My First Computer Builds: Part 1 - The Reason

This will be a short introduction to how I learned to assemble computers. I have just completed two of them actually, and I will be writing about those too. So here goes.

I am one who loves playing video games. A brief history of my gaming life: I've had my first taste with Space Invaders on my cousins' Atari 2600, they were tweens at the time and I was a little kid who just was past the toddler stage. Since then I have been obsessed, begged my father (with great success) to buy me the Nintendo Famicom. I have never skipped a generation since, I had owned at least one from each (I had SNES, N64, PS1, PS2, PS3). Well that changes now.

I have never really been impressed by news of this current generation populated by PlayStation 4, XBox One and the WiiU. The WiiU is the one I want the most out of the three because I think it's the most "exclusive" of them all - you can't get those Nintendo games anywhere. The other two? They're trying so hard to become a jack-of-all-trades system that they've become... a watered-down PC. Of all generations of consoles, I think this is the most evolutionary of them all. The past ones always had something revolutionary to offer: huge jumps in graphical quality, online play, new ways to control. So even though they always trailed the mighty PC in terms of graphical power and online play, they made up for it in other areas.

So we are in the here and the now. Motion control it seems is just a novelty. The control pad now has been refined so much that pretty much the only thing it can't control is an RTS game. If I am to look for cutting edge technology, PS4 and XBox One won't cut it. So I just thought of upgrading my PC. We've had this PC at home for almost a year now. It was assembled for us. When we were purchasing it, I told the store that I plan to upgrade it in the near future. I asked for something where the upgrade path was far enough for high-end gaming. Here's what was built for us:

Processor: Intel Core i3-3220
Motherboard: ASUS P8Z77M-Pro
Graphics card: Palit GT630
OS: Windows 8
and a 750GB hard drive plus 4GB 1333 MHz DDR3 RAM

All housed in a generic casing and powered by a generic 600W power supply. It's best to avoid generic power supplies as they have that big potential to harm your components.

I had fun with it. I was impressed on how fast Windows 8 boots up and shuts down. I never had any issues with switching from the Start screen to the desktop. I would say that it's a rough transition whenever you switch interfaces, but it's no deal breaker. Not even remotely annoying, but that's just me. In terms of games, I had Gears of War and Sims 3 on it, but I mostly played around with emulators. I had no problems running Dolphin or PCSX2, everything in my game library was completely playable.

So then the news about the PS4 and XBox One surfaces, and I was not impressed. The hardware was underwhelming and I was not excited about the upcoming games. I knew the PC would always have the superior versions of the games, so I went about researching about what parts I would need to have a console killer. I am happily playing with my newly-upgraded rig for a few days now, so for my next post I will be discussing the parts that I got, basically the fruits of months and months of research.