I am looking at building a computer component by component over the
next year or so as time and money allow. The building of the computer
however will not be the hard part, it will the assembling of the
components. I am completely clueless of what I should be looking for
in components as far as price, reliability, and good brand names are
concerned.
To start with, go to
http://www.tomshardware.com and take a good long
look at all the sections to get yourself a thorough grounding in the
various technologies. Also there will be a wide selection of benchmarks
to tell you about the performance of these things.
As for manufacturers, I personally like Asus. MSI and Abit also have
good reputations in the computer business. Gigabyte aren't bad either.
Memory: Corsair have a good reputation for overclocking and
high-performance memory. If you use an Athlon 64 system, you want memory
with low latencies (the expensive stuff...) as the memory controller is
on the CPU and will benefit greatly.
Graphics: For NVidia cards, I suggest Asus, MSI or Gainward, but I don't
know if there is much difference. As for ATI, Sapphire make good, solid
cards (but that's all I know). Avoid Leadtek at all costs (their cards
are part of a 'Winfast' range) - a friend of mine had nothing but
trouble with 2 of their cards.
Hard Drives: I like Seagate. They have 5 year warranties for all their
hard drives (new), which is more than any other consumer hard drive (as
far as I know), which must say something about their reliability.
Power Supply: Antec make really good, solid, high-current power
supplies. Plump for an Antec True Power and you are set (provided that
it gives enough juice - depends on your components...)
I would mainly be using this computer for home use, broadband net
access, and gaming so a good NVidia-based vid card would be a must.
You do not necessarily need NVidia graphics in your machine. I
personally love NV and will never go for ATI unless they announce stereo
3D support in their drivers, but that is my issue and not yours.
ATI do not make crap - if you go for the FX5900/Radeon 9800 generation,
pick the ATI card (Radeon 9800 Pros can be found for quite cheap now, in
the region of £120. They are good solid cards) as they had the better
price-performance ratio for that generation. Also, if you want to get in
on Half Life 2, then ATI is the way to go as it performs better on ATI
cards than NV cards of the same generation even though those cards would
have given similar results in 'neutral' benchmarks (such as 3DMark 2k3
or 2k5).
As for networking and broadband, nearly modern motherboards have built
in Ethernet ports (the newer Intel chipset boards have a very nice
Gigabit ethernet one built in that does not hog PCI bus bandwidth), so
you are set for that.
And I'm looking at an Intel-based CPU unless someone can make a
convincing argument to the contrary.
AMD curently have (and have always had) the advantage in the
price-performance ratio. Their newer CPUs run cooler than the newest
Intel CPUs (Prescott...) for the same performance rating - there have
been several reports on that at places like Tom's Hardware. AMD stuff
can be perfectly stable if you pick the right components.
Overall:
--------
Instead of buying it component by component, save up and get them all in
one go. If you have a year's gap between getting the stuff, there will
be a very noticeable performance or features gap between what you got
back then and what you could get now for the same money (especially in
graphics technology, not so much in CPU). Allocating a fixed budget will
help you choose components too.
I suggest a Socket 939 Athlon 64 3000 or 3200 to start with. Pair that
with an NForce 4 board (Asus A8N SLI, if you have the money for a decent
PCI Express graphics card) or an NForce 3 250 Gb board (MSI K8N Neo2
Platinum, if you want to stick with AGP). Stick in either 512 MB or 1 GB
(if you want to splash out) of matched pair DDR-400 (also called PC3200)
memory, set up for dual-channel operation (preferably stuff with good
timings like Corsair XMS or Crucial Ballistix).
Add a Seagate SATA hard drive (you will need another computer to prepare
the drivers for the SATA controller if you are installing WinNT, 2000 or
XP) in any size you want. I would want at least 120 GB of space on my
main HDD, but that's just me. You might manage with 80 - depends on what
you will be filling it with.
As for graphics: depends on what you want to run and how much money you
have. If you have a GeForce 6800 or Radeon X800 card, then you will need
a big power supply (480W minimum), otherwise a 400-450W Antec will do if
you have a Radeon 9800 or FX5900 card.
You can add a sound card like the Creative Audigy 2 if you want better
quality than the onboard sound, but you do not need it to get started
immediately.
