I Built a new Personal Computer

Somewhat recently, I’ve been able to cross something off my bucket list that I’ve been wanting to do for a long time. Many things needed to happen for this “experience” to be possible. I needed more living space, technical knowledge on the subject, the stars and the moon needed to align just right….but most of all I needed more disposable income.

Yes, I’m proud to announce that I have finally built my first personal computer.

In fact, I’m writing this article on that very PC. It is not 100% my dream computer, but it’s very close. As I alluded to above, this is something I’ve been wanting to do for a very long time - literally, since I was 12. I’m not sure why I allowed so many years go by without taking the plunge and just making one. For the most part, I spend my money on video games and anime. Finally I’ve decided to do something productive with it.

Thanks to the rising cost of computer parts, the entire build cost north of $1000. That said, it has some nice hardware. As far as performance goes, I was really aiming for a mid-level gaming PC. It has 16-gigs of RAM, 1TB of SSD storage, an MSI motherboard, and a GeForce GT 710 video card. For the CPU, I went with a AMD Ryzen 5. At the time of building the PC (mid-2021), any computer nerd will tell you the Ryzen 5 is one of the best CPUs you could buy for a moderate price.

You may notice that my video card is very underpowered. You can barely do anything remotely related to gaming with a GPU that weak. The reason...video card prices. Thanks to crypto mining, multiple fires in video card manufacturing plants, and covid, these cards are far more expensive than they should be. Decent GPUs for gaming are hard to come by these days. Hence, I bought the GT 710. I do plan on upgrading though...once those prices drop.

I’m most proud of the operating system I chose to install: Debian Linux. I’ve been using Linux as my daily driver for a few years now. Mostly I install it on a partitioned drive alongside Windows. I haven’t even installed Windows on this computer. Up until now, I’ve only ever used the Ubuntu distribution. Ubuntu is a fine operating system, but there’s too much “bloat” software that comes packaged with the OS on install. Debian, on the other hand, is a much more bare-bones OS; only containing software that’s completely necessary for normal operation. I’ve customized my install to some extent; the biggest change I’ve made is replacing the Gnome desktop environment with KDE. I prefer KDE because it has that old-school Windows 95 feel. I guess I’ll never be able to completely shake Windows from my perception of how using a computer should feel.

I’ll end this stream of consciousness about my computer here. ;)

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