Building my first PC
I do not know exactly what drew me back to wanting to get into PC gaming in 2009, but I know a large part of it was Fallout 3. Up until then I had been playing my PlayStation 3, but Fallout 3 specifically was very poorly optimized on PS3, and I was learning about the mods you could use on computer. It seemed very cool to me to be able to run the game much better and have access to the world of mods, and I was needing a computer increasingly for school work. It just made sense to me that I might as well be able to play a few games on my PC. So, I started reading about getting a computer for games. Up until then I had been mostly a Mac fan (I started playing the Putt-Putt games on my schools Mac around 2000 which are some of the first video games I remember playing) and I had always enjoyed using Macs over PC’s, but Mac’s did not play games at the time, so a PC is what I decided on.
At first, I just wanted to buy a PC, I would spend hours looking at PC Magazines and browsing the Dell website playing with the build configurator. Eventually I got my heart set on an Alienware. They seemed so cool, the design and branding was peak mid late 2000s video game energy. Unfortunately for me there where two major problems; Dell had just bought them and they were phasing out their old lineup for a new Dell-Alienware joint lineup, and the other issue was the price.
Gaming PC’s were expensive. There was no debate about it, especially for what you got spec wise. Even early on I noticed a trend that the “custom” pc builds featured in PC magazines had much better specs for the price than anything you could configure on Alienware’s website. I had an all-in target budget of $1,100 and the custom builds at that price point outperformed anything Alienware had at their lowest prices of $1,500. It was decided for me in a way that I would build my first PC. There was some good news however. Dell was selling off their old Alienware computer case stock from pre-merger, so that massive Alien looking PC case that I wanted so bad was being sold at my local Microcenter for $100.
And so I bought one. It was my first PC part I purchased, over the next few months I one by one purchased the rest of the parts I needed. The system I built that summer of 2010 ended up being:
- Intel i7 920 @ 4.0ghz
- 6gb DDR3-1200MHz Ram
- SLI EVGA GTX 465s
- Silverstone 1000w Power Supply
- ASUS Xonar Sound Card
- Corsair H50 Liquid Cooler
- 60 GB Sata 2 SSD (for the Windows 7 install)
- 2x Western Digital 1tb HDDs
- DVD read/writer
- Front panel flash card reader
- A Noctua Intake fan and Gentle Typhoon radiator fan (these were a big deal at the time!)
The Complete Build
Looking back at it now, it is truly a product of its time. Dedicated sound card, dual GPUs, small SATA SSD boot drives for Windows installs only, disk and memory card readers, colored power supply cables. Even the case with its rolled thick unpainted steel. Fully assembled it was HEAVY, it was loud, it ran hot enough that in the winter I would leave my window open when playing. Its game performance was good enough; it was not a monster build by any means but would play the games I wanted too amazingly. The games I was playing in this time are some of the best; Crysis, the Portal games, Mafia II, Metro 2033, Bad Company 2 and of course Fallout 3.
This was also the prime era of overclocking. The i7 CPU shipped at a slow 2.66GHz, but with some good cooling (and tons of power) provided by the Corsair H50 I could overclock it all the way up to 4.2ghz. Both GPU’s also left huge amounts of headroom on the table, I used MSI Afterburner to get significant performance increases from them as well. Of course, this only contributed to the heat output and power usage, at the time GPUs and CPUs did not downclock when underutilized, we are talking full power and full clocks, full time. It is crazy now to think this just ran full speed all the time even when just reading the web.
I really loved this computer. Slowly over time I sold off old parts to fund new parts, drives filled up and were replaced, eventually the case power button and lighting stopped working and it was replaced with something more modern. But I will always fondly remember this first build and the time I had with it. Enjoy the some more photos below, including some awesome 2010 blue LED glow.
