Featured Article: How to build a computer - Part selection
November 14, 2007
The most important step in building a computer is researching the different parts. This really isn't any different from any other project you may have. building a house you have to research what materials that are the best for your project. Though research you can get the best computer for your budget.
During you research process you will want to pick out some review sites and benchmark sites to do your research. You can search on google to find a few. Tomshardware.com is a really great resource for computer hardware. Check out this website during your research, I highly recommend this site.
The CPU or the Central processing unit which is also known as the processor it the brain of the computer. This is where you will want to start. There will be several different architectures that will have different pin outs. At the time of this writing there are single, double, and quadruple cores. A dual core processor is like two processors in one. This one processor can do 2 different things at one time. Great for multiprocessing, you can tell one core to do one thing and another do another thing.
The motherboard is the main circuit board of the computer. This is where all of the components are connected to. It is very important that all of your components are compatible with your motherboard. The sellers website will have all of the this information. Make sure your processor works in your motherboard as well as the rest of your components.
RAM also known as random access memory, holds everything that is while running your computer. Most system RAM now is dynamic where it looses everything stored on the memory after power is lost, like shutting down your computer. RAM is very fast so loading everything temporarily into RAM will make everything run faster. If you want a system that can last and perform well then you will want to get good, fast RAM and a lot of it. This is one area you don't want to skimp. At the time of this writing, 1 GB of RAM would be the minimum for a new computer.
If you are are gamer or graphics designer the graphics accelerator is one of the most important parts of the computer. For custom builders this usually comes in the form of an expansion card. This device is a separate processing unit that takes the load off of the Processor (CPU) for the graphics. For games that is excellent because the CPU doesn't have to deal with all of the intense graphics processing.
Depending on your need for graphics you will have many different price points, from $50-$2000. The cards at the top of this range are more for high end graphics design. High end gaming cards have been hitting around $500 but that number has been rising. Being a gamer, this is the highest priced part of my computer.
Hard drives will hold all of the data that you save on your computer. This is also the component that fails the most. Mainly because is is a moving part and is constantly moving while you car using you computer. If you decide to skip on your RAM then the Hard drive will be used even more increasing the possibility of a failure. This is know is virtual memory, the hard drive will store a portion of the RAM until needed.
I recommend doing a good amount of research on hard drives because you will want one that is reliable. Then you will want performance. A slow hard drive will really bog down your system. The hard drive is what your data gets loaded from.
There are other technologies to boost performance, like RAID. This stands for Redundant Array of Independent Disks. There are several different ways to use this but for performance you can run 2 hard drives as one drive. They will access the data twice as fast. This is known as RAID 0 or a striped set without parity, if you loose one drive you loose all data. For reliability there you can run 2 drives with the exact same data. one dies you still have a backup. This is known as RAID 1 or Mirrored drives. The most popular form of RAID that is used on servers is RAID 5 but has to have at least 3 drives. This will write the data so that if you loose one of the drives you will still have all of your data and won't have to sacrifice 50% of your space for the safety net like Mirrored drives. This technology is also known as striped set with distributed parity.
The Case is the piece that just holds all of your components and protects them. They make many different designs that appeal to different crowds. Some cases deal better with head and airflow. The rest is just convenience, expandability and cosmetic. Just look at the different models and see what you like. Aluminum seems to be good for heat distribution.
Last but not least is the PSU or Power Supply Unit. This is a commonly overlooked component. Some cases come with one but are usually not very high quality. Most people think is just supplies power and that power rating is enough for my computer. The truth is lower end supplies don't last as long and will loose power down the road. A 250W supply could be putting out 150W after a year. Also, make sure the you have a big enough power supply for your system. If your running a dual core CPU and 2 graphics card your going to need some generous power. I run 500W with a single core CPU and a single graphics card. May be a little bit of overkill but I plan I reusing this PSU.
That is just a little overview of what you should look out for and what some of these components do. Now it is your turn to research on what you want to build. Remember if you are just wanting to browse the web you don't have to spend much money on graphics cards and hard drive configurations. Just get a good solid platform with Motherboard, CPU, and RAM. In the next article I will tell you how a computer goes together.
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The Author: Thomas Milas
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