Congratulations, Colleen Boudreau ! You would have received an email from jackson@makeuseof.com. Please respond before November 14 to claim your prize. Enquires beyond this date will not be entertai

There are a lot of good options in the $100 to $150 range for any given processor and, if budget is your concern, it’s wise not to stray too far from them. Top brands like ASUS, Gigabyte and MSI offer plenty of choice for budget shopp

Let’s look at some standard IDE cables and connectors. There are 3 identical looking connectors – one at either end and one in the middle. However, one of the gaps between the end connectors and the middle connector is longer – this is the end that plugs into your motherbo

The way this setup works includes a web server with Subsonic installed. Technically, you don’t need to set up a web server – when you install Subsonic , it will use port 80 and serve up its own webpage. If you already have a web server, you can configure Subsonic to use its own subfolder within the public html fol

Remember, there’s always something better on the horizon. Even if you buy the fastest, most expensive hardware it will be out-paced by something new in a few months. Taking a step back and buying fast but affordable hardware is a better cho

The fan you purchased should come with at least four screws. These are usually short and stubby like the one in the photo below. However, the screws may be longer if they are meant to install alongside another piece of hardware, such as a radiator used in a liquid-cooling syst

IDE was a significant limiting factor in older PCs. Though modern machines will often include a single IDE connection for the sake of backwards compatibility, most machines from the IDE era of computing were equipped with two IDE sockets – each connection being referred to as an IDE “channel”. On each channel, you could add up to 2 IDE devices – so that meant a maximum of 4 hard drives and/or CD-ROM dri

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

Keeping the fan in place is before the screws are installed is a common difficulty. Expensive cases usually have brackets that can hold a fan even without screws, but budget cases do not, making installation a chore. My recommendation is to use a few pieces of masking tape or duct tape to temporarily hold the fan is pl

If the fan is installed and has power it should start to spin as soon as the system begins to boot – if it does not, check the power connection again. Something may have come loose or the fan may be fau

Screw the metal standoffs into the case in the corresponding holes (the same ones the motherboard ends up using) so that the motherboard won’t be directly touching the side of the case. Place the motherboard on top of the standoffs and screw it in. Make sure that you also have the I/O panel (the back panel where you connect everything) pressed into the back of the panel before screwing in the motherboard. You want the female connectors to be visible and accessible through the holes in the I/O pa

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

Since I only have a single IDE CD-ROM and single hard disk to show you today (as well as only a single physical IDE connector on my motherboard), I’ve opted to make the hard disk as Master and the CD-Drive as sl

However, as some readers pointed out, the process of adding an IDE drive is significantly more difficult than a SATA drive, so in the interests of completeness and for those of you with old PCs, here is a complete tutorial for how to add a second IDE dr

To keep costs down you can aim for one of the less impressive options or an older product. The Crucial M4, which was once considered cutting-edge, is now pretty mundane. And that means you can buy a 128GB model for just

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

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 pc assembly|https://pcbuildinsight.Com/ 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 $