If you don't feel confident about building a computer:
www.ibuypower.com
You'l just have to research your parts
But as someone else said, there's nothing like first hand experience.
To start with, you need 9 parts:
1) Processor - This is the first thing you need to pick. I'd recommend you get an AMD Athlon64, as they are cheaper than Intel Pentium 4's and faster. There's something called a Socket, to keep it in simple terms: it's basically the "size" of your processor. The newest Socket size for AMD Athlon64 is 939, the older one was 754. You might save money going on the 754, but the 939 is better for upgradability as it's newer and up to date
2) Motherboard - This is quite a complicated topic. But I'm going to keep it as simple as possible so you can have a basic understanding. You need a motherboard that fits your socket. A motherboard that has a spot for a Socket 754 processor will not fit a Socket 939 processor. What I recommend you to do is do your research on Chipsets. Again, it's a complicated topic for a beginner, but if you ask around, you'll get help.
For beginners, ASUS and Gigabyte tend to be good brand names.
3) RAM - For most games, you need around 512MB to 1GB of RAM. Typically, the more RAM, the better. When you get more advanced, you should do your research on CAS latencies and stuff - but I wouldn't worry about it now.
You should note, that 2 sticks of 512MB ram is faster than 1 stick of 1GB RAM - this is known as Dual Channel.
You should know about the "Big" brands that people tend to buy:
Corsair
Crucial
Kingston
For a beginner, I would stick with these 3.
4) Hard Drive - obviously this determines the amount of space you have. There tend to be brands that are more prone to failure than others. If you search around, it seems as though many people will not recommend Maxtor. Go for Seagate drives with quietness, although I haven't had any problems with Maxtor. Western Digital is also a good brand to choose from, but you can't beat Seagate's 5 year warantees
🙂.
Older drives are known as IDE (or ATA), and newer kind of drives (faster) are known as Serial-ATA (SATA). SATA drives tend to be a bit faster, and they use a different connector.
5) Case - Kind of self explanatory. I won't go in and discuss the cooling performance of cases, but you should know some good brand names:
Antec (Quiet, budget cases)
Lian Li (Quality, expensive Aluminum (lightweight) cases, a bit louder than Antec)
CoolerMaster (Great cooling performance, nice looking as well)
6) Power Supplies. This is somewhat a complicated topic. For a typical mid-range PC, a 350 Watt poer supply should be fine. If you're going for a high-end PC, you might need to get something more powerful.
Just please note one thing,
there are 500W power supplies for $30, and there are 350W power supplies for $70. Be aware of generic brands.
Getting a generic 500W $30 power supply might fry your equipment - try to stick to the big brands.
Antec - Quality budget power supplies. They got some good ones in the upper range
Enermax - I haven't had any experience with them, they seem to be pretty good though
If you ask around, people will give you a whole host of recommendations.
7) Graphics Card - This is where the performance in games come from. ATi and nVidia are the 2 major companies that make graphics cards.
Lemme list some graphics cards.
Low End:
ATI Radeon X300
nVidia geForce 6200
Medium End:
ATi Radeon X600
nVidia geForce 6600
High End:
ATi Radeon X800 XT
nVidia geForce 6800 GT
nVidia cards have the lead right now - they're cheaper and more powerful.
8) CD/DVD Burner - Pretty much self explanatory. Make sure it matches the color of your case
9) Floppy Drive - Self explanatory. Make sure it matches the color of your case
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Stuff you need:
-Monitor
-Keyboard
-Mouse
-Operating System (Windows XP or similar
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I hope that guide helps out a bit.
It's all open to interpretation, feel free to debate it.
Sorry if there were any errors and if I left out any major information/major brands. Typed this in a rush.
I've created a "guide" on this thread:
http://forums.anandtech.com/messageview...atid=27&threadid=1563385&enterthread=y
Oh, one last thing. About places to buy stuff, most people here would recommend
http://www.NewEgg.com.
I hope that helps a bit, even though it was rather "shallow"
-The Pentium Guy
