Buying Components and Building Your Own PC
I’m typing this on my five year old Dell Dimension 4550, while the Wife is plotting a trip with the Mother-in-law on the laptop and the Kid is blazing away at Crysis on my homebuilt. Meanwhile an ancient HP with Athlon XP2000 purrs away in the basement as a backup, and an IBM Thinkpad lays next to the sofa for the times when two laptops need to be going. Everything is networked together wirelessly and except for the occasional hiccup with printers (usually the Epson all-in-one with dried out ink) everything functions smoothly. As the amount of technology in our home shows, computers are an integral part of our household.
I’ve learned quite a bit since I bought my first “real” pc in 1989 – a PC clone with 80386-20 processor, 640kb of ram and a 40 meg harddrive. However things didn’t take off for me until 1998 when I got A+ certified. Since then my career has progressed so that I no longer have to touch the insides of a computer, but I still keep up with the technology. While I didn’t build my first PC from the ground up until 4 years ago, I am convinced now more than ever that it is easy and fun to build your own PC.
Some caveats. First you can’t build your own laptop. You can buy 3rd Party memory upgrades, harddrives and batteries but for the most part laptops are built using technology particular to a model and vendor. Second you have to research everything – motherboards, memory, video cards, harddrives, and power supplies. If you need a PC in a hurry, don’t build your own. Finally, if asking for help isn’t your style, then neither is building your own PC. You will run into trouble, and you will be forced to rely upon the kindness of friends and strangers to help you out. But for every problem you run into someone else has too – and you’ll find the answers on numerous support forums at Toms Hardware, Motherboards.org, and other sites supporting the enthusiast community.
Why build your own? Unless you are trying to build the cheapest rig possible you are not going to save much money building your own. It takes time, and if you are one of those people who value your time in dollars then building your own will turn out to be more expensive. Dell and HP cater to such people, and there’s nothing wrong with purchasing one of their machines.
What you do get by building your own is a deeper understanding and appreciation for technology. You also get better components, and by buying carefully you can put together a PC having better performance. When you buy a Dell or an HP, every component that’s in your PC came from the lowest bidding subcontractor or vendor. In order to make the component as cheaply as possible, corners are inevitably cut.
The “Silicon Triangle”
The three most important components of your PC are: processor, motherboard and memory in that order. These three components limit each other. Processors must be installed into a particular type of motherboard. Motherboards only work with certain types of memory. Because these elements are the core of your PC don’t skimp on any of them. You might spend big bucks on the hottest new processor, but if you drop it into a cheap motherboard running slow RAM, you are wasting cash. Similarly you waste cash by buying a high-end motherboard then dropping the cheapest chip that will fit into it. This is akin to buying a sports car with a speedy transmission only to power it with a tiny four cylinder engine.
The Processor
The first component to consider is the type of processor that’s right for you. In general this will be the fastest one you can afford. The two main players are Intel and AMD, and both companies have strong fan bases that write disparagingly of the other. I have built systems with processors from both companies, preferring one over the other depending on their offerings at various times.
The firms will always have a cutting edge design that is their most expensive, and they will also have processors that are surprisingly cheap. What you must find is the “sweet spot” – the place where price and performance match. Tom’s Hardware often runs benchmarks on the processors on the market, so based on their reviews decide the processor that fits your budget. The processor you choose will limit your choices when it comes to motherboards.
The Motherboard
The motherboard is akin to the central nervous system of the PC. Buying the wrong motherboard will cripple your system and therefore the time spent researching the best motherboard that is right for your system is time well spent. The choice of motherboard can be confusing. It is perhaps the most frustrating of choices due to the differences between chipsets, models and versions. Here again Tom’s and Motherboards.org will prove indispensable. But don’t discount what you read at Newegg, one of the best places to buy PC components on the web. Buyers from Newegg often leave detailed and honest reviews of what they buy, so read carefully one can glean a lot of information from the reviews.
Memory
After you’ve chosen processor and motherboard, you will have to think about memory. Motherboards are quite picky when it comes to memory, so be sure to get the right type called for in the motherboard specifications. While memory modules may look on the surface to be exactly the same as every other memory module on the market, look closer and you’ll find significant differences. Some memory operates at faster timings and frequency, and that can make a big difference when using memory intensive operations like video compression/encoding or handling large files in Photoshop.
Other Components
Harddrives of the same capacity may look exactly the same, but here again some are faster than others. More importantly, some are better at holding their data than others with better track records of not crashing. When it comes to harddrives, advice hasn’t changed in 20 years: buy the biggest you can afford.
For those using large graphics, video or music files I would offer a slight variant on that advice: decide what you planned to spend on one drive, then divide it by three and buy three of the exact same drives at that price. The purpose? RAID-5. RAID-5 presents a nice balance between safety and expense.
A good video card is an absolute necessity these days. While gamers have driven demand for these cards, which are now as – if not more – expensive as PC processors, don’t think that you can get away with a cheap card or the graphics built into some motherboards. Using your PC to store and manipulate your digital photographs can be done much faster with a decent graphics card. My advice is to find the “sweet spot” of price and performance; Tom’s Hardware has a monthly scorecard that rates cards, and remains the best way to get up to speed with the Market’s current offerings and prices.
All these components take a lot of juice, and one place where PC enthusiasts often look to cut corners is on the purchase of a power supply; that is, until they build an unstable system and eventually discover that it’s due to power spikes or low voltages being fed to the components. To avoid this scenario, buy a decent power supply with more wattage than your components will need. Newegg’s customer reviews are a good place to research these.
Finally, disaster recovery isn’t just for large corporations anymore. Today the average PC user has thousands of family photos, MP3’s, videos and personal documents that will disappear if the harddrive dies. And harddrives die. The cost of data recovery is about as expensive as in-hospital medical care for the uninsured. The only way to avoid the pain and suffering is to develop a disaster recovery strategy and most importantly, follow it.
For those who are building a PC to store and manipulate large files, the RAID-5 is an absolute necessity. For everyone else I recommend the following:
1. Buy an external drive.
2. Buy the backup software that is the market leader.
3. Use the software to backup all media files (documents, spreadsheets, photos, videos, music files, etc) to the external drive at least once a week.
4. Burn backup DVDs every month.
5. Store your backup DVDs that are older than 6 months in a safe deposit box.
That’s all the advice I have for now. I hope that someone who stumbles across this on Al Gore’s Internet finds some use for it in the future. At the very least I’d like to think that I helped someone become a little bit more comfortable with the technology that surrounds us.
Leave a comment