$625 gaming PC

My 18 year old grandson is building one of your $625 Gaming systems. My question is, since he is not actually familiar with the intricacies of the PC, wil he be successful in his effort to get a stable working gaming platform with your system inventory in a plug and play world? What areas should he be careful of, and what are the typical mistakes amatures make when assembling one of these hybrid's?

Thanks for your advice.

Bill Mansfield
Tektronix

Check out youtube and other sites for videos of people putting together systems, this will help get you acquainted with the process. Also follow the instructions for your motherboard as they will outline most of the steps for installing cables, the cpu and add-in cards. Most heatsinks come with pre-applied thermal paste and it is adequate for stock speeds and slight overclocks. If you do not intend on overclocking, take the money they allocated for an aftermarket cpu cooler and put it towards a faster processor. Last and most importantly, always ground yourself before touching any components and do not work on carpet.

Thermal Paste - Less is more.

Would be best to get a Retail Mobo over a OEM. Few quid difference in price, but the Retail version comes with a lovely handbook that shows you where to plug all the components into. Along with Drivers and Leads and such.

Conversely get an OEM Operating System. Few quid less but equal to Retail versions. Only difference is that it is binded to your motherboard so you may have probs from Microsoft should you look to cha nge the Motherboard. I dont really see this as a problem as Windows 7 is released in the next 12 months, a nd you can usually talk past the reps anyway.

If it takes him 6 hours then thats fine. Dont rush is the top tip really.

Yeah thats true, the motherboard manual is a good thing to read through so he knows all of the functions. There are also installation instructions scattered about each hardware manual that he will get. Good to read through them all actually.

Motherboard manual is always good for a first build, but don't forget to read the case manual too, it will tell you which screws fit in where and will help to avoid crossthreading, or even stripping screws.

Don't forget, Google is your friend, and can often come up with the help you need in under a minute.

Lastly, I'd say my most important piece of advice, is to not be afraid to ask questions at any point in the build! There are a great bunch of people on here, some people can get arsey and everyone has a bad day, but ion general you can get some great advice. This place has helped me out many a time with problems, hence giving back to the community.

@pr
hehe, that was pretty funny! Your initial post was all over the place, you sounded like you'd had too much coffee!

What you might want to look at is a partial home build. As your budget isn't massive, the performance snobs on here will laugh, but for my cheaper PCs, I buy Asus barebones machines, a better power supply & graphics card, hard drive & DVD.

The case already has the motherboard installed, they are neat and practical and on a budget they are great little machines. My youngest kids PC is one of these and has stood her in great stead over the last year, having been upgraded from stock to a 4850 powered, 1680x1050 CnC3-playing great little rig.

If your graphics choice isn't too ambitious, you could even run it on the existing, pre-installed power supply, which I did (a 7600) for a while without issue, though I wouldn't recommend it long term.

I guess as you quote $ you aren't in the UK, but something like this should be available: http://www.scan.co.uk/Products/Asu [...] -Board-VGA

That plus a DVD, CPU, Hard Drive and RAM would get you running with expansion options in the future - and take a good chunk of the pain away from a first build.

read this thread:
http://www.gamefaqs.com/boards/gen [...] c=47902857

Here is a guy who doesnt know much about compyters and constantly trying to mess with it by various means like upgrading, ocerclocking, etc. ruins them and returns them to the store,