Assemble Your PC (Select Your Hardware)

Assemble Your PC

To build your PC from scratch you will need to purchase all the necessary hardware. The first thing you must consider before you start to shop around for your PC hardware is the specification of the hardware. You should think about what you are going to use your PC for, before buying fancy expensive hardware. Otherwise you will end up buying hardware which offers advance features that may not be necessary for your needs and end up wasting your money. For example, you may be using your PC for word-processing, spreadsheet and browsing the web. You would not gain much benefit by purchasing an advance 3D graphics card or having a top of the range processor. A simple graphics card and a mid-range processor will satisfy your needs.

Satellite Card

Satellite Card

Digital satellite cards (DVB-S) are designed to allow you to watch Satellite TV or get high speed broardband via Satellite. You can connect the card to a satellite dish using the standard F-socket just like a deicated satellite box. Once installed and the dish is alligned to your chosen satellite like Astra, Hotbird etc you can use a DVB software to watch your favaourate satellite channels on you PC.

There a quite a few manufacturers of satellite cards. Some of the popular brands are Hauppage, Technisat and Technotrend.

TV Tuner Card

TV Tuner Card

A TV card gives you the option of watching TV on your monitor. TV cards are quite useful as it offers more than just watching TV. You can connect your VCR to the TV card so that you can watch video's too. One of the useful things about having a TV card is that you can use it for capturing Video. Using the necessary software you can capture video in various format such AVI or MPEG files. One of the popular TV card is Haupauge WinTV PCI as shown below.

CD / DVD Writer

CD / DVD Writer

CD Writer / DVD Writer is a very good option for a backup device. It allows you to backup the contents of your HDD onto a CD-R, CD-RW & DVD-R disc. It also allows you to backup your existing application CD's. As blank CD's are very cheap, it is an affordable backup device.

Like all other PC hardware a CD/DVD Writer comes in various speed. A 32 speed drive can write a full 650MB CD in around 4 mins and a 52 speed drive can write it in around 3 mins and so on. CD-ReWritable's are available in IDE and SCSI interface. You will require a SCSI card if choose to get a SCSI model.

Monitor / LCD Display

Monitor / LCD Display

It is important that you get a quality monitor that is comfortable to view. Monitors come is various sizes and refresh rate. 17" monitor are becoming entry standard monitor. 15" monitors are OK if you are running it at a low resolution and not using it for long hours. As monitor prices have dropped in the recent months it is recommended that you consider a 17" or 19" monitor. You can run these monitors at higher resolution and refresh rate, which means they are more comfortable to view and you can work with them for long hours. Monitors are measured diagonally. If a monitor is 17" it does not mean that it is the actual viewable area. Some 17" comes with a viewable area of 16" which is good where as others can be as low as 15.6". Monitors consist of thousands of pixels (the tiny dots you see on the screen). Smaller pixels produces high definition sharp display. Settle for something which is at least 0.25 mm dot pitch. If you purchase a 17" monitor make sure it can handle refresh rate of at least 85 Hz at 1024 * 768 resolution. A 19" monitor should handle at least 1280 * 1024 at 85 Hz.

Speakers

Speakers

A quality sound card would not be much of a benefit without a decent pair of PC speakers. Most PC speakers are magnetically shielded so that it does not interfere with your monitor, but there are some budget speakers out there that are not shielded, so check before you buy. If you are just going to use the speakers for basic sound and music and are not one of those people who play CDs on a PC then you can get away with a budget PC speaker. However, if you play games and CD's then you should consider a speaker system with a sub-woofer. These would produce high quality sound suitable for most tasks

Hard Disk Drive

Hard Disk Drive

Hard disk drive stores all your data including operating system, applications, user files and documents. It is a non-volatile storage, which means the contents of the HDD is not lost if the PC is switched off.

There are three different types of HDD, which are IDE/ATA, SCSI, SATA (Serial ATA). Majority of home PCs are equipped with IDE Hard drives. SCSI hard drives are mostly included in servers and powerful workstations as they offer better data transfer rate which results in better performance than the IDE drives. However modern SATA drives are not far behind SCSI drives in terms of performance with the introduction of the newer SATA 300 drives.

Floppy Disk Drive

Floppy Disk Drive

You need a FDD to access floppy disks. Although floppy disks are limited in capacity, only 1.44 mb, every old PC is almost guaranteed to have a FDD. Floppy disk drives and now coming the end of their life span as some current PCs are built without a floppy drive. This is due to the popularity of USB Flash drives. Floppy disk is ideal for storing small files and documents, creating boot disks, and transferring small files. It really does not matter which make of FDD you purchase as they are cheap and performs the same task.

Modem

Modem

Modem stands for Modulator Demodulator. It converts digital signals to analogue so that it can travel via your telephone line, and vice-versa. A modem is an essential item if you are intending to connect your PC to the internet.

There are many kinds modems out there based on the Rockwell/Connexant v.90/v.92 chipset. There are two kinds of modem, software and hardware. Software modems uses your CPU resources to perform its tasks and is run on a virtual COM port. Hardware modem performs its tasks using the onboard chipset and therefore does not take up the CPU resources. It also runs on a physical COM i.e. communication port 3. Software modems, which are also known as winmodem can only run on a windows operating system,

Sound Card

Sound Card

If you require sound for your PC then you will need a sound card. As basic sound cards are very cheap it is recommended that you consider a sound card. It offers many benefits such as running multimedia applications with sound, listening to wave, midi, and MP3 music files or even play your audio CD's. If you are thinking of playing games on your PC then having a sound card is a must. Most current motherboards also have basic built in sound. One of the most popular sound cards are the Creative's soundblaster range. We will use a Creatives Sounblaster Live 1024 for our

Graphics Card

Graphics Card

Graphics card provides display output to your monitor. There are many graphics card manufactures out there who release a new card into the market nearly every three to six months as it is one of the most competitive hardware market. While choosing a graphics card consider what you would be using it for. For 2D applications such as word-processing, spreadsheet etc, a basic graphics card with around 64MB or 128MB video memory will be sufficient for your needs. It will also allow you to run your monitor at various resolutions.

However, if you require 3D functionality for running 3D applications or playing 3D games you will require a 3D graphics card with at least 256MB or even 512MB of video memory.

Memory DDR2/DDR3 RAM

Memory DDR2/DDR3 RAM

Memory is the name given to silicon chips that stores volatile computer data. Volatile means that the contents of memory will be lost if the power of the computer is switched off. Memory stores some of your operating system and application data while it is being run. The more memory you have in your system, the more application you can run simultaneously and will provide an overall better system performance.

Memory comes in many form. The older systems use SDRAM, while the current systems use DDR2 or DDR3 SDRAM (Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory).

Processor

Processor

The processor also known as CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the brain of a computer. The faster the processor, the faster it will execute instructions and run your programs. The leading Processor manufactures are Intel and AMD. Whichever manufacturer you decide to choose you will have to make sure that you purchase a compatible motherboard.

Nowadays Intel and AMD have stopped the GHz race and concentrated on how many cores they can fit in each CPU. So having a 3 GHz single core CPU is not better that having 2.4 GHz Dual Core CPU. Nowadays a CPU is judged on how many cores it has. The more cores it has the better it is.

Mother Board

Mother Board

A motherboard is a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that connects your processor, memory and all your expansion cards together to assemble a PC. Most motherboards made nowadays are ATX. An ATX motherboard has the standard I/O (Input/Output) connectors such as PS/2 ports, USB ports, parallel port, serial port, etc, built onto the motherboard. ATX motherboard fits into a standard ATX case. The following is a picture of a Modern ATX motherboard.



As you can see from the image, the motherboard comes with various expansion card slots and connectors. It comes with 4 different expansion slots, 2 PCI and 2 PCI Express slot.

Tower or Desktop Case

A desktop or tower case is required to hold all your components together. It is your personal preference on which one you decide to choose. Desktop or tower cases come in standard ATX form factor. You can find them in many different design & sizes. The most common sizes are Mini, Midi and Full tower. Most budget cases come with PSU (Power Supply Unit) but most of the premium cases don't come with PSU which has to be purchased separately. The case below is an ATX Midi Tower case.

To decide if you need a mini, midi, or a full tower case you need to ask yourself how many hard drives, dvd-rom etc you need to fit in the case. The bigger the case, the more bays you will have for your drives and peripherals. If you are building a pc which has to be small as possible and you are planning to buy a Micro ATX Motherboard then go for a Mini Tower case.