Tried to Remove On-Board Graphics Card

[magicdanw]

I've built pcs myself, and I agree it's cheap and fun. Just make sure the parts you buy work and work together (don't buy combos from TigerDirect - often the parts aren't compatible), watch out for ESD damage, and don't disassemble the parts any more than they come disassembled!!!

[JoostinOnline]

Yeah, my job this summer was almost always building computers from scrap, and I had a blast.

[Areign]

i too can vouch , as a kid with no experiance or knowledge who built a computer, its quite simple. just take care. my only suggestion is that it wil end up costing more than you initially plan. i planed for 650, ended up buying it all for 600 then realized i need a seta cd drive and then realized i needed a new hd so...

[NETWizz]

It will only cost more if you don't plan what you are going to buy and what you are going to build.

You will need the following components:
A Case in the ATX or possibly BTX form factor
Power Supply with appropriate connectors (SATA, 24 Pin motherboard Power, PCI-E, and possibly even the new 8-PIN motherboard connector)
Motherboard for the chipset you decide upon.
Processor that supports that motherboard
Memory compatible with the motherboard.
SATA or maybe PATA (EIDE) hard drive(s)
SATA or PATA(EIDE) Otical drive(s)
Video Card (Always recomended as On-Board video stinks)
Add on cards (Video Capture, RAID, Sound, Wireless, NICS...)
________

I will be happy to help you in the selection. It should not cost more than you expect if you are conscious in your effort to property add up all the prices before buying.


The expense comes when you upgrade and buy more than you initially planned. I built my main computer about 2 summers ago.

It consisted of an ABIT-KN8-SLI motherboard, 3200+ Socket 939 Processor, Antec SoHo Server Case, Free DVD ROM from my father, 2x 250 GB WDC drives in RAID one from Newegg, 2x 512 Mb Corsair ValueRAM, PNY Geforce 7300GT, and I added a Linsys Wireless G card.

Next, I upgraded to a DVD burners (I wanted 2), so I got an NEC and a Lite-ON. Later I disliked the NEC, so I got another Lite-ON. Then I bought another hard drive and upgraded to RAID 5. Then the video card irritated me, so I returned it and bought an EVGA 7600GT. It sucked and artifact ed, so EVGA replaced it. I then bought a 4200+ processor with crappy motherboard cheaper than the price of the processor. The motherboard I had (ABIT KN8-SLI) had sound trouble (fried chip), so I got it replaced with another.

I added a 400 GB Seagate Drive to the computer. Replaced one of the Lite-On 16x Dual Layer with an 18x Dual Layer... Upgraded the RAM from 1 GB to 2x 1 GB Corsair XMS. Then later I added 2 more GB. The Power Supply wasn't beefy enough, so I replaced it with a 750 Watt ThermalTake Tough Power.

Then I got fed up with my inability to Game a month ago and bought an Nvidia GeForce 8800GT. It was good, but I wanted another for SLI, so I bought another.

Then I realized that my system is much slower than the Graphics card, so I bought an Asus Nforce 680i Motherboard, Intel Q6600, and 2x 2 GB of DDR2-1000 AKA PC2-8000

You can see the cycle here.... When you build it yourself, you are free to upgrade until your heart's content. Moreover, you can upgrade the problem areas or add the specific features you want in a computer. You do not just replace a custom built computer as it is almost always more economical to upgrade. Unless you waited so long that the processor, memory, power supply, graphics card interface, and drive interfaces all changed.

[NETWizz]

In building the above aforementioned PC, I had a leftover 3200+ Athlon 64, ECS K8T890-A (VIA Chipset, but it costed negative $5 considering I bought it for the bundled processor for another system...), 2x 512 MB Corsair Value Ram DDR, Left-Over Lite-On 16x DL +-RW.

I had to buy an EVGA7300GT (Nvidia near bottom of the Barrel 7 Series I figured perfect for Linux and alternative OS)
Case and Power Supply I got for $40
Hard drive for $50 (100 GB PATA)

Basically, I built a spare box for only about $150 more to experiment with alternative Operating Systems. Oh, and I bought a wireless card too Netgear WG311v3 for it...

I had 2 19" monitors attached to my main computer at the time with the desktop spanning both of them, so I used on of those monitors...

I then installed Ubuntu Dapper Drake and it was good. I later bought a cheap KVM switch for about $30 just to use it to switch the keyboard and mouse between computers.

________

This year, a 19" monitor died, so I bought a 22" wide screen View Sonic and attached it too my main computer, the Linux machine. That is right, my cheap-cheap-spare computer became my most used computer. I had over 4x the money tied up in my better computer, yet I used the cheap computer much more. I decided that the good monitor belongs on the cheap computer.

Later I decided it would be nice to have a better video card on the Linux box, so I swapped the 7600GT from the PC with the 7300GT in the Linux box. They traded video cards (all I used the PC for was paying some bills and some special school work). I had at some point upgraded to Edgy as well. Then I had 2 extra 200 GB SATA Maxtor hard drives I bought for $35 each OEM. I had them for over a year, so I imaged my Linux computer from a SATA to an IDE. It was a major headache to be honest.

I upgraded to Fiesty Fawn... then I did a hard drive migration. I had to do a BIOS update for proper detection of the SATA drive due to the crappy motherboard detecting the SATA drive as a PATA drive and the IDE DVD writer as SATA . I used partimage to do the imaging, dd to image the MBR, and sfdisk to ensure the filesystem was created right for imaging. I then used gparted to risize and had to re-install Grub. All was well.

Next, I did the update to Gusty Gibbon!

In all, I have done the distribution upgrade 3 times on my spare box, upgraded monitor, video card, and hard disk... All without a clean install. Linux runs great, and I recommend everyone have a spare computer for experimentation