Since I'm going to grad school and need a more powerful, but less portable, computer, I'm selling my iBook G4 and building a custom PC. Here are the specs (below).

Whaddaya think?

I think this is a very high end configuration. What are you planning to run on it. It seems like its too much for a school kid. I can run a powerful server application on this configuration.

The usual things one would expect to use a personal computer for. But I'm also a grad student (so not a "school kid" per se, but thank you, I'm flattered), so I plan to use it for research/work as well.

thats awesome...

i wanna make a computer one day...

I can't honestly critique or even give a review of what you have listed, but I wanted to extend a congratulations for getting the custom computer plans all put together. =)

oh snap I see workstation card...

Gonna run RAID with those two drives?

Nah. I want the full TB of storage.

Well there's still RAID 0 but whatever floats your boat.

Same here. I would be indecisive when customizing a computer.

woot nice specs you have there, hows the nvidia working for you? I was going to get that. What kind of coolers do you have for your pc? I have the same motherboard as you also ^^

Meh. RAID 0 is the pussy version of RAID.

But seriously, it's not really worth the effort, especially since I will have pretty fast SATA hard drives.

Well, I haven't gotten it yet, but I'm hoping the nVidia card will work okay. nVidia Linux drivers tend to be better than ATI Linux drivers, and Sun uses that card in their Linux machines, so I think it'll work okay.

The case has an 80mm rear fan. I wouldn't mind something with more oomph, which makes me think I might be better of getting the same case but without the included power supply, and getting a "less beefy" power supply instead.

I actually have changed my mind and decided to go with an nVidia GeForce 8600GT GFX card. I also ditched the 40 gig HDD for Windows, because I don't want to mess around with dual-booting (for now).

Get the 6400AAKS drives instead. Faster, less energy, runs cooler, etc. Much quicker since they use the 320GB platters. They are comparable to the older generation of 10k rpm raptor drives.
They'll reach ~110 MB/s max read speed, and ~170 MB/s max read speed in raid-0.
The 5000AAKS will be more likely around 70 MB/s

I'd steer away from HEC PSU's they're pretty bad. When they work, they are fine, but they have a history of deciding to randomly quit on you - damaging your components with it.

I'd go with a decent Antec case/PSU combo since their PSU's are much more reliable and you won't be disappointed in the case's build quality. You can usually find them at ~$100. I just bought the NSK6580 for a 2TB NAS build - cheap, reliable, great internal design, and the PSU won't flake out on me.

good luck with the build

I took your advice and switched to a 6400AAKS drive instead -- only one for now, though. I'm also going with a different HEC case that doesn't come with a power supply, so I'm thinking about a 480W Rosewill power supply instead.

I'll post the revised parts list later on.

Alrighty, here are the updated specs:

• Processor: Intel Core 2 Duo (2.53 GHz, 64-bit, 1066MHz FSB)
• Motherboard: MSI P6N
• RAM: 2GB DDR2 800
• Hard Drive: Western Digital 640GB SATA drive
• Case: HEC 6C28BB8S (ATX mid-tower, black, steel)
• Power Supply: Rosewill 450W
• GFX: nVidia 8600GT (256MB, PCIe x16)
• Optical: Pioneer DVD+-RW drive
• Sound: Logitech X-540 (5.1 speaker surround, 70W)
• Input: Logitech keyboard and mouse

Personally, I wouldn't trust a Rosewill product at the base of my system. Maybe a Rosewill peripheral like a microphone or network card, but not for a Power Supply. They are made cheap to be sold cheap.

Rosewill gets great reviews from buyers because the people who buy their products are cheap and don't know the difference, and are too happy that they saved $10 to realize that they're new SLI Gfx cards could go up in flames from poor manufacturing of their PSU. lol

I'd go with a power supply that's well documented as being efficient and a great psu all around.
Like the Antec Earthwatts EA500, which is currently on sale for $59 from it's regular $90 price tag.

If you're gaming, you may want to consider a gfx card that has 512mb memory, but that should do fine for most games at decent settings.

Personally, I'm not a fan of cheap 5.1 sound setups. They usually sound like their price would indicate.
In most cases, you would be better off spending the money on a 2.0 or 2.1 speaker setup. You could get some really nice 2.1 active desktop speakers from a great brand for not much more, like the Swan M-10 speakers.
But that's just personal preference, some people don't really care if they get the clearest audio as long as they can hear the explosions behind them while watching Die Hard 4, or that sneaky gamer coming up behind them with a knife.
Just some food for thought.

Other than that, the build looks pretty good all around

I guess I'll go with that... I'm a little bit reluctant to go with a 500W power supply, since I have to pay my own electric bill, and 500W translates to 11% energy usage than 450W, but I guess I can swing that.


Don't plan on doing much gaming. I'm using the gfx card for two purposes: 1) to drive multiple large monitors (eventually), and 2) I do research in computational science, which often uses intense visualizations.


I've spent ~5-1/2 years dealing with shitty iBook speakers; anything is an upgrade from those.

In actuality, the 500W Power Supply would use LESS energy than the 450W power supply because it is more efficient. And that rating just means that it can output up to 500W, not that it will run at 500W constantly. For example, I just built a new file server for my home and I used a 450W PSU but it only uses about 105W of electricity while running (I used a Kill-A-Watt to test).
A cheap off-brand power supply would be highly un-efficient so it could take up to 200W of actual electricity to output 125W of power to your computer. New and more efficient power supplies like Antec's are more efficient, so they might take only 135W to output 125W to your computer, so technically you could save in the long run on your energy bill since it's more efficient and you're computer only uses as much energy as it needs, not the full amount of the Power Supply.

Ok, then you'll be perfectly happy with the 8600GT 256MB

Haha ya you should notice a good increase in sound quality then

Okay, I have some updates, because I've made a few changes. I was sitting around and thinking, "Gee, I'm mostly going to use this computer for surfing the web, watching movies, and maybe playing the occasional game -- I don't really need really powerful stuff." So I downgraded a few parts in order to cut some costs, mainly the following:

• I went with a set of 2.1 speakers instead of 5.1...for now. (Already bought them so they aren't listed on the linked page.
• I decided to go with a mini-tower case and micro ATX motherboard.

Mostly everything else stayed the same. Here's what I have now:



If you want a PDF with actual links to the parts, click here.

Alright, I finally bought the parts, and they're coming tomorrow. This is what I ended up getting:

• Intel Core 2 Duo @ 2.53GHz
• Western Digital WD6400AAKS SATA HDD, 640GB
• Samsung DVD drive, SATA
• Asus P5E-VM micro ATX motherboard
• HEC 6K28BB8F mini tower chassis, black
• G.SKILL DDR2 800 RAM, 2 GB
• Antec Earthwatts 500W power supply
• EVGA 256MB GeForce 8600GT gfx card

And, of course, I burned the Gentoo 2008.0 install CD. So it looks like I'm (almost) good to go!

Woo hoo! I built the computer this evening, and everything works. I compiled/installed Gentoo as well. And my X config works, too! Right now, I'm compiling GNOME, but since that'll take a few more hours, I'm going to bed.

And don't worry, Kryo, I'll be compiling KDE 4.1 as soon as I'm able. (But I have to do some stuff with overlays in Gentoo, and I wanted to get a working window manager before I did that.)