The basic components of a PC consist of:

• Case
• Processor (CPU)
• Motherboard
• Graphics Card
• Memory (RAM)
• Hard drive
• Power Supply Unit (PSU)
• Optical Drives

In addition the new PC would need software namely:

• Operating system (OS)
• Office Suite

Normally the price does not lie when buying computer components and my normal technique would be to find the most expensive components and then check the reviews for them. Once I had made my decision I would then surf the net to find the cheapest price for the component. This approach ensured I always had quality items at the cheapest price.

Cases can range from the basic box to more expensive options. The case I chose was the Thermaltake Tai-Chi VB50001SNA. This aluminium case contains a liquid cooling system built onto the inside of the case that would save me having to buy a separate cooling component. It also offered six spaces for drives giving me massive potential to expand. I checked a few reviews online that were all favourable. The size of the box when it arrived was still a surprise though.

Total Cost: £218.55

Postage £14.51

The Intel Extreme processors represent the high end of the market in terms of performance and price. The Dell XPS comes with a QX6700, so I made the decision to go for the processor above this. The QX6800 was the best desktop processor on the market (though a new QX6850 is shortly to replace it) so this would give me a performance edge over the Dell without the need to overclock. By waiting until the Intel Price drops in July and shopping around I was able to save over £150 though it still proved to be the most expensive component for something that is about twice the size of a postal stamp!

Total Cost £608.87

Postage: 8.57

The motherboard is the most important part of a computer since it controls every other part which needs to fit into it. My sole requirements were it needed to be quad-core supporting and either BTX or ATX size since the case could support either. An "Ultimate" pc needed an "ultimate" motherboard and I eventually settled on a Asus Striker Extreme. This motherboard whilst expensive offered BIOS overclocking settings and I was impressed with the number of other options like you can modify the first BIOS screen picture and it even has a music alarm!. However the reviews were mixed. There seemed to be a lot of problems with the motherboard in the support forums (mostly concerning memory) and the CPU list did not include the more powerful QX6800 I wanted to use. However using the forums available on the Asus website I was able to confirm the motherboard did support this (and the day after my post the CPU list on the Asus website was updated). The memory compatibility was still a worry though. The motherboard supported SLI so could give me the same as the Dell XPS. The motherboard also had an onboard soundcard meaning it was not necessary to purchase this separately.

Total Cost: £182.65

Postage: £2.94

Nvidia have been around for ages it seems though in all my computers I have always had ATI Radeons. The best graphics card around at the moment is the Geforce 8800 Ultra. There seemed to be a lot of varieties of these that all had similar specs so in the end I chose the XFX version with 768MB. This would give me an awesome graphics card to start, with the option to use SLI to double it up later on.

Total Cost: £411.19

Postage: £7.34

RAM was something I had always taken for granted. Buy the memory sticks and plug them in simple. Although there is faster RAM available I chose a special offer OCZ 2GB Git Platinum DD2 PC6400 800MHZ. I duly bought 4GB and then read the motherboard compatibility list and realised it wasn't on there. Thankfully the guys at OCZ have an excellent support forum that specified the settings needed for it to work on the motherboard though a BIOS release before I built the PC meant I didn't have to change anything.

Total Cost: £129.23

Postage: £7.34

All my previous Hard drives had been the older IDE variety where you plug in a ribbon and a power cord and partition the disk how you want. For this PC I wanted to use a striped SATA RAID array. RAID stands for Redundant Array of Independent Drives (or Disks) and basically involves multiple hard drives being linked and being treated as a single unit. This can be used for error correction or copying the same disks called Mirroring to allow fault tolerance. The Striping array I wanted was pure performance based where data is stored on different disks so accessing it is quicker since each hard drive can retrieve its data separately. Again a special offer saw me buy two Samsung SpinPoint T 500GB 72090RPM SATA 3GB/s 16MB Cache. This would give me a Terabyte of hard disk space plus the performance.

Total Cost: £136.30

Package: Free

The choice of power supply needed some investigation since I had only ever bought a replacement one before so had no idea what I should be looking for. Eventually after reading a few articles the importance of the PSU suddenly became more apparent. If the power supply was insufficient then the system would suffer by say the DVD player stalling while power was needed by the graphics card etc. Since the water cooler on my case needed power and I had already anticipated one of the state of the art graphics cards I needed some serious power. I eventually chose the ThermalTake Toughpower 1200w. This beast of a power supply would give me the option of powering the two graphics cards should I choose to use the SLI feature of the motherboard. It was also modular meaning I would only need to connect the cables I actually needed.

Total Cost: £176.19

Postage: £7.34

LG DVD RW GSA-H44NBRL 18X DVD +/-R/RW/RAM DL IDE       Chosen for its Vista 64 bit compatibility

Total Cost: £18.17

Postage: £2.94

Floppy Drive + Card Reader: £17.79

Postage: £2.15

Total Cost: £35.96

Postage: £5.09

64bit capable systems have been around for years but the move to the 64bit operating system and its need for 64bit drivers and software has meant this has not yet caught the mainstream buyers attention yet. To use the full power of all four processors on the Quad Core, Windows Vista was the operating system of choice (Windows XP supports only two processors). By choosing the 64bit Home Premium version I had access to the full 4GB of RAM I had already purchased. On the downside this presented several headaches. Firstly all drivers have to be 64bit. This meant a lot of my existing hardware (scanners/printers/network adapters) would be unusable. I had already bought a new Belkin MIMO usb adapter that was not compatible and meant I had to sacrifice it for an inferior but compatible Zyxel G202 wireless adapter. In addition several of my applications would no longer work either. Office 2000 (see below) and Visual Studio 2003 would both be lost to me with the move to the new OS.

Total Cost: £65.79

Postage: £4.74

The use of Vista as an operating system finally meant an end to my student licensed Office 2000 professional and meant I had to replace it. This meant another hefty expense. The new Office 2007 package however included Outlook 2007 which would finally allow both hotmail and Pop3 email accounts to be monitored (Outlook Express had this functionality for years but Outlook - the more expensive fuller version did not).

Total Cost: £351.98

Postage: £8.99

Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard and Optical Mouse: £16.85(+£2.15 postage)

Benq 22inch Widescreen Monitor £211.19 (+Free Postage)

Zyxel G202 wireless adapter £4.99 (+£3 postage)

Speakers £25.99 (+£9.99 postage)

So after 10 weeks of ordering parts in it was time for the fun to begin and put it all together. The instruction manual for the case and water cooling was far from perfect. Basic instructions were given in vague terms so it would take trial and error (and probably some luck) for it all to work perfectly straight away. I thought it was important to get all the components onto the motherboard first and worry about cutting the pipes to the right size afterwards. So after working out that the motherboard tray needed some copper screws between it and the motherboard and installing the CPU, water block and RAM the motherboard was ready to be installed into the case.

This is where we hit our first glitch. The motherboard tray had to be slid onto the case but it was very difficult to get this into place with the motherboard covering the hooks. In the end we took out the left side of the case and attached the motherboard to it, before attaching it back into the case. We then cut the cooling tubes to the right side and attached them to the water pump.

The i/o shield clipped in nicely, and the power supply slotted in and was screwed in with no problems. The hard disks were tricky to attach to the cage but again slipped in ok. The card reader/floppy drive combination needed to connect to an onboard USB which was out of range of the top slot on the case but luckily this could be moved down to reach. All the other connectors were attached with little or no problem. Then we came to the graphics card. This monster (taking up two PCI slots) simply would not fit in to the expansion card push-click mechanism of the case and we had to remove the plastic connectors put the card in and then reattach the plastic connectors.

Firing it Up

After filling up the coolant tank we were ready for power on, about 2hours after we had begun building. We stepped back and pressed the power on button......only for nothing to happen. Well not nothing...a closer inspection revealed some blue LED lights to come on the motherboard. We disconnected the non-essential components and tried again with the same result. It was tremendously disappointing and an anti-climax after the build up. After an hour of searching through the Asus website we found a reference to turning off the LED switch and a check of the manual did confirm that it had instructed us to press this button at the beginning (I really should read the instructions carefully BEFORE installing stuff). Doing so allowed the system to power on with the fans buzzing in a blue light and the sight of some air bubbles moving towards the water block. However the system switched itself off after about 10 seconds. We quickly discovered through the BIOS that the CPU temperature was rising rapidly and the system was switching off after it peaked at 100 degrees. The water cooling was clearly not performing and closer inspection showed that there were massive gaps of air in the tubes that was preventing the coolant from reaching the water block. We switched off and topped up and switched off and topped up noticing the bubbles each time. Eventually we decided to drain the systems (my brother breaking the disappointment with a joke about bleeding pipes!). Through trial and error we managed to get the system on with a flow of water but the CPU temperature was around 65 degrees still too hot. Again we drained the system again and managed this time managed to get almost all the pipes filled with water before we screwed it to the pump. This time the CPU temperature never went beyond 40 degrees. However bleeding the pipes again allowed the temperature to go as low as 29degrees idle. Before we could congratulate ourselves however we realised we couldn't shut the side door with the size of the graphics card and the radiator on the door.

With the 8800 Ultra

With the 8800 GTX

At first we thought the solution may be to replace the fan on the graphics card with a new cooling solution that would take less space though the Ultra was a brand new graphics card and the custom cooling solutions used the same space as the existing fan. We could have drilled new holes in the case and moved the cooling system on the door up but again this wasn't particularly attractive. The solution was to order a new slightly less powerful GTX model and sell the Ultra model on Ebay.

My aim in building the QuadAqua was to construct a PC that was better than the Dell XPS for less money. I therefore went on the Dell website and customised an XPS to make it as similar to the QuadAqua to compare the price:

However the table is misleading in many ways. Dell's provides an excellent warranty service and comes with a lot of extra software. Whilst the motherboard did provide an anti-virus and other software it wasn't Vista compatible so was lost. Nevertheless the QuadAqua contains a more powerful processor and faster RAM for £400 cheaper than the Dell so the project was successful in that way. What is also worth noting is I wasted £450+ on a graphics card that didn't fit and a wireless module that wasn't compatible with Vista 64. Not only that but Dell released a new version of teh XPS with very similar stats to the QuadAqua shortly after I had finished building which cost around £4000.

Lessons learned:

• Shop around. The internet really does mean you can find parts literally hundreds of pounds cheaper.
• Always read the instructions before assembly. Sounds obvious but so tempting to just dive in.
• Use online support forums for advice. Chances are someone has tried something you are trying or has experienced the same problem. Special mention for the OCZ memory forum which gave clear advice on what settings to use. Top notch!
• Be patient. The water cooling took about three days to optimise and remove all the air pockets. This was probably due to the insufficient instructions but it was worth it when the processor never goes above 40degrees!
• Do your homework. Deciding on Vista 64bit for example meant a lot of checking whether certain components were compatible. By doing this before I bought them meant not having the disappointment of finding out after building and installing. I may also have been prevented from finding out the graphics card didn't fit!