O/T building up a PC

[david counter]

Hi
has anybody build a PC
I thinking about building one up,
I've never done it before, is it easy, are there any pitfalls or things to watch out for,

any help much appreciated

[BOONDI]

It is easy to build one to your required specs, but, there are some pitfalls.

1. Dont believe the case manufacturers specs for a "400" watt PSU in a £20 case. It will do 400 watt on peaks but dont expect it to live very long....

2. Buy a motherboard bundle from Dabs or novatech as it works out cheaper. I know with Novatech, the processor and memory comes pre installed, so no messing about with thermal paste and heatsinks etc.

3. Make sure the case you buy is the right size for the motherboard. ATX motherboards will not fit in older AT style cases, well they will, but the power switch/supply for AT will not work for the newer ATX case either.

4. Dont waste money on a Motherboard with graphics and sound built in if you intend to use a decent graphics/soundcard anyway.

5. On the subject of graphics cards.....The latest spec is called PCI express and runs at 16X AGP speeds, so a 16 X PCI express card is theoretically twice as fast as ann 8 x AGP card. Remember, a new £30 AGP/PCI express card with 256Mb ram will beat the pants off of a 64Mb high end card from two years ago.....

6. On the subject of soundcards, go for the highest sample rate/resolution card you can afford. If you want to just play games, a cheap 24/96 card can be had for about £20, inc. Soundblaster or Teratec. If you want it for pro audio, then 24/192 cards are coming down in price now. A word of caution here, some soundcards claim to be able to handle 24/192 audio in hardware, but they don't really. What they do is use a software down sampling routine to convert the audio stream to 24/96. This has a performance hit on the processor.

7. AMD processors work just as well as INTEL do at speeds upto 3.7 Ghz. Intel Dual core are about 5% faster than AMD dual cores, but they cost a lot more than 5% is worth.

8. Buy the biggest i.e..>300 Gb Serial ATA 2 hard disks you can afford. SATAII....Make sure your motherboard supports this standard, it's blindinglly fast.

Good luck.....

[david counter]

thanks Boondi
really helpful and good to get a couple of suppliers I was stuck with Maplin and PC World,

[NickG]

http://www.ebuyer.com/ is a good source of parts to build with as well, their postage isn't as nice as it was a few years ago, but they are considerably cheaper than PC World (then again, just about everywhere is).

[Shane]

Just a word of praise for Dabs.com. My Laptop ordered on Friday afternoon arrived 10 AM Saturday at £150 less than PC World.

They were recently bought out by BT. I don't know if that's good or bad!

[pre65]

Hi-i have found Dabbs to be a good place to purchase items from.

Philip