This is the mantra I repeated to myself over and over for the past week in respect my weekend project, and to be honest it was true…

Today, I tackled the task of building my own PC for the first time. I know it’s lame that a person who professes to be as big a geek as I do has never built a PC, but I switched to Macs right about the time that PC building became popular. I have of course upgraded plenty of PCs in my life (I was a PC technician for quite some time) and figured that doing a complete build could not be that much harder, and I have to say that was a good assumption. But why would I want to build a PC? Especially since I’m such a Mac boy?

About a month or so ago, I was beyond fed up with my networking issues [Why Me, Straightened Out?], a few frustrated calls to Pinoyboy, and he suggested that I take more control over my network and install an IPCop box. IPCop is a Linux Install that provides a Firewall, DNS Services, DHCP Server etc. It replaces all the functions of my Linksys router. The install was super easy and thanks to Pinoyboy’s help, I even got some Firewall rules written. The nicest part of the IPCop install is that since it’s a very specialized Linux OS, the system requirements are very modest. I pulled out my now 7 year old Gateway out of the closet and used it to install the OS and it ran without issue. The only problem? The Gateway PC is a full-sized tower and it was LOUD, very loud, so I decided that I wanted a new, very small system. I figured that since the system requirements for IPCop were modest, I could do this on the cheap and I decided to build a Bare-Bones system myself.

After many hours of discussion with Pinoyboy, he helped me sort thru all the stuff I don’t know about PCs anymore, such as what processors go with what motherboards, what chips were good value and what I truly needed for this machine. I decided on a case that was about the size of two reams of paper, all black with a hidden floppy and DVD drive. This was important to me because I wanted to harvest what I could from the Gateway. Here’s the case I selected…

The BioStar iDEQ N1

The total cost of the box was 202 dollars before shipping. I went with an AMD Sempron 64 2600+ Palermo 1.6GHz for the processor, 512 MB of Corsair memory. I harvested the 10GB HD, CD burner, Floppy and NIC from the Gateway.

The build went well, the only issues I had were that I’d never applied thermal paste before and the cabling for the HD was so tight that I bent a pin on the hard disk. After that was sorted I spent about a total of an hour putting the machine together. The IPCop setup was a bit more time, as I did a back up and a restore and it was fine except the one NIC had changed. Once I had that sorted, everything was fine. The unit is super quiet and boots so fast. Another nice bonus is that it fits on TOP of the Mac Pro!