My 3 year old desktop PC (it's not really a desktop, it's far too big and noisy to actually sit on my desk) has past it's prime so it's time to build myself a new one! I suppose i could save myself some time and a bit of money and just buy something from Dell, but i like to know what's inside my pc, and that i can change/replace any parts myself if i need to. Also hopefully i can squeeze a bit of extra performance out of it, by buying the right bits. It's quite time consuming and there are many problems in building a stable system with new parts, till the drivers are mature enough to iron out any issues.

So what do i want from a new PC?

• Upper limit of about £1200 (this is just for the base unit, not including speakers, monitor, keyboard & mouse)
• Quietish (some air noise is ok, but vibration and other noisy parts should be at a minimum)
• Speedy (I spend a lot of my day working on a pc so it needs to keep up)
• Stable (same as above, i need a solid, reliable pc to work on)

So i did my research and spent my time picking components that should work together, and came up with 3 builds based on price

 
So #3 it is. I just need to wait for the rampage formula motherboards to be released (anytime now!) and everything should be fine and dandy. My last PC cost £1500 and has lasted 3 years and would probably crawl on another half a year or so. It's not doing bad for saying it got damaged when the phone line was hit by lightning last year, and destroyed the phone, my adsl modem, the ethernet cable and the ethernet socket and some of the usb ports on the computer. Luckily the other ethernet port, and the front usb still work - and it carried on ticking! Nice work asus!

I recently worked out that i rent a pc over 3 years (as thats about how long they last me), although if you were only doing office work then it would probably last longer, but after 3 years the hardware tends to degrade in quality and systems become less reliable for heavy use. All the choices above are my own, and i've spent a long while looking at the various options available at the moment. It's very confusing what to do to get the "best" system, with things changing every week with new bioses and drivers for new and old hardware. Overall, look at the basics to make your decisions such as cost, speed, reliability and then look at things like noise, heat, overclocking. If you prioritize correctly then you'll be happy with the system you get, try to ignore the people on forums that say "I wouldn't buy this or that" and the speed reviews that say things like 10% faster etc, often only show real world values that are small - such as a couple of frames per second difference in the latest game, which won't bother the majority of us!

What do you think? What about your own builds? If you get one of the above specs let me know how you get on!