The best way to buy a computer these days is to build one your own. Building your own computer gives you the flexibility you need to build a computer around you. Doing this gives more meaning to “Personal Computer”. There are many ways to go about building your computer here is the process I did to find and build my computer. .

One question you have to ask yourself is “What are your main reasons for using this computer”. Once you have figure this out you can now start building your ultimate personal computer be it office work, image and video manipulation and or gaming. For my personal computer I focused on video and photo manipulation and gaming and these are the steps I took to build my computer geared towards these requirements.

When starting my computer build the first thing I did was research and lots of it. It is not enough to just go online and buy the basics to get you running you must find out the best version of each separate component. The best place to start off once you found the case that matches your style would be the motherboard. Once you found the motherboard that works everything else falls into place, Example there are only one or two different cpu’s that  are compatible with your motherboard. Same things goes for memory for the motherboard which is  dependent on what type of ram your motherboard can handle.

Finding the components for your personal computer involves a little bit of rolling up your sleeves and getting into some research. Great sites I have come to love and depend on would be Newegg .com and Tigerdirect .com. Both are great sites but  search both and you will find the best prices out there cutting your computer build cost some times by 30% or more. On top of all that they even have sales for Bare Bones pc builds, Which are just the basic components you need to build any pc at a discounted rate. Sometimes it’s good to look at these as a quick way to get a jump on a build and sometimes it’s a waste of time depending on what they decide to offer. As for me and this build I will be handpicking the different components so that I know my pc will work hard for me on the topics I described earlier.

For my case I went with the Thermaltake Armor plus line because of the awesome airflow that the cases provided as well as easy to access ports on the top front of the case. This is important to me because I will be using my flash drive a lot to import photos that I take while out in the world and I need a quick and easy way to get to my usb ports without having to crawl to the back of the pc . cost for this case will set me back  $279.99

Next up on the list of things to get would be my motherboard because im advanced in the things I do be it gaming or video editing I need a computer that can keep up with me so for that reason along I went with  the ASUS P6T Deluxe V2 LGA 1366 Intel X58 ATX Intel Motherboard. With its many sata ports and 5.1 onboard sound and support for the new and powerful intel i7 cpu it was a must have for my build.  This motherboard set me back $289.99.

With the motherboard now figured out the only choice in cpu’s I could go with would have to be the i7 lineup from i3 all the way up to the fastest which was and  I7 I chose to go for the best and bought an i7 cpu a cpu is the brains of the computer without it you will have no computer so its important you treat this component with much care when installing either by wearing and antistatic strap or by wearing gloves. This particular cpu is not cheap either it cost me $288.99 to gain this powerful processing power.

With modern motherboards you will most likely not see onboard video to save space and to put more hi-end items on the board they  usually will leave out onboard video that takes away from the cpu power so being that this is true for a lot of the boards you will have to buy a gpu or graphics processing unit  (graphics card). Be sure to check what ports your motherboard has before purchasing a card  be it pci express or just pci or if it’s an old pc agp. For my build I will be buying an evga geforce gtx 285 with on gig of onboard memory for that extra graphics processing I will be doing when dealing with anything graphic intense like gaming. This card will run me about  $419.99

Another thing that should be looked at carefully will be your ram (random access memory) or for short memory. For my build I got the 6 gigabytes of ddr3 ram from ocz and this will cost me $149.99.And finally we have the hard drive this is where all your software will go as well as personal pictures as well as video too. Since I will be working with a lot of video mostly blue ray format I went for the biggest hard drive they have at the time 1terabyte. When dealing with hard drives the faster the the rpm or (revolutions per minute) are the faster your hardrive can retrieve your information so with this in mind I went for the Seagate barracuda 2 terabyte hard drive with 5900 rpm running me $179.99

With all the components in place and the computer built your going to need an operating system and software for your computer. Nowadays installing an operating system is not traumatic at all simply pop the disk in and the wizard will walk you thru the steps for installing which ever operating system you choose. For my mega build I went with the latest operating system Windows 7.Eventho this is a fairly new operating system and there are known issues with any new operating system I felt I might as well go for the latest to save any future hassles of upgrading in the future. Windows 7 full version *not the upgrade* runs $199.99.

Also being that im making this build for video and photo editing I will need software to reflect my workflow. I chose to to go with adobe for all my photo editing and video needs.

This includes  adobe’s master suite which has adobe premiere for video editing and adobe photoshop for photo manipulation, And for an added plus dreamweaver and adobe flash tools are also included for  web development which comes in handy for my website that I maintain.

Now that everything is built and you have installed your operating system of choice,  looking back at everything that was needed and the cost you will find in most cases you already have most or some of the things on the list. A good example of this are hard drives. You will not have to spend a lot of money to get yourself an up to date personal computer and will leave yourself with money to splurge on extra accessories for your computer like a better speaker system or a gaming headset for those online battles

In conclusion it is always better to build a computer as appose to buying computers from dell.com or other websites that sell prebuilt computers, Places like these with this type of computer usually will run you well over two thousand dollars. My build has come up to $1,808.93 and will last me well over four years or more and due to the case that I have chosen it will be almost effortless when It comes to upgrading my pc . A little preplanning before hand will go a long way in ensuring satisfaction with your computer for a long time.