After you’ve figured out what you intend to do with your PC and your price range you want to be in, you get to move on to the fun part, hardware! Choosing hardware, especially within a set price range can be, is one of the hardest part of the whole PC building process. One must pay careful attention to the product itself. Buying online is far cheaper and far better than people often imagine it to be. For instance a normal dial-up modem at your average Best Buy costs around $50, but on www.newegg.com or www.zipzoomfly.com it costs more like $12 with shipping. It’s also very important to use quality sites, talk to people on message boards, and read up on policies. Some sites have a bad wrap. They often look okay, but in practice they may not be as good as they appear. For all of the following examples I’ll be using www.newegg.com as a ‘base site’ I’ll be discussing some of the policies they use, such as their shipping policies. That’s another thing to watch out, if your not careful you may be overcharged for shipping, when that’s not really necessary. For instance the default type of shipping is set to ‘overnight’ or ‘next day’ when ‘fed ex saver shipping’ is normally free, and rarely takes four days to arrive. Other web sites have similar shipping plans and ‘overnight/next day’ often knock the price up.
Some general Things to look for before purchasing some products:
- When looking for hard drives, make sure they have a speed of 7,200 RPMs, and an 8 megabyte cache. That makes all the difference in speed.
- Make sure you have the Front Side Bus (FSB) on the processor and Motherboard matched up before you commit. The newer Intel Mother boards for instance often have variable FSB speeds.
- Check the specs on the motherboard, look for things like onboard Ethernet/LAN, onboard video and sound as well as the latest USB and firewire (IEEE) doesn’t hurt either. I have made the mistake of purchasing a motherboard without onboard video, I had to go back and buy a graphics card (sometimes referred to as video card) from a friend of mine. If you plan on buying a Graphics card, it’s not something to worry about but onboard sound, video, or Ethernet rarely cost very much more than a board without them. It’s good to have something to fall back on should a sound card or video card stop working.
- Check the case form factor, don’t buy a case with a micro ATX form factor and a motherboard with a standard ATX form factor. You’d either have to buy a different case or a different mother board.
- Another thing to note, working with Micro ATX is difficult, the cases are especially cramped and are difficult to work in.
- If you get confused over RAM, that’s okay. The RAM will probably say something like PC 2100, but no where on the motherboard specs does it say that. Check the motherboard specs for the ‘RAM’ Spec. It will list MHz speeds, what type of RAM and how much it can take. For instance in the Motherboard specs under ‘RAM:’ it will list ’2xDIMM for DDR 266/200 Max 2GB’ That means there are two slots available for Double Data Rate RAM, and it can hold up to 2 gigabytes. Take note of the ’266/200′ and refer to the section of site where they sell RAM (note: sometimes RAM is referred to as system memory), select a well known name, such as Kingston, and take a look. When you look at the RAM specs the spec that lists ‘speed’ should have two numbers a DDR number and a PCxxxx Number. For instance you interested in 128 Megabytes of RAM, you look under the specs of the Kingston PC2100 under ‘speed’ it says ‘DDR 266(PC2100)’. It’s a quick way to determine what each DDR speed means. Now you know that DDR266 is PC2100. I, myself, was confused over what the PCxxxx numbers meant until I discovered that little quick trick.
- Another thing to know about RAM is that different brands often won’t work together. A 512 MB stick of Kingston RAM often won’t work with a 512 MB stick of RAM made by Crucial. Try to get RAM sticks of the same brand.
- An important thing to know, is sometimes a stick of RAM wont work at all, for no reason. This is referred to as a ‘bad stick’; this is likely why that a lot of the RAM producers have extensive warranties on their products. That also shows confidence in one’s own product.
- When buying cases you may get a case that’s just hard to work with, sometimes you can find a case that’s super easy to work with. Antec is one such company that uses thumbscrews and latches on case doors for easy and quick removal. They also feature shelves on the inside of the case to make things that much more organized inside.
- Also pay attention to the power supply, especially if it comes with the case. If your going to make a system that isn’t going to be used for High-End Gaming, or have a lot of devices out of the norm you wouldn’t need anything more than a 250 or 300 watt power supply. Anything larger for a general-purpose computer is just overkill.
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