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

[Hugo1]

I find Scan computers to be very good. Their 'Today Only' page often has very good deals, and their service is very good indeed:

www.scan.co.uk/todayonly

They are also good for barebones systems, which are a piece of p!ss to build - go to 'Systems' on the website. I built an Asus Pundit a couple of years back, and while it is no powerhouse, it's cheap (£100 for the case, motherboard and PSU), small, pretty and quiet. The newer versions take dual core processors etc, so are no slouches, but are ultimately not suitable for gaming as the integrated graphics are not designed for such work. Fine for DVDs, though.

Cheers

Hugo

[david counter]

thanks for all the links,
I'm confused now there's so much choice


a couple of questions
is ATX the industry norm ie. are parts labled ATX compatable?
is a dual core processor worth getting or is it just for specialised functions like
downloading while you use the computer?
is it worthwhile getting an expensive psu, is it beneficial to the computer?

[petercom]

ATX is an industry norm.

Dual core processors are useful for programs that can make use of their advanced multi-threading processing functions. These may include high level processing programs such as Adobe Photoshop, AutoCAD and so forth, and advanced 3D gaming.

Whilst there may be a small improvement for ordinary programs, such as wordprocessing, there really isn't much to be gained as the main reason for watching the hour glass on computers these days is because of slow data delivery from hard drives, CDROM, Internet etc. So most of the time the processor is sitting around doing very little anyway, whether it is dual core or not.

Expensive PSUs usually deliver the power they are meant to. Cheap PSUs often fall short of the power they specify. One way round this is to over-rate the PSU. For example if you think you need a 300W, get a 500W cheapie and so on. Bear in mind that modern graphics cards eat power like nothing else in your computer. I would stick in 500W PSU no matter what you are fitting, just to be on the safe side.

[NickG]

is ATX the industry norm ie. are parts labled ATX compatable?

In my experence, yes. All you need to watch, is you get a motherboard and processor/memory that match. There are more alternatives than you might expect.

is a dual core processor worth getting or is it just for specialised functions like downloading while you use the computer?

Depends on what you are doing. Don't take any notice of the adverts though, computers have been more than capable of multitasking for at at least 36 years, mainly using a single processor. You don't need two cores to do two things, thats just hype. BTW, "downloading" will take next to no CPU time, unless you happen to have a fiberchannel interface, in which case the disk IO will be more important (ignore that last bit, it doesn't apply to real users).

is it worthwhile getting an expensive psu, is it beneficial to the computer

Not in the sense of a better petrol may make your engine run better. However getting a good power supply is important if you expect to add a lot of disk. I generally avoid the cheapest cases, but once you get above £25 ish (not at PC World prices) you should be fine. The more expensive cases give you things like see through bits, and at the top of the range you find cases aimed at server with loads of disk bays, or radical cooling for overclocking gaming machines.

All very IMHO of course.