The good thing here is that she falls into the age group where she can either be in the school year ahead of her birthday or the one behind her, as she was born in the summer. So there is some time to properly build something before she goes away, as my mom plans for her to do a year of community college before actually going to a university. It's going to get her used to the college experience, and it's also a way for my parents to save up some more money for when she actually goes to a university.
Anyways back on topic, she has a laptop that she got through her high school but that thing is falling apart at the seams. It has a keyboard and touch pad that doesn't work, it's extremely slow, and it doesn't boot up unless she has the power cord installed in a certain way. Long story short, it's a computer that would make any PC enthusiast cringe just from looking at it.
So what I've been doing is saving up some of my spare parts from older PC builds, that way it will save some money on her build or enable us to use the money saved from those parts to buy some good quality products to stick in her pc. My dad is pretty cheap but since my sister is still young he loves to buy her stuff, doesn't' give a crap about me or my brother anymore, so I know he's going to want to mostly pay for a computer that's going to her.
Here's a list of the parts I have so far, from my very first build I have an XFX Radeon HD 5770 video card which is still in great condition. It has one minor problem where it randomly crashes 1% of the time but otherwise still works perfectly. I'm working on sending it in for an RMA and get that issue checked out, as I have a lifetime warranty for that card. XFX is awesome for that by the way, you can't beat a lifetime warranty. Anyways if that works I'm going to buy a second card for her and use them in crossfire mode. I also have a 550w OCZ Fatality series power supply from my first build as well. Strangely enough I bought both these items at the same time from newegg. The downside right now is that this particular power supply is 'broken' but I recently found out I had a 3 year warranty on that, so I'm working with OCZ to try and get it RMA'd and either fixed or replaced. It's actually a very high quality power supply so I have no doubt it can run two 5770's as they don't really have a high power consumption anyways, they only require one six pin power connector each to run.
Those are really the main two items I have readily available for a new PC build at the moment, but I will have a few more extra parts in the near future. The funny thing is that I'm using this project as an excuse to get myself some new computer parts as well, which in turn will actually benefit this second build as parts of my current computer are going into this new build. I will be getting a new computer case for myself in this process, and I am looking at purchasing a Raven 3 from Silverstone, so my sister will be getting my Azza Helios 910 case. It's a very big mid tower case, almost on the verge of a full tower in overall size so there won't be any issue with room.
So there's the case that she'll be using, it's a very solid case and I would recommend it to anyone building their own mid-range gaming PC. However the overall airflow design of the case is not all that great, so I probably wouldn't suggest using it for a high end setup with dual video cards. That's partly why I'm upgrading to something different, I have major concerns about heat with two high end video cards in this case. Also the cable management could be better, the area behind the motherboard really isn't that big at all and not all my cables can be hidden in this one.
As far as other parts go, I'm thinking of maybe getting myself a bigger hard drive and she can use my older 500 GB drive, which is plenty space for her. Hard drives will be taken care of at that point, so that will save some money for both of us.
Lastly I'll list a couple of the parts that will need to be purchased. I know she won't need anything ridiculously powerful as my machine, but my goal her is to give her something minimal but still very solid and reliable for years to come.
So for a processor I've decided to go with Intel on this, as it's been a while since I've done a build based off their chipsets. A core i3 processor should do just fine, as it's minimal in the amount of power it consumes, yet still very decent for gaming based on reviews I've read.
Link 1
For a motherboard I'm going with something that's crossfire/SLI enabled. For those of you who don't know, she actually does play games. Mainly Dragon Age and WoW stuff, but with a dual 5770 setup I think that will be all the power she needs for games and like I said earlier the 5770 isn't a very power consuming graphics card.
Link 2
In terms of memory, I think 8 GB of DDR3 should do just fine. I need a lot of memory on my system for encoding purposes, but apart from that my sister does a lot more multitasking than I do on a practical basis. So I think more than 4 GB is necessary, and 8 GB should be just fine for everything she does.
Link 3
And of course, with all the operations that may be going on in her PC you gotta have a CPU cooler to maintain cool temperatures and prolong the computer's life. I think this one is very suitable, but when I do buy all these parts I may decide just to buy on a price to price basis, whatever is cheapear but reliable at the time.
Link 4
As for everything else, I think we'll let my sister go out and buy her own peripherals for this PC when it's time. We do have a spare computer screen and DVD drive to send with here but everyone has different likes when it comes to speakers, keyboards, and mice. Maybe later on she'll even decide that she wants a blu ray drive like I have on my computer, but she can buy one herself.
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