Building the Perfect PC

Preface

Building PCs isn’t just for techies anymore.

It used to be, certainly. Only gamers and other geeks actually built their PCs from the ground up—everyone else just called the Dell Dude and ordered a system. That started to change a few years ago. The first sign was when general merchandisers like Best Buy started stocking upgrade components. If you wanted to expand the memory in your PC, install a larger hard drive, or add a CD writer, you could now get the components you needed at the local big-box store.

A year or two ago, things changed again. Big-box retailers started carrying PC components like cases and motherboards—parts seldom needed by upgraders, but necessary to build a new PC from scratch. Nowadays, although CompUSA, Best Buy, and other local retailers may not carry as broad a range of PC components as some online specialty retailers, you can get everything you need for a new PC with one visit to a big-box store.

Note

Specialty PC component superstores like Fry’s carry a full range of components at extremely good prices. We wish we had a Fry’s within driving distance. Or then again, maybe not. There’s too much good stuff there. Our credit cards are smoking already, and a trip to Fry’s might be the last straw.

And you can bet that big-box stores don’t allocate shelf space to products that aren’t selling. Building your own PC has become mainstream. Nowadays, even regular nontechnical people build their own systems and have fun doing it. Instead of settling for a mediocre, cookie-cutter system from Dell or Gateway, they get a PC with exactly the features and components they want, at a good price, and with the pride that comes from knowing they built it themselves. They also get a faster, higher-quality PC with much better reliability than any mass-market system. No small thing, that.

Robert visited Best Buy one day and spent some time hanging out in the PC component aisles. He watched a lot of regular people comparing hard drives, video adapters, DVD writers, and other PC components. Some of them were buying components to upgrade their current systems, but many of them were buying components to build entirely new systems.

Robert watched one grandmotherly woman fill her shopping cart. She chose an Antec case and power supply, a Maxtor hard drive, an Abit motherboard, an AMD Athlon XP processor, an nVIDIA graphics adapter, a couple sticks of DDR memory, and a Lite-On DVD writer. He approached her, and the conversation went something like this:

Robert: “Looks like you’re building a new computer.”

Woman: “Yes, I’m building my granddaughter a new PC for her birthday.”

Robert: “Are you worried about getting everything to work?”

Woman: “Oh, no. This is the third one I’ve built. You should try it. It’s easy.”

Robert: “I may do that.”

Every project system in this book can be built entirely from components available at your local big-box store. If some of the components we recommend aren’t in stock, one or more of the alternative components we recommend almost certainly will be. If you buy this book on a Friday, you can buy your components Saturday morning, assemble the new system Saturday afternoon, test it Sunday, and have it up and running Monday morning.

If she’d had this book, she might have made different choices for one or two of her components. Still, Dell may have something to worry about.

Goals of This Book

This book is your guide to the world of building PCs. Its goal is to teach you everything you need to know to select the best components and assemble them into a working PC that matches your own requirements and budget—even if you have no training or prior experience.

We present five projects, in as many chapters. Each chapter details design, component selection, and assembly instructions for a particular type of PC. You can build any or all of these systems as presented, or you can modify them to suit your own requirements.

Rather than using a straight cookbook approach, which would simply tell you how to build a PC by rote, we spend a lot of time explaining why we made particular design decisions, chose certain components, or did something a certain way. By “looking over our shoulders” as we design PCs and choose components, you’ll learn to make good decisions when it comes to designing and building your own PC. You’ll also learn how to build a PC with superior quality, performance, and reliability.

Not that we skimped on the how-to. Each project system chapter provides detailed assembly instructions and dozens of photographs that illustrate the assembly process. Even if you’ve never seen a hard drive, after reading this book you should be completely comfortable sitting down with a bunch of components to build your own PC.

If you have never built a PC, we hope this book will inspire you to build your first system. If you have some PC building experience, we hope this book will provide the ideas and advice to help make the next PC you build the Perfect PC for your needs.