Building Your Own PC part 1
Introduction
I have recently decided that I am going to build my own computer. I figured that if I were doing this, I might as well write a non-security related tutorial on some of the steps necessary to do this. I am going to cover what you need at a bare minimum to build a decent PC, and then I will go into adding extras like sound cards, etc. This is by no means the ONLY way to go about doing this, this is just some steps that I take when doing such a thing.
First Things First
You need to decide exactly how much money your going to spend on your PC. Lets say you don’t want to spend anything more then $1000, but you really want it to be less then $900. This is not including the monitor or any high end sound system (Speakers, subwoofer).
Now that you got the first step down, your going to want to decide what your computer is going to do. Is it going to be a huge gaming PC? Are you only going to use the PC to surf the internet, make word documents and play an occasional mind sweep game? Well, lets say we want our PC to do both. We want a decent gaming PC and we’re also going to surf the internet and create word documents.
Now, a lot of people don’t know where to begin when building a custom PC. A lot of people think to build the PC around the processor. They think the processor is the single most important thing in a PC and after they got that selected, then they choose everything else. In reality, you build a PC around the motherboard. You need to choose a motherboard with a good FSB (frontside bus) speed, make sure it’s compatable with speedy processors, etc. Lets take a look at www.tigerdirect.com and www.newegg.com. These are sites that sell computer hardware at reasonable prices. Beware: tiger direct has high shipping fees!!
Choosing a Motherboard and Processor
Lets try and find a cheap, decent, and reliable motherboard. First, do we want a Intel processor? Or an AMD? Lets go for an Intel motherboard. I found that the Abit IS7-V2 looks pretty nice. It can be found here:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...&Sku=A458-1108
Let’s look at the stats:
Quote:
Form Factor: ATX
Processor Interface: Socket 478
Processors Supported: Intel Pentium 4 Prescott and Northwood up to 3.06GHz
Additional Technologies: HyperThreading Technology
Channels: 6 Channels
Speed: 8X
LAN Type: 10/100Mbps
AGP Slots: 1
PCI Slots: 5
Notice that the processor interface is "socket 478". That means that only processors that use socket 478 can run with this motherboard. So now we have to find a socket 478 processor. I found Intel Pentium 4 2.8GHz / 1MB Cache / 800MHz FSB / Socket 478 / HyperThreading / Processor which our motherboard supports and can be found here:
http://www.tigerdirect.com/applicati...8912&CatId=260
You might also want the heatsink that it recomends on that page. It's only 15 bucks, and yes, you need a heatsink, your processor will fry in 60 seconds if you don't have one!
Good, we now have the 2 most important things to a computer. The hard part to the decision making is over, now we just gotta add stuff to it.
Adding RAM
This step is easy. The type of RAM out there today are DIMM's, RIMM's and SIMM's. SIMM's are outdated, they only support SDRAM. RIMM's are only Rambus, which turned out to be a major disapointment. Our motherboard supports DIMMS which is a good thing since most RAM in computers these days are DIMMS. We also have to look at the speed of the RAM. Unfortunatly I couldn't find any thing that states what speeds of RAM the motherboard can handle. So lets assume it handles PC2700 since most motherboards will support that. So lets look at www.newegg.com for some DDR ram. We want at least 512MB at PC2700. After some searching we found Crucial 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-2700 which can be found here:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...145-059&depa=1
Hard Drive and Disc Drive (ROM Drives, burners)
Well, we have a choice, we can choose a SATA hard drive, or we can choose a standard EIDE hard drive. There really isn't much noticable difference in speed between the two standards, so let's just go with an EIDE. Lets try 40 or 60GB. And once again with newegg, we find Hitachi 40GB 7200RPM IDE Hard Drive and can be found here:
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...145-068&depa=1
And we need some drive for removable storage. Lets just get a CD burner because that acts as both a ROM drive and a CD burner. I found this: Artec Black 52x32x52 CD-RW Drive
http://www.newegg.com/app/ViewProduc...120-145&depa=1
Also, notice how I didn't add a floppy drive. That is because floppy disks are becoming more and more obsolete. But I think you all knew that ;).
Graphics Card
And now, for another very important component. The graphics card! There are currently two types of graphics cards on the market. AGP or PCI. This means that the card either goes into the AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) slot or the PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) slot. Since the AGP slot is faster then the PCI slots, we want an AGP card. And we're in luck, our AGP slot on our motherboard runs at 8x which is currently the fastest of AGP's so we want a graphics card that can match that. Graphics cards also have alot of specs to look at. They are literally little mini computers. I suggest reading this:
http://graphics.tomshardware.com/graphic/20030714/
because picking a video card and knowing their specs is really a tutorial all on it's own. It's a very educational site.
See, I already had a graphics card in mind. The ATI radeon 9600 xt. Cheap and powerful. You can find it here:
http://www.pcconnection.com/ProductD...ourceID=k15506
I found that site using www.pricegrabber.com which is another good site for finding computer hardware at good prices. This site will actually list sites where you can get this card even cheaper then this, but I liked this site so I decided to use it :D.
Power Supply and Case
We're almost done, now we just need a power supply and case. Picking these things are really easy, infact we can usually get these things in a combo. I thought this was a pretty nice case, and it came with a 450w power supply:
http://www.newegg.com/app/viewproduc...200-003&DEPA=1
You usually won't need a more powerful power supply, that will usually suffice. Really the only reason I can think of off the top of my head for a more powerful power supply is if our graphics card demands it. But ours doesn't.
Well, that's it, that's all you need for a pretty good Computing/Gaming experience. We don't need things like a NIC or a sound card because those come onboard with out motherboard. If your a sound freak then you can add a sound card which would go in the PCI slot. But I won't get into that.
After buying all that, you would have spent only $637.42!! This doesn't include an OS, which will usually cost you $150-$200 for windows, but you might want to use linux or bsd! Even if you buy the OS you still won't go over the $900 dollar price limit.
Stay tuned for my next tutorial Building Your Own PC part 2 where I talk about how to actually assemble all the parts together. It isn't hard at all, I just feel that I should go over it. I am hoping to be done with that tutorial within the next 20-30 days.
Hope you all enjoyed and learned a little from it.
