That's it from me. I hope you enjoyed this little visual build-log. If you'd like to try the same thing yourself, keep an eye on FreeCycle , or head down to the city dump and find old some old PCs to play with. Just tearing them apart fully, mixing a few components, and trying to make them work again is a fantastic learning experience. Comments are welcome, but I might not be able to answer any specific hardware related questions for your particular bu
Before screwing in the PSU, verify everything is working. Connect the power suppy and try to power it on. Without a video card installed yet, there's an initial error beep - but this is fine, it’s just to check the switch wiring, and the motherboard fan is spinn
Cooler Master eXtreme Power Plus 500W power supply : Cooler Master is a respected brand for power supplies and cooling, so I gravitated towards their products. With a decent CPU and GPU, I predicted that 500 watts should be more than enough to power the entire system. I could've probably gone with a 400 watt power supply without any issues, but I wanted to be completely sure. At just under $45, it's not a bad price anyways. If you're unsure about which power supply to get for your custom budget gaming rig, Matt explains everything you need to know about power supplies and how to pick o
Elsewhere on MakeUseOf we’ve covered methods for connecting PS3 controllers and Xbox 360 controllers to your PC – but did you know that it is also possible to interact with your computer via the Wiim
The default browser in Raspbian is Chromium, which is more or less able to run pages with Javascript, AJAX and Flash. Alternatives are available, but the this version of the browser is optimised for the Pi, so using it makes sense. If you're experiencing performance issues, however, try disabling JavaScr
Install the CPU fan by removing the plastic from the bottom (careful, thermal paste is applied that needs to go directly onto the CPU!) and place it onto the CPU. There should be braces on the motherboard surrounding the CPU holder where you can lock the fan into place. Connect the CPU fan to the motherboard (see manu
Once I did all that, I installed Team Fortress 2 and Dota 2 via Steam. I also separately installed Urban Terror, another popular game on Linux. The custom budget gaming rig performed very well with these games. The settings for Dota 2 and Urban Terror were set to their maximums and gameplay remained very smooth. Team Fortress 2 also ran without a hitch following the settings recommended by the game -- all of which were set to "High" if not the maximums. These results are all very impressive for a computer that costed less than $
Originally, I wanted to just get a 4-core processor, but it was pretty much at the same price as this 6-core model, so I just opted for more cores because I didn't really have to pay more anyway. I didn't get a more powerful CPU cooling solution because it would have made me go over my budget, plus I don't plan on overclocking the CPU. If you plan on overclocking, I'd definitely recommend a bigger fan or a water-cooling solut
Operating systems generally are not a limitation when you are upgrading hardware, which is why the topic shows up last in this article. This doesn’t mean they are never an issue. It’s possible that you may find yourself with a hardware upgrade that is physically compatible with your system in every way but still doesn’t w
Western Digital Green 500 GB 3.5-inch SATA III 64 MB hard drive : I wanted to find a cheap hard drive that would still offer a decent amount of storage. I absolutely love Western Digital hard drives (and absolutely despise Seagate hard drives), so I went with a Green 500 GB. Since loading times are going to be reduced anyways, might as well save some power while we're at
To test this theory, I decided to build a custom gaming rig. The total budget for the entire build? A measly $500. This is a pretty tough challenge, but there's a reason for it. The main competitor for this build is Alienware's X51 desktop , which includes a 3.3 GHz Intel Core i3 processor, 6 GB of RAM, a 1 TB hard drive, an 802.11n wireless adapter, and NVIDIA GeForce GTX 645 graphics card. The price of the X51 is $699 with Windows 7/8, or $649 if you opt for Ubuntu. While this is a decent price for an entry-level gaming PC, I definitely think that I can do better for l
There are two utilities that can help click here to visit Pcbuildinsight for free. The first is GlovePie [No Longer Available], a free tool that is capable of acting as an interface for not just Wiimotes but also Kinect and PS3 controllers, among many others. This software has a lot of applications, perhaps worthy of its own dedicated p
Following these steps can keep hundreds of dollars in your wallet. The system you end up may be not as awesome as it would have been, but it will be extremely close. So close that you won’t miss the more expensive hardware that you didn’t purch
