Complete idiot wants to build his own comp

[Susitna]

Yes, I am the idiot!

I have had it with my current computer and I don't want a store bought one loaded with things I don't need.

I also know near nothing about computers other than how to turn it on, type a letter or email and surf the net (my son has also gotten me addicted to a game called counter-strike).

So I was wondering where I should begin to learn about the best hardware I should buy and what I am looking at price wise. I am wanting to learn more about comps and figure this is the best way to learn.

I was also thinking about buying an "A+ cert" book to learn more about hardware and software so when things go bad I can be able to fix problems myself.

I would be extremely appretiative if anyone could point me in the right direction hardware wise and ideas on wether or not an A+ book would be worth my time.

Thanks!

[mystvearn]

Welcome to PcMech.
The best way to start is by reading all the guides posted as a link on the main page. There you will learn a lot what components you will need for a new build

[diver203_98]

Welcome to PCMech.

As for A+ books, here are two that I have:

The All - In - One A+ Certification Exam Guide Fifth Edition By: Michael Myers and Scott Jernigan

And: A+ FastPass By: David Groth, A+ Certified

If you live near a Barnes and Nobel, WaldonBooks you will find these there. Together they cost me $96.00 and also to me they are well worth the money. You will find alot of useful info in both, as well as a CD that also contains practice exams to help prepair you for the A+ exams, that is if you decide to take them.

[Karnevil9]

Welcome to PCMech. If you are looking to find out good hardware, just search through any post with "New Build" in the title. As you read more and more of those you will start to see which brands are the best for building PC's. Also check out the Building your own computer section of this site for a step by step instruction.

A very good book on computers is Building and Upgrading PC's by Scott Mueller. It also come with an instructional CD.

I am very new to this myself, only about to start building my fourth computer. I'm hooked on it now. I don't think I will ever go with a store bought again. Don't worry, It is not as hard as you might think.

[thorlo6]

welcome to PCMech susitna! I agree with karnevil9. Scott Mueller's book, "Building and Upgrading PC's" is one of the best. To get the latest version, get the 15th ed.. I got one for Christmas last year and it is absolutely awesome. However, karnevil9 is wrong about one thing. It doesn't come with a CD,
it comes with an instructional DVD. Yuo can get it @ Barnes & Nobel, Walden Books, BooksAMillion, or B. Dalton. Also, another very good resource is the PCMech CD. You will find it advertised on the home page here. It will help a lot. Once again, Welcome to PCMech. thorlo6

[Karnevil9]

Hey, at my age I might of said that it comes with an instructional 45

[raftero]

being an idot isn't a drawback, i have built a few.HA the main thing is to get a general idea of how to by reading the 'build your own pc tutural on this site ,you can google a few more. decide if you want AMD or intel. i would reccomend just a mid range simple setup for the first one and AMD is a little less expensive in this range something like a 2.5 barton AMD(RETAIL comes with heatsink)
processor, and asus or abit motherboard with nVIDA chipset like the asus A7N8X or abit NF7, the case an enlight(this isn't too important) but the power supply is (get a good 350W) a decent video card, and 512 memory. xp home os.i really prefer intel but they are a little mor expensive on this kind of build and the AMD is really a quality pc.as for the books, if you are like me you wont be able to understand what they are saying for a while till you get a little experience. just suggestions ,hope this helps.

[Cricket]

Build Your Own Computer

PC Mech: Build Your Own PC

Cricket

[ceh4702]

What I recommend you do is to put a list of parts together and then run it past some people at this forum. You don't have to start from scratch because there are plenty of threads like this. Look for New Build, check my list, or Newbie first build or something like that.

For Prices start at www.newegg.com and then look around a little.

There is another website you may want to look at that has some different computer building articles that are up to date:

http://www.anandtech.com/guides/showdoc.html?i=2034&p=9

Anandtech has these build guides for different types of PC's, like Low-End, Mid-Range, High-End, and Overclockers. They keep rewriting them. They also explain why they chose what they did. I recently built a computer with these items:

Case:
Antec SLK3700AMB, With 350 Watt Power supply

Power Supply:
Came with Case

Motherboard:
Asus A7N8X Retail Box

CPU:
AMD XP2800+ Retail with heatsink

CPU COOLER:
Came with CPU
(Recommend Speeze Falcon Rock)

Memory:
Crucial 512Meg One Stick

Video Card:
Sapphire Radeon 9000 (Kind of old)
(Recommend Radeon 9600 XT for games)
(If you got the $$ get a Radeon 9800 Pro)

Hard Drive:
Western Digital 80 gig 2Meg Cache

Floppy:
None (who needs it?)

CDROM:
Asus 52X

CDRW:
None (Recommend Lite-On Brand for DVD R/W )
(Recommend Lite-On Brand for CD R/W)
(MSI makes some good CDROM DVD PLAYER COMBOS)

Sound Card:
Integrated

Network Card:
Integrated

Speakers:
Cheap ones that sound nice (Pair of stereo speakers)
(I like speakers with the headphone jack so you can plug in your headphones without looking at the back of the
computer.)

Keyboard:
Used old one.

Mouse:
Microsoft 2 button optical mouse 2 years old.

Monitor:
MAG 19 Inch Monitor


You either want a Premium sound card and a nice set of speakers or you are cheap like me and integrated sound is OK.

[Hi Ho]

Welcome to PCMech. So, you want to build a PC to play some games and not break the bank. There are some choices to make such as whether you want an AMD sytem or an Intel system. The poerformance of each is comparable and it really doesn't matter what you choose. Second, are you going to use your current monitor or buy a new one. I have put together a sample system that isn't too expensive and would play games very well.

Cooler Master Centurion 2 Silver ATX Mid-Tower Case - $46 - This case is nice looking and very good quality. Just about any ATX case would do but quality in design and materials varys between brands. Some other good brands are Thermaltake, Antec, Enlight, and Radimax.

ASUS "P4P800-E Deluxe" i865PE Chipset Motherboard for Intel Socket 478 CPU -RETAIL - $128 - This is an excellent motherboard for a Pentium 4 processor. It uses an Intel chipset which naturally works well with an Intel processor. When using Intel I would advise against a motherboard with a VIA chipset. However, for AMD the best chipsets are VIA and Nvidia Nforce 2. Asus is the best brand of motherboard as far as I'm concerned. It's all I use although there are other good brands such as Abit and MSI.

SAPPHIRE ATI RADEON 9800 PRO Video Card, 128MB DDR, 256-bit, DVI/TV-Out, 8X AGP -BULK -OEM - $207 - The Radeon 9800 Pro is the best bang for the buck at the moment. Though both ATI and Nvidia have just released there newest, most powerfull cards, they cost $500 and aren't really worth it right now. I would stay away from any of the Nvidia "FX" series cards. They were a "bad batch" with slow performance especially on newer games. If you wanted to save a little money and still get a video card with good performance then you could go with a Radeon 9600 Pro or XT.

Enlight ATX 360W P4 Power Supply, Model "EN-8361934A1" -RETAIL - $32 - This Enlight power supply is more than enough for this system and it is an excellent quality, yet low priced unit. The power supply is probably the most often overlooked component of a PC. People see claims like "600 WATTS! Only $20!". Buying one of those generic time bombs is bad news. A good quality power supply is necassary for a long lasting, stable system. Cheap power supplies probably cause more trouble than anything. Not to mention, if it goes out it could take the entire system with it and even catch fire. Quality is more important than watts. A good quality 350 watt power supply is sufficient for most systems. Other good brands are Antec, Enermax, Fortron Source, and Sparkle.

Intel Pentium 4/ 2.8C GHz 800MHz FSB, 512K Cache, Hyper Threading Technology - OEM - $177 - The P4 2.8c is one of the more popular Intel processors around here. It has an 800mhz front side bus (FSB) which boosts performance compared to CPU's with 400MHZ FSB. If you are going Intel, the P4 2.8c is probably the best deal right now. For AMD there is the Athlon 3200+. One thing to keep in mind when shopping for CPU's is that an AMD Athlon XP 3200+ does not run at 3200mhz or 3.2ghz. In fact, it runs at 2.0ghz. However, that is not a problem. AMD processors are just as fast as Intel and it would take a while to explain why.

Corsair Value Select 184 Pin 512MB DDR PC-3200 - OEM - $92 - Corsair makes good quality memory and 512MB would be enough for your purpose. You don't want to go with cheap generic RAM because that can cause more trouble than it's worth. I learned that the hard way. For a CPU with an 800mhz FSB such as the one I linked to above, PC3200 RAM is just right. In fact, You should probably use at least PC3200 no matter what CPU you buy. It will leave room for upgrades later. Other good brands for RAM are Crucial, Geil, and Kingston.

Western Digital 120GB 7200RPM SATA Hard Drive, Model WD1200JD, OEM - $99.25 - Western Digital makes excellent, reliable hard drives. You want to look for drives with 8mb of cache instead of 2. It makes a noticable performance increase. Also, though there aren't many left, you want to stay away from 5400RPM (revolutions per minute) drives as they are old technology and slower. Stick with 7200 RPM and above. The drive I linked to is a SATA (SerialATA) drive which also increases performance greatly. SATA is faster than IDE and uses much smaller cables instead of those wide, gray, ribbon cables. Other good brands for hard drives are Maxtor and Seagate.

NEC 8X DVD+RW/-RW Drive, Model ND-2500A, OEM Bulk - $85 - This NEC DVD burner is a low priced and good quality drive. A DVD burner will burn CD's as well as DVD's. This burner has gotten good reviews and it is also one of the less expensive ones on the market. Other good brands of CD/DVD burners are Pioneer, Plextor, and Lite-On.

Microsoft Windows XP Home Edition with Service Pack SP1a - OEM - $91 - Windows XP Home Edition is all that you need unless you are doing advanced networking such as in large companies.

TOTAL WITHOUT MONITOR: $957.25 - All prices from www.newegg.com

Now for the monitor. If you are going to buy a new one you will have to decide between an LCD flat panel or a CRT. LCD monitors are much more expensive than CRT's but they are much light, take up much less space, and look nice. CRT's are cheaper but heavy and bulky. Also, LCD's aren't really good for playing games. They have problems with "ghosting". A couple recommendations for good 17in CRT's are SAMSUNG 753DF-T/T 17" DynaFlat CRT Monitor –RETAIL or ViewSonic E70F+SB 17" Perfect Flat CRT Monitor –RETAIL. I recommend buying a monitor locally to save on the high shipping costs from buying online. Other good brands for both CRT and LCD are KDS, NEC, and CTX.

If you want a good keyboard and mouse I recommend a Microsoft Multimedia Keyboard. The one I have is the best I have ever used. If you want a decent mouse included then the Multimedia Keyboard/Optical Wheel mouse combo is a good one. If you want a really good wireless mouse and don't mind spending a little extra then the Logitech MX700 is the best you can get. It is one of the few that has rechargable batteries and it is the best performing wireless mouse on the market.

Total with Samsung 17in monitor and MS Multimedia Keyboard/Optical Wheel Mouse Combo: $1,130.25

I hope this has helped.

[RayH]

I built my first computer by having a friend help me select the parts. I just followed the installation instructions in the motherboard manual. I booted Windows and followed the instructions!

[Susitna]

Thanks,

Alot of info to digest! Now that I am pointed in the right direction, I will post from time to time to let you know my progress.

Thanks again