Ashton George

Feb 03, 2023

Building My Own PC: Part 1

After a week of contemplating it, I have decided. I am going to build my own PC. After having and working with my MacBook Pro 2020 for a little over a year now, I have come to terms with its lifespan. I realize that while Macs are amazing for engineering/programming, there are some things that I want to do that might be too much for it to handle. I have also been going deeper into the customization of my peripherals, like my keyboard, which has sparked an interest of customizing my laptop more. Unfortunately with Macs, this isn't really possible.

This is why I, today, just bought all of the parts I need to build my own PC. All of the parts are to arrive by the 8th, next week. After working on it for some time, I will write another post. But for now, I will detail some of the parts I chose and why.

A few months ago, I had been working at ACM when a gentleman by the name of Jared had stopped by from the Cumberland campus. We got to talking, and he spoke about how he used the website PC Part Picker to aid him in finding the best parts for the best price. I got to looking at the website, and it was more than I had expected. Featured on the home page are hand-picked PC builds based on a customer's price range. I chose the "Great Intel Gaming Build" to start with. Although I knew I would be using a PC doubled as a toy and workstation, I realized early on in my research that GPU's have a painful price tag. For a while, this killed my interest in building my own.

However, after visiting the site more recently, and having more money saved up, I considered it again. Thankfully Jared was going to come up again, so I thought I'd ask him whether he thought prices were in a good spot at the moment. Not only did I learn from him that prices were good, but I also learned that the CPU included in the "Great Intel Gaming Build" had an integrated GPU within it. I was unfamiliar with the concept up until this point so this really piqued my interest.

Now, after learning of integrated GPU's, I realize that the best time to buy a legit GPU would be during a decent sale. Paying full price for a $700 graphics card is absolutely not in my price range, especially as a college student without a full time job. That thought directly ties into when I plan to buy a GPU (not now). Unfortunately, for the time being I will put up with suboptimal graphics.

Below, I have a full parts list detailed. Thank you for reading, have a nice day.

Corsair 4000D AIRFLOW Tempered Glass Mid-Tower ATX Case - Black

MSI PRO B660M-P DDR4 LGA 1700 Intel B660 SATA 6Gb/s Micro ATX Intel Motherboard

Thermalright Peerless Assassin 120 SE ARGB CPU Air Cooler

Timetec 1TB SSD

Intel Core i5-12400 LGA-1700 Socket

Silicon Power Value Gaming DDR4 RAM 16GB (8GBx2)

EVGA 550 B5, 80 Plus BRONZE 550W