine, and all his photo/video editing software open like they were minimized. He was amazed at how fast it was, and I told him that his last setup wasn't adequate to run any of that software, ESPECIALLY with only 3GB of RAM, and that this new one should keep him going for the next few years. Here's the final parts list:
Parts he bought:
Intel Core i5-2310
GIGABYTE GA-Z68P-DS3 LGA 1155 Intel Z68 HDMI SATA 6Gb/s ATX Intel Motherboard
CORSAIR 12GB (3 x 4GB) DDR3-1600 RAM
Sapphire Radeon HD 6670 1GB
ASUS DVD +/- RW
Antec 300 Mid-Tower
Parts I used from the original:
Thermaltake 430W PSU
500GB Seagate SATA HDD
1.2TB WD Caviar Green SATA HDD
Put it all together and installed all the drivers and it works perfectly. He asked how much I owed him for my trouble and I said "don't worry about it, it's not a problem." He pulls out the change I gave him back from the Antec tower which was $50, and handed it to me and goes "here's for your 'not a problem.'"
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ASUS Sabertooth P67 | Intel Core i5-2500k @ 3.3GHz | Corsair XMS3 1600 8GB (2 x 4GB) | XFX Radeon HD 6970 | Corsair CMPSU-850TX 850W | Corsair H80 High Performance Liquid CPU Cooler |
