by Dave Pascoe

When I read Joseph Greppo's rant on Gateway's "Gaming Machine," I confess that I cackled and clapped my hands with glee. That's exactly my feeling and experience with computer assemblers. I won't even deign to call them "manufacturers." They are assemblers of components, and the hell of it is that most of them can't even do that right.

I've got some bad news for the companies that assemble computer parts and sell them as if they were manufacturers. It is easy to build your own computer. If I can do it, anyone with a fair knowledge of these things can.

There are some things I still can't do, like go into the registry and remove old drivers. But I can put parts together, read directions, change jumpers, reassign IRQs, format a drive and boot a system. Which is basically all you need to do to build your own.

I, too, was frustrated with my mail order "ultimate" machine that, a year later (after I was done fixing all the problems), was now as obsolete as last week's newspaper. I went through many of the same problems that Joseph encountered with the $3,500 SCSI system that I had purchased from Micron.

Although Micon's service was generally excellent, that didn't alleviate my frustration with an expensive, malfunctioning machine. Within a week I had replaced a video card (one that didn't need replacing), two fans and the O/S twice. They had a hideously laborious system install regimen. Then I spent God knows how long getting rid of all the crap they used to clutter my hard drive. Call it advertising more than software, because that's what it was.

Business, or Pleasure?

Yet that was only part of my problem, for I was using this machine for all my personal, business and gaming use. It took me a while to catch on that this was very unwise. How was I to know that the "manufacturer" had the thing so crapped up with unneeded junk, and had such poorly chosen components, that it was hardly good for much of anything?

After a while I caught on. The components were not chosen because they were the best quality, or even because they worked well together: they used the ones they got the best price on.

But never mind, my purpose is not to go into a rant. Ya'll probably have cause enough to go on your own. The good news is that there is a way out. Here's how I did it.

Getting Started

First, I read a bunch of articles, including many excellent ones from COMBATSIM.COM™. I researched hardware incompatibility issues, particularly motherboards, video cards and sound cards, the primary source of suffering for gamers.

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Next, I made a list of components that people bitterly complained about, and scratched them off the list of possible choices. Fortunately, I have an e-mail friend in the computer business. I asked him for his recommendations for a primary system -- mobo, vid card, disk drives, sound card and cabinet. When I got it, I compared his recommendation with my own choices. Many were the same, particularly the mobo, vid and sound cards.

Having confirmed my faith in his recommendations, I made life easy for myself and just logged onto the Net and ordered my parts from his list in about one hour's time.

The total cost of my system was $1524.91, not inclusive of such things as UPS, monitor and other niceties since I already had those items. I also retained my old Advent sound system since I'm not real fussy about sound. I am fussy about reliability, and that's what I ended up with.

I would caution, however, that unless your current machine is going in the garbage, you will be tempted to buy a stuff like another monitor and UPS, etc. If you're thinking economy plan every expense or you'll soon find yourself with the usual $2700 bill.

Tuning Up

I am not the type to attempt to squeeze every last megahertz out of every piece of silicon. But there is an additional price to be paid. Whether you buy from the Cow barn or build your own getting all the parts to work together harmoniously requires the patience to learn about all those lovely drivers, and also the time to read the articles that tell you how to tune your system. Sorry about that, but for the serious gamer that is the truth.

Putting it together and making it work was easier and took far less time than the planning of the project. Actually, I timed it at a mere 12.5 hours when I was planning for a week. That would have probably been down to around 9 hours had I followed my own maxim of never doing technical things at night when I am tired. And to not be in a hurry. Anyway . . . .

Go to Part II