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A Newbie's Hardware Guide (Updated 4/6/2014)


Dae314

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Hello everyone!

Kametsu has finally made it far enough into my heart that I feel comfortable posting and maintaining a link to my hardware guide on here. The guide is angled toward new and intermediate level system builders, and I run updates for it monthly. Since Mae gave the OK, I'll be making a new post here with the latest update as it comes out.

The guide can be found here.

I hope you all enjoy and make use of it. The guide is also up on bit-tech, animebyt.es, and hidden-street (originally it's from hidden-street hense the name on the guide). You can see an update history if you visit this thread

~Dae

 

Guide Updates (4/6/2014):

1. Links updated

2. End of life products removed or replaced

3. Intel 570 SSDs added to Section 8 recommendations

4. NVIDIA GTX Titan Black added to Section 5 recommendations

5. Antec High Current Platinum series PSUs added to Section 6 recommendations

Sorry for dropping off the map there for a month. Lots of news of future changes happened while I was gone, but it appears that the hardware landscape stayed fairly stable. Keep that in mind if you're planning to build a new box.

Unfortunately I didn't get to address the brand bias in the recommendations though :(.

Enjoy!

Edited by Dae314
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  • 4 months later...

Wait did you read that 4th one right? Maybe you should read it again. Yup... you read it right. I'm currently in the process of changing the guide and all that is in it into a website. This process is very time consuming, and there are a lot of factors that I am taking into consideration. Currently, I do not have any target or expected date for this to be done. The amount of work that goes into doing the guide from month to month will depend on how busy I am, how tired I am, how frustrated I am, and how good the anime I'm watching happens to be. Yes I make this project sound like it's not very important to me, but it is. It's just I have a life to live too and making a website is quite difficult (if you've ever done it you understand me). This is also the first website I'm ever creating so I'm working hard to make it good, but I'm also stuck doing a lot of code lookup (I'm coding this site manually) which slows down progress. I've created a thread here since it's the most technical forum that my guide is posted on describing this project in more detail and requesting aid in certain areas. I'll continue to use that thread as a resource to post questions or ask for advice as I build the site. I'll also post updates on the site build here occasionally, but since this thread's purpose isn't really to discuss web design I'll refrain from posting more than that.

note: I'm not sure this is an accurate repost of what I had in my update, but this is the best copy I have.

Update 4/7/2013

While this project has been dead for a while, it's not forgotten. Just pushed aside for school >.> School ends soon though so it'll be back in the water then!

Edited by Dae314
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I didn't read the whole guide, but you have obviously put a lot of work into it. I intend to read more of it at some point, as there is information in there that I didn't know before, despite building my own computers for the past 15 years!

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  • 7 months later...
  • 3 months later...

A friend introduced me to the idea of building a computer about 3 years ago. Back then I thought building a computer meant going from sand to CPU ^^;. From there I went researching all kinds of things related to computer building and how computers worked on a hardware level. This I coupled with my education in computer science and eventually I formed a very complete picture of how a computer works from a theoretical machine to a running application all the way down to the logic gates. During that process, I became more active in watching hardware and advising people on builds. I started by tearing down some old computers I had around and watching friends and strangers (over youtube) do their builds. I also lurked around bit-tech for a while observing the way people gave build advice and how they chose what parts to recommend. I did things this way because I never had a lot of money to throw into a decent build (that's changing in a few weeks :D). Eventually I started participating of course, and that's when I got tired of repeating myself ^^. I wanted a place not only to point new builders to when they needed help, but also a place where I could store a lot of my knowledge so I could reference it myself if I forgot. I got my information from a lot of sources, some even just word of mouth, and it would have been difficult to track down the original source of some information if I forgot it. I did find other similar guides around the internet but they were never detailed enough for me, and a lot of them hadn't been updated in years. I also wanted a guide for HOW to choose parts, not just WHAT parts to choose.

The guide works as a one-stop-shop for all the basic computer building knowledge that I've accumulated up to now, but I hope to eventually expand that once I get around to working on the website project again ^^. Last summer I only began development at the end of summer so when school started I had to drop development to keep up :(. I have a friend working with me on the site this time, but he's busy working on some graduate classes, and I'm preparing for an interview in July. Around July/August though, I should be able to start seriously spending time on developing the site. We're basically still in the planning stages until then ^^.

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  • 1 month later...

There were some major non-technical updates this month. Foremost of which is the fact that I've decided the license the guide under a Creative Commons license. Full details are now in the guide for those who are curious.

The upshot of the license is that you may make copies, edit, and share the guide as long as credit is given, it is not used for commercial purposes, and you make your edits available under a similar license.

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  • 3 weeks later...
  • 4 months later...
Unfortunately, I only just now thought to check the working copy of the guide I keep on my computer (this is where I do updates before pushing them to google).  Due to my SSD failing, I wiped out the contents of my data drive and restored an OS image on top of it.  Windows file restore was less than ideal for restoring the files I wiped out and the version of the guide it gave me did not contain most of the edits I'd been working on in the week leading up to the SSD failure.

 

After skipping December to enjoy the holidays I had hoped to push out an early update in January but I doubt I'd be able to get anything out before mid-January.  This combined with the fact that I'm going to wipe my data drive (and thus rely on Windows File Restore one last time) when the replacement SSD comes does not give me very much confidence in getting an update out this month.

 

Please accept my apology for the inconvenience this may cause you.  Most of the info sections should still be relevant however the SSD subsection is mostly out of date.  This was the section I was making most of my edits in since I plan to peel it off and give it a section separate from hard drives.  I'll be trusting my backups to Acronis in the future, so hopefully this won't happen again.

 

Happy New Year everyone!

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