Buying a pc that is fast enough for playing the latest games can be very expensive, as most of the high street brands love to charge a fortune for the latest high specifications. There are a lot of companies out there that have started to offer a custom “bespoke” pc building service where you select the parts that you want in your pc and they build it for you, this is a good way of getting the pc that you want but you will be paying through the nose for someone else to build the machine for you. The other worry is the warranty, a lot of companies that offer this service are small firms so if you use one of these companies then make sure you are getting a decent warranty and find out exactly what this warranty covers, otherwise you could end up with a very expensive piece of hardware that doesn’t work with no after sales support and believe me, that sucks.

But why use one of these suppliers when you can save yourself a pretty penny and build one of these machines yourself? I know what you might be thinking; where the hell would I start!! But trust me, it isn’t as hard as you would imagine. Building a pc today is so much easier than it used to be years ago, mainly because the components are so much more “plug and play” friendly then they used to be and driver support is miles better then it was back in the days of Windows 95.

To be honest, if you just want a pc for basic stuff, such as word documents, office apps, internet browsing etc then DO NOT BOTHER trying to build one as they are so cheap to buy. At pc world you can get yourself a nice starter pc with a monitor all ready to go for around £350.00 and you wouldn’t be able to build a machine of similar ilk for the same cost.

A gaming pc on the other hand is a very different story. Building one of these bad boys is a lot cheaper than buying one off the shelf and I include the Dell XPS systems in this statement. If anyone can prove me wrong then go ahead but I built a monster pc last month for £1000.00 here are the specs;

· CPU: Intel D920 2.66GHz Corei7 processor

· CPU fan: Titan TTC-NK85TZ Fenrir CPU Cooler £28.99

· Motherboard: Gigabyte GA-EX58-UD3R iX58 motherboard.

· Memory: Corsair 6GB (3x2GB) DDR3 1600MHz XMS3

· Graphics card: XFX 4870 x2 GB GDDR 5 graphics card

· PSU: Hi-Power Black 800W Modular 13.5cm Fan PSU

· Hard drive: Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache.

· Samsung SpinPoint F1 1TB SATA-II 32MB Cache

This build above cost me £1000.00, no word of a lie. If you bought this system then it would cost you £1300.00 at the very least. Also when you build your own machine, remember that you can have whatever you want.

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IT Support London based company that I work for. As I work in a room full of techies I get to pick up on all the latest hardware/software chat plus we all build our own machines. I am a dab hand at building pc’s so if you ever need any advice then feel free to get in touch.