try a great online tutorial on Hardware Central
Edited by soxrok, 08 May 2005 - 03:47 PM.
System Building Information
Started by
Hemal
, Oct 05 2004 03:24 PM
#1
Posted 05 October 2004 - 03:24 PM
Hemal
-
- Technician
-
- 1,470 posts
Founding Fart
try a great online tutorial on Hardware Central
#2
Posted 24 December 2004 - 08:52 PM
Unoxis2002
-
- Member
-
- 24 posts
Member
Ever wanted to build your own computer...maybe get an idea on the parts to buy or just see how to put it together
try a great online tutorial on Yahoo Tech
I'm a newbie and I would love more info on this. Unfortunately I couldn't view the article through the link provided. Do you have a copy of what the article said? Or possibly a different link? You can PM or email it to me.
Thanks
#3
Posted 18 June 2005 - 03:59 AM
in_texas_dallas
-
- Member
-
- 77 posts
Member
That is an old tutorial. By at least 5 years. It is somewhat complete, but cannot possibly cover all that is important today. I am searching for a newer tutorial, but al that I have found are old like that one as well.
You can take that as a guideline. But somethings just aren't up to date. example pci video card instead of AGP video cards. crucial
There's that and a whole horde of other technologies that weren't apparent even a couple of years ago.
To give a quicker and actually better description/summary of a good computer tutorial, here as follows
:
Contrary to what was said in the tutorial, small shops are the MOST (did I say most, cuz I meant MOST) expensive places u could possibly goto to buy computer parts. Only place I can think of where I could goto to by a computer and spend thousands$$$$ and not get anything worth while in a computer. While not all are like this, the world is just not competively cut out for mom and pop sort of computer places, whether selling computer parts or conmputers themselves. Tooo much overhead. Overhead is extremely important. That's why Gateway is not doing good and closing shops like America shutdown Saddam's palaces.
Why Dell only sells online or over the phone. You can't even buy a computer in poerson if u went to their corporate headquarters in Round Rock TX.
The reason why Hp and Compaq still sell in mass stores, is first they merged, and every Tom [bleep] and harry store from Wallly World to K-mart to whatever, BestBuy sells their computers to people basically ignorant of tech term to differentiate a good computer from a mediocre or 20 year old one. (exaggerating it a little bit) The kind of people who buy Compaq's and HP's are the reason why consoles game systems are so popular. If all the gamers had to even so much as download an updated driver for their graphics card or whatever, let alone find / build a system fast enough to play whatever said game, they would never play the game. So package a system that is completely simple to plugin and play and requires no thinking skills whatsoever to use. Otherwise computers would reign completely supreme over console games because of the resourcesfullness of computers(which can do everything in the world) vs. consoles (who can do nothing but play games and occasionally play music; but not at the same time. drrrn xbox) Since I upgraded my comptuer i haven't even touched my XBOX
Anyway, enough ranting about completely irrelevant subjects.. Here are the basic guidelines of building a computer updated a ltitle bit to the technology of the time.
You have your basic parts that are absolutely required:
1. Case (helps to hold everything to gether; also should have
good case fans to keep your computer cool )
Sometimes comes bundled with power supply
2. Power supply. For newer computers make sure your power supply
is rated for 450 Volts or above. For new mobo/cpu/video cards
this power can be a necessity. Otherwise your computer will never
get enough power and never start.
3. Motherboard. This is like the framework of a car, from the body, to the
wheels, to the transmission, water pump, axles... etc etc etc.
A.) There are three types of motherboards
1. Pentium compatible motherboards
2. Celeron (which can usually go on pentium motherboards) sometimes
3. Athlon compatible motherboards
I will get into the different CPU's in a moment, for now I will give u
some guidelines in choosing a motherboard and which style is best.
The choice of your motherboard is quite important for more than one
reason.
First of all, it determines what kind of CPU you can put in
Secondly, if you don't get a quality motherboard, it will just short-circuit
or basically just cease to function (usu because of cheap transistors)
Thirdly, the hardware built into the motherboard can save u money by not
requiring certain devices to be installed. All motherboards come with a
video card of some kind built in, so that if u don't have a video card,
you can start your computer and have what's called a picture
(you know, where you can see what's going on in your computer,
where you work, click on , etc etc etc... you can view many things on
your monitor as well. Such as email.)
Most have a sound card as well. A lot of mobo's now have PCI Lan card
(basically just a device that you can connect the telephone like cable
from broadband internet) There can be a lot of features built in that could
just save somebody a lot of money if they didn't necessarily need the
performance that separate devices afford.. A word of caution, if you are
trying to run games and memory/cpu/video/audio intensive applications,
mobo devices like sounds cards, video cards, etc will slow your computer.
Because instead of their being a separate card that handled all the thinking
for these devices, the cpu has to do the thinking. So of course this takes
away from it's power and speed. You can notice a huge difference by
replacing just the sound card and video card with separate cards and not
using the onbard graphics/sound.
A few good reliable companies for motherboards that I have used are:
Asus (probably some of the most renowned mobo's for penitum
celeron or athlon. Sometimes more expensive
but you can probably find just as cheap as ABIT if
you look .. Not hard. low to really high end price
ABIT ( reliable mobo's; low-end cost; appeals for reliability
functionality; quiality and low price; Very low return
(dead) rate for mobo's; which is good ofcourse
4. CPU's - Now onto cpu's.
This is analagous to the engine of a car. It does all the driving and
controls everything (CPU - central processing unit - simple enough)
When u buy parts for a computer, always buy your mobo and other
computer parts around your cpu. Not the other way around.
So, let's say you decide to purchase a Pentium 4, then you would find
a motherboard that not only was made for pentium's, but was the right
socket to fit, which isn't usually a problem with Pentium's. But there
are several sockets of CPU's, and in order to install it on the mobo, it
must the be the same socket as themotherobards "CPU receiiving slot"
As far as CPU's, here are the different kinds of CPUs and general
information
1. Pentiums - long called the chamption and most used
cpu's in the world in the home and especially in the
commercial/etc world.
2. Intel Celeron (maid
3. Athlon. Longtime the underdog, now sort of champions, at least for
the time being. Athlons always run better than their MHz
rather their GHz rating. So if you get an ATHLON 1500,
it may only run 1.3 GHz, but it is equivalent to a faster
Pentium cpu in several benchmarks.
NOTES: I have actually used all of these. I had an Intel Celeron as my
first computer running at 435MHz. I really liked how this ran
Very realiable. And very fast. In all the computers I have had
I always replaced onboard extras with expansion cards, (ie.
video card, sound card, modem, etc). This helps a lot. On my
celeron computer I had a lot of quality fast (at that time) parts
and I could play a lot of very modern computer games that
were rated minimum for compters twice the size as mine. And
not notice any system problems or slow downs. I was very
impressed with this configuration. it served me well for 3 years
after i got this computer.
Another computer I had was a Pentium II, 350 MHz, and
granted this was an older computer, I never liked it's
performance. It didn't go beyond the call of duty like what
I had noticed in my celeron. There were a few lesser
quality add-ons (e.g. Western Digital Hard Disk drive as
opposed to the Seage Quantum Fireball HDD that was one my
Celeron computer). But I also had the onboard hardware
supplanted with a separate video card and sound card.
I can't really blame the computer for being slow. But at the
same time, it never once surprised me. This could be chalked
up to being an older machine with less than great quality
parts (mobo was mediocre; fairly common though; plenty of
memory though) Could've have just been the fact that i was
running Windows XP Pro. But I did the same on my celeron
and actually noticed the computer ran faster (pretty much
same effect on Pentium as well )
My latest computer, not really the latest and greatest computer
parts, but quality and fast nonetheless. I have an ABIT VA-20
which is a step up from the more sold/popular VA-10, has
some nice features from some common cheap/low-end
MOBO's you might find and several upgrades from its
sibling.I put a AMD Sempron 2500 which is just an ATHLON
1500. I put 512KB of DDR Ram; I have two hard disc drives.
Which apparently now are completely inseparable pending a
complete backup of my large hdd and format and reinstall
of windows (grrrrrrr). An ATI Radeon 7000 64MB (fairly old)
and a SIIG sound card(very NOT name brand)
I have Windows XP Pro installed on this computer as well
and have never been disappointed at the speed and
reliability and stability. My computer benchmarks better than
the standard benchmarks for a faster Pentium with a more
powerful graphics card on the Pentium. I can play any 3d
game with no hitches. Basically I am plumb happy with my
new computer. And am a happy AMD fan(athlon btw; their
premier cpu model) For sinking only $225 in the cpu, memory,
and motherboard total, I got a real powerhouse capable
of running any app game I have put on here yet
5. Memory. RAM memory that is. This is where the computer stores information
while the system is writing. And in today's apps, usually the more the
better. Sometimes too much just plan and sim ple doesn't do you any
good though. I can't really see somebody using more than 1GB
(512MB really though). Just about all ram today is DDR which just
means double draw rate, it can send and receive data twice as fast.
The BUS SPEED, which is how fast the memory and CPU and
transfer data, shoudl be in line with each other. Namely, if you get
RAM that is rated for 400MHz speed it's actualy speed is 200MHz, but
since it is double draw, it functions as 400MHz, and your BUS speed
on your CPU (one way or another with penitum/athlon) is also
Double draw, namely it functions at twice it's actualy bus speed.
The point of this is, if your memory and your cpu have the same
bus speed, transfer of data is a lot more smooth, neither cpu nor
memory have to wait on each other, but operate completely in tune
with each other. It is always best to get RAM that is rated at the same
speed as your bus speed (effective). Besides buying quality memory,
Nothing more to this
6. Hard disc drive. There are abundant tyupes of hard disc drives. Thie are the
standard hard disc drives (IDE / EIDE / etc), their are hard disc drives that
have to be connected to a card(thru the PCI slot), their are harddrives that
connect to a SCSI card(which helps to take some load off the CPU once again),
There are FireWire, there are also External USB hdd as well. It's really hard
for me to pinpoint exactl what kind of hdd is best for you. Usu big one is
important if you are into games or music. However that is such a small part
of how HDD's work .. And the benefits of different kinds. I don't have
experience in anything but standard HDD's and one SCSI HDD drive once
Good standard hard disc drive should be at least 7200 RPM, less than 5 NS
seek time. Plus large transfer rate. Things other than this plz somebody help
by posting info about those in this post list.
Everything else is non-essential. This is Part 1,
Part 2 is coming soon. I am too tired to write any more..
Please post here if you agree or have any comments helpful to this post or if you just wnat Part 2 (which btw is about all the cool things inside a computer and some good pointers on keeping your computer clutter(insert random expletive) free and making the most out of whatever computer you have. Whether to get a game playing just that much quicker or whatever. I seem to be a master at tweaking the most out of computers. And getting them running like machines far superior to what they actually are.
mainboard is
Which will lead
You can take that as a guideline. But somethings just aren't up to date. example pci video card instead of AGP video cards. crucial
There's that and a whole horde of other technologies that weren't apparent even a couple of years ago.
To give a quicker and actually better description/summary of a good computer tutorial, here as follows
:
Contrary to what was said in the tutorial, small shops are the MOST (did I say most, cuz I meant MOST) expensive places u could possibly goto to buy computer parts. Only place I can think of where I could goto to by a computer and spend thousands$$$$ and not get anything worth while in a computer. While not all are like this, the world is just not competively cut out for mom and pop sort of computer places, whether selling computer parts or conmputers themselves. Tooo much overhead. Overhead is extremely important. That's why Gateway is not doing good and closing shops like America shutdown Saddam's palaces.
Why Dell only sells online or over the phone. You can't even buy a computer in poerson if u went to their corporate headquarters in Round Rock TX.
The reason why Hp and Compaq still sell in mass stores, is first they merged, and every Tom [bleep] and harry store from Wallly World to K-mart to whatever, BestBuy sells their computers to people basically ignorant of tech term to differentiate a good computer from a mediocre or 20 year old one. (exaggerating it a little bit) The kind of people who buy Compaq's and HP's are the reason why consoles game systems are so popular. If all the gamers had to even so much as download an updated driver for their graphics card or whatever, let alone find / build a system fast enough to play whatever said game, they would never play the game. So package a system that is completely simple to plugin and play and requires no thinking skills whatsoever to use. Otherwise computers would reign completely supreme over console games because of the resourcesfullness of computers(which can do everything in the world) vs. consoles (who can do nothing but play games and occasionally play music; but not at the same time. drrrn xbox) Since I upgraded my comptuer i haven't even touched my XBOX
Anyway, enough ranting about completely irrelevant subjects.. Here are the basic guidelines of building a computer updated a ltitle bit to the technology of the time.
You have your basic parts that are absolutely required:
1. Case (helps to hold everything to gether; also should have
good case fans to keep your computer cool )
Sometimes comes bundled with power supply
2. Power supply. For newer computers make sure your power supply
is rated for 450 Volts or above. For new mobo/cpu/video cards
this power can be a necessity. Otherwise your computer will never
get enough power and never start.
3. Motherboard. This is like the framework of a car, from the body, to the
wheels, to the transmission, water pump, axles... etc etc etc.
A.) There are three types of motherboards
1. Pentium compatible motherboards
2. Celeron (which can usually go on pentium motherboards) sometimes
3. Athlon compatible motherboards
I will get into the different CPU's in a moment, for now I will give u
some guidelines in choosing a motherboard and which style is best.
The choice of your motherboard is quite important for more than one
reason.
First of all, it determines what kind of CPU you can put in
Secondly, if you don't get a quality motherboard, it will just short-circuit
or basically just cease to function (usu because of cheap transistors)
Thirdly, the hardware built into the motherboard can save u money by not
requiring certain devices to be installed. All motherboards come with a
video card of some kind built in, so that if u don't have a video card,
you can start your computer and have what's called a picture
(you know, where you can see what's going on in your computer,
where you work, click on , etc etc etc... you can view many things on
your monitor as well. Such as email.)
Most have a sound card as well. A lot of mobo's now have PCI Lan card
(basically just a device that you can connect the telephone like cable
from broadband internet) There can be a lot of features built in that could
just save somebody a lot of money if they didn't necessarily need the
performance that separate devices afford.. A word of caution, if you are
trying to run games and memory/cpu/video/audio intensive applications,
mobo devices like sounds cards, video cards, etc will slow your computer.
Because instead of their being a separate card that handled all the thinking
for these devices, the cpu has to do the thinking. So of course this takes
away from it's power and speed. You can notice a huge difference by
replacing just the sound card and video card with separate cards and not
using the onbard graphics/sound.
A few good reliable companies for motherboards that I have used are:
Asus (probably some of the most renowned mobo's for penitum
celeron or athlon. Sometimes more expensive
but you can probably find just as cheap as ABIT if
you look .. Not hard. low to really high end price
ABIT ( reliable mobo's; low-end cost; appeals for reliability
functionality; quiality and low price; Very low return
(dead) rate for mobo's; which is good ofcourse
4. CPU's - Now onto cpu's.
This is analagous to the engine of a car. It does all the driving and
controls everything (CPU - central processing unit - simple enough)
When u buy parts for a computer, always buy your mobo and other
computer parts around your cpu. Not the other way around.
So, let's say you decide to purchase a Pentium 4, then you would find
a motherboard that not only was made for pentium's, but was the right
socket to fit, which isn't usually a problem with Pentium's. But there
are several sockets of CPU's, and in order to install it on the mobo, it
must the be the same socket as themotherobards "CPU receiiving slot"
As far as CPU's, here are the different kinds of CPUs and general
information
1. Pentiums - long called the chamption and most used
cpu's in the world in the home and especially in the
commercial/etc world.
2. Intel Celeron (maid
3. Athlon. Longtime the underdog, now sort of champions, at least for
the time being. Athlons always run better than their MHz
rather their GHz rating. So if you get an ATHLON 1500,
it may only run 1.3 GHz, but it is equivalent to a faster
Pentium cpu in several benchmarks.
NOTES: I have actually used all of these. I had an Intel Celeron as my
first computer running at 435MHz. I really liked how this ran
Very realiable. And very fast. In all the computers I have had
I always replaced onboard extras with expansion cards, (ie.
video card, sound card, modem, etc). This helps a lot. On my
celeron computer I had a lot of quality fast (at that time) parts
and I could play a lot of very modern computer games that
were rated minimum for compters twice the size as mine. And
not notice any system problems or slow downs. I was very
impressed with this configuration. it served me well for 3 years
after i got this computer.
Another computer I had was a Pentium II, 350 MHz, and
granted this was an older computer, I never liked it's
performance. It didn't go beyond the call of duty like what
I had noticed in my celeron. There were a few lesser
quality add-ons (e.g. Western Digital Hard Disk drive as
opposed to the Seage Quantum Fireball HDD that was one my
Celeron computer). But I also had the onboard hardware
supplanted with a separate video card and sound card.
I can't really blame the computer for being slow. But at the
same time, it never once surprised me. This could be chalked
up to being an older machine with less than great quality
parts (mobo was mediocre; fairly common though; plenty of
memory though) Could've have just been the fact that i was
running Windows XP Pro. But I did the same on my celeron
and actually noticed the computer ran faster (pretty much
same effect on Pentium as well )
My latest computer, not really the latest and greatest computer
parts, but quality and fast nonetheless. I have an ABIT VA-20
which is a step up from the more sold/popular VA-10, has
some nice features from some common cheap/low-end
MOBO's you might find and several upgrades from its
sibling.I put a AMD Sempron 2500 which is just an ATHLON
1500. I put 512KB of DDR Ram; I have two hard disc drives.
Which apparently now are completely inseparable pending a
complete backup of my large hdd and format and reinstall
of windows (grrrrrrr). An ATI Radeon 7000 64MB (fairly old)
and a SIIG sound card(very NOT name brand)
I have Windows XP Pro installed on this computer as well
and have never been disappointed at the speed and
reliability and stability. My computer benchmarks better than
the standard benchmarks for a faster Pentium with a more
powerful graphics card on the Pentium. I can play any 3d
game with no hitches. Basically I am plumb happy with my
new computer. And am a happy AMD fan(athlon btw; their
premier cpu model) For sinking only $225 in the cpu, memory,
and motherboard total, I got a real powerhouse capable
of running any app game I have put on here yet
5. Memory. RAM memory that is. This is where the computer stores information
while the system is writing. And in today's apps, usually the more the
better. Sometimes too much just plan and sim ple doesn't do you any
good though. I can't really see somebody using more than 1GB
(512MB really though). Just about all ram today is DDR which just
means double draw rate, it can send and receive data twice as fast.
The BUS SPEED, which is how fast the memory and CPU and
transfer data, shoudl be in line with each other. Namely, if you get
RAM that is rated for 400MHz speed it's actualy speed is 200MHz, but
since it is double draw, it functions as 400MHz, and your BUS speed
on your CPU (one way or another with penitum/athlon) is also
Double draw, namely it functions at twice it's actualy bus speed.
The point of this is, if your memory and your cpu have the same
bus speed, transfer of data is a lot more smooth, neither cpu nor
memory have to wait on each other, but operate completely in tune
with each other. It is always best to get RAM that is rated at the same
speed as your bus speed (effective). Besides buying quality memory,
Nothing more to this
6. Hard disc drive. There are abundant tyupes of hard disc drives. Thie are the
standard hard disc drives (IDE / EIDE / etc), their are hard disc drives that
have to be connected to a card(thru the PCI slot), their are harddrives that
connect to a SCSI card(which helps to take some load off the CPU once again),
There are FireWire, there are also External USB hdd as well. It's really hard
for me to pinpoint exactl what kind of hdd is best for you. Usu big one is
important if you are into games or music. However that is such a small part
of how HDD's work .. And the benefits of different kinds. I don't have
experience in anything but standard HDD's and one SCSI HDD drive once
Good standard hard disc drive should be at least 7200 RPM, less than 5 NS
seek time. Plus large transfer rate. Things other than this plz somebody help
by posting info about those in this post list.
Everything else is non-essential. This is Part 1,
Part 2 is coming soon. I am too tired to write any more..
Please post here if you agree or have any comments helpful to this post or if you just wnat Part 2 (which btw is about all the cool things inside a computer and some good pointers on keeping your computer clutter(insert random expletive) free and making the most out of whatever computer you have. Whether to get a game playing just that much quicker or whatever. I seem to be a master at tweaking the most out of computers. And getting them running like machines far superior to what they actually are.
mainboard is
Which will lead
#4
Posted 21 June 2005 - 01:05 PM
Hemal
- Topic Starter
-
- Technician
-
- 1,470 posts
Founding Fart
Where did you find this article- please source it if you did 
#6
Posted 26 June 2005 - 04:03 AM
mm_akash
-
- Member
-
- 94 posts
Member
Dear soxrok
Thanks a lot my dear.
I got my solution by using your link.
Thanks again..
Akash
Thanks a lot my dear.
I got my solution by using your link.
Thanks again..
Akash
#7
Posted 26 June 2005 - 11:02 PM
Mr. dudlecoff
-
- Member
-
- 1 posts
New Member
[FONT=Geneva]
Ever wanted to build your own computer...maybe get an idea on the parts to buy or just see how to put it together
try a great online tutorial on Hardware Central
#8
Posted 27 June 2005 - 08:29 AM
warriorscot
-
- Retired Staff
-
- 8,889 posts
Member 5k
Yeah that is a good guide compared to alot of the ones out there, the only other one ive seen with such good detail was one on building a pc out of lego bricks.
#9
Posted 01 August 2005 - 08:59 PM
Its not broke
-
- Member
-
- 3 posts
New Member
I don't think I'd want a 450 volt P/S.
#10
Posted 03 August 2005 - 03:45 PM
OneCool
-
- Banned
-
- 466 posts
banned
I don't think I'd want a 450 volt P/S.
agreed
I think that needs to be changed
edit :
2. Power supply. For newer computers make sure your power supply
is rated for 450 Volts or above. For new mobo/cpu/video cards
Edited by OneCool, 03 August 2005 - 03:46 PM.
#11
Posted 03 August 2005 - 09:49 PM
in_texas_dallas
-
- Member
-
- 77 posts
Member
Umm, some CPU's need a 450W power supply.
If you don't need that, don't get it..
Here is a Computer Building Guide I have been creating.. It is a work in progress still, but will pretty much cover everything to do with building a computer.
http://www.geekstogo...owentry&eid=102
It is a lot better than the one I posted in here. Since I posted in here, I have been working on this.. Enjoy and COMMENTS WELCOME
If you don't need that, don't get it..
Here is a Computer Building Guide I have been creating.. It is a work in progress still, but will pretty much cover everything to do with building a computer.
http://www.geekstogo...owentry&eid=102
It is a lot better than the one I posted in here. Since I posted in here, I have been working on this.. Enjoy and COMMENTS WELCOME
Edited by in_texas_dallas, 03 August 2005 - 09:51 PM.
#13
Posted 06 August 2005 - 03:25 PM
OneCool
-
- Banned
-
- 466 posts
banned
Cool...lets plug this rascal in!!!!!!
#14
Posted 09 August 2005 - 02:32 PM
fastandfuzzy
-
- Member
-
- 18 posts
Member
Umm, some CPU's need a 450W power supply.
If you don't need that, don't get it..
Here is a Computer Building Guide I have been creating.. It is a work in progress still, but will pretty much cover everything to do with building a computer.
http://www.geekstogo...owentry&eid=102
It is a lot better than the one I posted in here. Since I posted in here, I have been working on this.. Enjoy and COMMENTS WELCOME
That was a long read, but it has a lot of good information for beginners.
#15
Posted 09 August 2005 - 04:07 PM
Its not broke
-
- Member
-
- 3 posts
New Member
in regards to 450 V. P/S assuming 3.3 V as base, a voltage of 450 V would give us a CPU clock of 27272.2727M .(27.3 M. H.) Hertz instead of a mere 200 M. H. Lots of Smoke
Similar Topics
0 user(s) are reading this topic
0 members, 0 guests, 0 anonymous users
As Featured On:
Sign In
Create Account
