Brand quality: I’ve spent some time listening to the tech gurus, and some time experiencing things for myself. There’re a lot of computer hardware brands out there and sometimes it’s hard for the newbie to decide what brand to buy. Some brands are known as higher quality than others. I am going to point a few of the well-known high quality brands that are in circulation today. As with many things in the computer world, this information is my OPINION. Others might believe that these brands are not as good as others. This is simply meant as a supplement to your own research on the subject.
Hard Disk Drives (HDD): A very solid and stable hard drive brand Western Digital. It’s very easy to find and buy this brand of drive, just by reading the model designation. Also, Seagate makes extraordinarily quiet hard drives and it’s a great brand too.
Computer Cases (ATX): Antec is considered by some to be the best brand of case there is. Antec makes their cases easy to use, with shelves and slots to fit drives into the case neatly. And almost all of their cases are easy to get open, weather it be thumbscrews or a simple handle.
Motherboards: Whether I’m using an Athlon or an Intel processor, Asus is the way to go. They are stable and reliable. Asus motherboards come with a host of support software and have extraordinary BIOS that can be updated easily. Over clockers often find this brand very good for their over clocking endeavors.
CD-R/RW: The CD-R/RW drives are essential parts of the whole system. But this is probably the least sensitive part. Most of the brands on the market today are all good. Sony, Toshiba, Acer, Memorex, are all good.
Floppy Disk Drive (FDD): With Floppy Disk Drives approaching their redundancy any old’ brand will do. For instance Mitsumi is big in CD-R/RW as well as floppies, and I’ve had this old Mitsumi for six years and it still works like a charm. Sony and NEC are also big floppy producers.
Modems (V.92): Like the Floppy Disk Drive, modems become cheaper and cheaper, and more and more obsolete everyday. Encore and Linksys are good.
Graphics Cards: As I am sure most of us know graphics cards are very, very expensive – for the most part– it is very important to choose a reliable brand. The most popular brand you’d want to purchase would be Raedon or ATI.
Processors (CPUs): This is probably the more obvious section. Watching commercials on TV, or looking at ads in a magazines you will see that nowadays there are only a few different brands of processors. That would be Intel and AMD. Intel has the Celeron and P4. AMD has the Duron, the Celeron relative equivalent and Athlon, the P4 equivalent.
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