parts guide(touch up on Col_Loki old guide)

awhir

General Parts guide

The parts required for a complete PC are CPU (processor), Motherboard, Ram, Graphics card, Hard disk, CD drive (optional), Case, Power Supply along with keyboard, mouse, speakers, Screen.

CPU : Comes in two flavours, AMD and Intel. At the time of writing Intel's Core 2 Duo line is trampling over AMD's Athlon 64 X2 line in terms of performance, AMD are expected to counter attack with better parts later in 2007.

Motherboard : Loads of different brands, ATX is the standard for midi-towers and mATX is for smaller cases. There are many chipset's as well far too many to list but in general CPU support and features are determined by the motherboard.

Socket AM2 -> AMD Athlon 64 X2 & FX CPU's
Socket 775 -> Intel Core 2 class CPU's plus legacy CPU's like the Pentium 4/Pentium D/Celeron D line's.

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Hard Disks: Space is incredibly cheap these days so really there is little reason to buy a small HD.

Few main brands..
Western Digital -> Best performance/price ratio at the moment with the SE16 line. Raptor line is the fastest SATA HD you can buy.
Maxtor -> Bought by Seagate no longer active.
Samsung -> Good performance, low noise
Seagate ->Good performance, low noise
Hitachi-> Good performance, make best laptop HD's.

From fastest to slowest cache & spindle speed;
16MB cache > 8MB cache > 2MB cache
10000rpm (WD Raptors) > 7200rpm > 5400rpm

Hard drives have generally fallen into commoditization in that there is little difference between the various brands which is for the most part the current trend.

Hybrid hard drives - these are a new type of hard drive that will be available soon they integrate an amount of flash into the HD directly to act as a buffer/cache to improve performance and lower power consumption.

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Graphics Cards : The two primary competitors NVIDIA & AMD/ATI (ATI were purchased by CPU maker AMD and have merged with AMD but they still use the ATI brand name for graphics cards so they are often referred to as AMD/ATI).

Generally there are two types of card Direct-X 9 {DX9} & Direct-X 10 {DX10} the DX10 cards can only use DX10 mode in Windows Vista with supporting games of course. They will operate in DX9 mode under Windows XP which will still be the dominant API for years to come anyway.

ATI
ATI high end line X1950 - replaced X1800/X1900 {DX9 class cards)
ATI mid range X1600X/1650 line (DX9 class cards)
ATI low end X1300/X1500 line (DX9 class card)

Noteworthy features;
* Generally better image quality and features compared to NVIDIA Geforce 6 & 7 series GPU's.
* AVIVO video decoder gives excellent picture quality for DVD's and comes free with all X1K series GPU's.

NVIDIA
NV high end line 8800 (DX10 class cards)
NV mid range 7900/7600 (DX9 class cards)
NV low end 7400/7300/7100 (DX9 class cards)

Noteworthy features;
* GeForce 8 line is cream of the crop for NVIDIA and finally bests ATI in the image quality department.
* Generally NVIDIA tend to get the price/performance ratio right more often than ATI in the mid-range.

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Memory : The main standard at the moment is DDR2 . The common speeds are....
PC4200 ->533Mhz
PC5300 ->667Mhz
PC6400 ->800MhZ
PC7200 ->900Mhz (unofficial for overclockers)
PC8000 ->1000Mhz (unofficial for overclockers)
PC8500 ->1066Mhz (unofficial for overclockers)

There are also memory timings. The better the ram the lower the timings will be and the better it will perform. The lower the ram timings the better your memory will perform at the rated speed in theory but in real world it rarely works out that way.

Low latency isn't that important with DDR-2 and really only benefits select applications so unless your out to win synthetic benchmarks it's is not a priority.

What is important is capacity and I would strongly recommend getting 1GB or 2GB of RAM in any system.

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Budget PC (€750 ish)

Motherboard: Intel 945 chipset
CPU : Intel Core 2 Duo E4300
CPU Cooler : Stock
HardDisk : Seagate Barracuda or Samsung.
DVD/CDRW : Any DVD±RW
Memory: 1GB DDR-2
Graphics : GeForce 7600GT or X1650XT
Case: Recommend case with built in PSU

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Mid Range PC (€1500 ish)

Motherboard: Intel 965/975 or nForce 6 chipset.
CPU :Intel Core 2 Duo E6400 or E6600
CPU Cooler :Arctic Cooling Freezer 7
HardDisk :Western Digital SE16
DVD/CDRW : Ideally Plextor or NEC
Graphics : NVIDIA GeForce 8800/7900 or ATI X1950 class
Ram: 2GB of DDR-2
Case: Recommend brands are Antec, Lian Li or Silverstone
Power Supply: Recommend brands are Seasonic & Tagan 600w or higher.

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High End PC (€2300 ish)

Motherboard: Intel 965/975 or nForce 6 chipset.
CPU :Intel Core 2 Duo E6700 or X6800
CPU Cooler :Tuniq Tower 120
HardDisk : Western Digital Raptor
DVD/CDRW : Plextor or NEC.
Graphics :NVIDIA GeForce 8800 GTX SLI
Memory :2GB DDR-2
Sound Card :Creative Sound Blaster X-Fi
Case: Recommend brands are Antec, Lian Li or Silverstone
Power Supply: Recommend brands are Seasonic, OCZ & Tagan 700W or higher.

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Power Supply's Info

Generally it is best to take the PSU's power rating with a grain of salt, especially when your dealing with cheap no-name brands. I have seen loads of people fall into the trap of buying a 600w and running into power troubles.

A decent 600w PSU should power almost anything but no-namers tend to vastly exaggerate the power output so it fails to deliver the necessary output causing system instability. Basic rule, brand is everything when it comes to PSU's, ignore rating unless its a known good brand.

*****General Rule, Stay away from Q-Tec's, Codegan's, NorthQ & other no-Name PSU's !!*****

Noise output:
In general the manufacturers will claim that the power supplies are much quieter than they actually are. A lot of them come with variable fans and adjust the speed according to the stress on the PSU thus can be silent while browsing the web and noisy when playing a game (where its less noticeable).

In general the quietest are Zalman's, Be-quiets, Seasonics, Tagan & some Antec's

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Suppliers Listing (where to buy)

There is a sticky about this on the Comp/Tech forum but its huge so I'm just going to make a list of the essential ones:

www.komplett.ie (good prices, cheap delivery - general hardware)
www.hitide.ie (overclocking & silence & flashy bits - i like em)
www.elara.ie (nice antec cases, general hardware, more expensive than jes & komplett in general)
www.pc-memory-upgrade.co.uk (free delivery, based in kildare, good service and prices)
www.computerbits.ie (best customer service ive ever had)
www.pc-look.com (overclocking, fortron & zalman PSU's, silence parts also)
www.excaliberpc.com (american company - wierd delivery rules but cheap)
www.xcase.co.uk (biggest range of cases ive seen)
www.creative.ie (free delivery)
www.computeruniverse.net (huge range - german supplier)
www.overclockers.co.uk (great products, good company)
www.overclock.co.uk (good company also)
www.tekheads.co.uk (overclocking stuff & gen hardware)

WaterCooling Suppliers

[Kits]
www.hitide.ie
www.watercooling.de
www.overclockers.com
www.pc-look.com

[Build your own]
www.dtekcustoms.com/
www.dangerden.com
http://becooling.safeshopper.com/

Swiftech & Dangerden probably two of the best for custom systems.

Well there the main ones you should be looking at, could name more but all these above should sort you out with whatever you need !!

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Last updated on the 08/03/07

MarkR

Good stuff, i'll definately be coming back to this thread. Bookmarked.

Cuddlesworth

White water second best cpu water block on the market? What in gods name have you been smoking? On a price performance ratio it would be the Apogee, Storm and AquaXtreme MP-05 in that order. G7 being the best, G5 next but the price negates the performance.

Other then that, good job man. Still pushing to be a Mod ehh?

awhir

**** missed that.

me mod na .

Anti

Bump what ?

Just ask for this to be made a sticky.

8T8

Will do after the holidays and get some good free time to further work on the guide for now I placed a link in the key posts sticky.

Anti

yep, this needs to be worked on alot, especially the typos and gramatical errors. but otherwise a good read for beginners.

Overheal

I think the section on CPUs is grossly understated:

What are the ups and downs of AMD vs. Intell? Who has the better chip? Which ones perform better for which tasks, etc?

awhir

lol ya.8t8 said he would touch it up ?

TonyM.

Western Digital discs are not noisey i have four of them and Hiper make a good power supply.

Anti

Wd's are very noisy compared to samsung spinpoints.

But then raptors are loud compared to wd's. Alot of the noise is case dependant. rubber crommets help reduce vibration. A thick case will block out noise too.

8T8

I'm very sorry awhir I totally forgot about it

Thinking about it a bit more I'm not so sure a general parts guide, while a nice idea it changes so frequently & there are so many combinations and factors that have to be taken into account price, performance, tasks etc. that it is a big job to maintain.

I'll set about updating some of the info in it today though.

Edit: Okay I have finished the update I rewrote some of it and cut out some info so the guide should last longer in terms of relevance without constant modifications being made to it.

awhir

nice

DanGerMus

Needs Work and i'd agree that it would need constant maintanance to keep it up to date. But i had this same idea the other day so glad to see it up here and should def be considered for a sticky as long as it's maintained well.

dazftw

This thread just saved me €60 on my new pc.. lol