Building the Perfect PC

Organization of This Book

The first two chapters of this book comprise a short but comprehensive course in planning the perfect PC and choosing and buying components for it.

Chapter 1, Fundamentals, focuses on things you need to know, things you need to have, and things you need to do before you start to buy components and build your new PC. This chapter explains the advantages of building a PC versus buying one (YOU control the quality, performance, reliability, and quietness of your components), provides design guidelines, and explains the inevitable tradeoffs in performance, price, size, and noise level. We list the tools and software you’ll need, and provide a detailed tour of the motherboard, the most important and complex PC component. Finally, we provide detailed troubleshooting information, because it’s easier to avoid problems if you know from the beginning what to look out for. After you read this chapter, you’ll be prepared for the next step: actually buying the components for your new PC.

Chapter 2, Choosing and Buying Components, tells you everything you need to know about how to select and purchase the components you need to build your new PC.

Note

When you design and build your own PC, you get something that money can’t buy if you purchase a preassembled machine: total control of quality, reliability, performance, and noise level.

We explain the important characteristics of each component and how to choose among alternatives. We also recommend specific components by brand and model number, and provide alternative recommendations for those with different requirements or smaller budgets. The original draft of this chapter was more than 40,000 words—far too large for the space available, and nearly a book in itself. As our agent said to Robert, “You’re the only author I know who accidentally wrote a book.” So we spent most of a week cutting this chapter down to its final size, about half of what it had been. In the process, we ruthlessly eliminated extraneous information, and boiled it down to essentials. After you read this chapter, you will be prepared to choose the optimum components for your new PC and to buy them at a good price.

Further Reading

If you want more information about choosing the best components for your new PC, O’Reilly also publishes Building the Perfect PC: A Pocket Guide to Choosing and Buying Components. The pocket guide is a greatly expanded version of Chapter 2, with additional important details. It’s small enough to take with you when you prowl the PC component aisles in your local big-box store, and detailed enough to help you buy the right components the first time. Cheap insurance, we think.

The final five chapters detail project systems, any of which you can build as-is or modify to suit your particular needs. The introductory section of each project chapter is a design guide that explains the choices we made and how we decided to implement them. Following that is a detailed section on selecting components, with specific products listed by brand name, and a bill of materials. In each case, we list alternative components for those with different needs or budgets. The bulk of each chapter is a detailed guide, with numerous photographs, that shows you step-by-step how to build the system.

Chapter 3, Building a Mainstream PC, teaches you how to build a general-purpose PC that is a jack of all trades and master of…well, quite a few, actually. In the standard configuration, this system combines high performance, top-notch reliability, and moderate cost. Depending on the components you choose—and how much you’re willing to spend—you can make this system anything from an inexpensive entry-level box to a do-it-all powerhouse. And it’s quiet, particularly if you build it in a midrange configuration. In a normal office or home environment, you can barely hear it running.

Each project chapter is full of tips, many of which are useful no matter what type of system you decide to build. Accordingly, we suggest you read the entire book, including all project chapters, before you start building your new system.

Chapter 4, Building a SOHO Server, focuses on building a reliable, high-performance SOHO (Small Office/Home Office) server, appropriate for anything from an inexpensive server for a home office to a serious server for a small-business network. Because these requirements span a vast range, we take particular pains to detail alternative choices and configurations that are appropriate for different environments. We emphasize reliability and data safety regardless of configuration, because a server failure is as disruptive for a home office as for a small business. Accordingly, we emphasize such features as redundant disk storage and reliable backup.

Chapter 5, Building a Kick-Ass LAN Party PC, is all about building a fire-breathing gaming PC with an emphasis on portability. A LAN party happens when a group of people bring their PCs to a central location, hook them up to a network, and start competing. LAN parties are the rage among PC gamers, and most serious LAN partiers build a PC optimized for LAN parties. This chapter shows you how to build a seriously fast PC that’s easy to carry around. If you’re not a gamer but need speed in a portable package, this system will do the job for you, too.

Chapter 6, Building a Home Theater PC, shows you how to build a PC that provides TiVo-like DVR (Digital Video Recorder) functions, without the monthly subscription or the DRM (Digital Restrictions Management) “features” common to commercial PVR units. For about the price of a combination TiVo/DVD writer and program guide subscription, this PC substitutes not only for a commercial DVR unit, but also for an AV receiver, CD-ROM player, DVD-ROM player, DVD recorder, 5.1 home theater speaker system, and a gaming console. Talk about bang for the buck.

Although we tested the configurations we specified for each project system, we did not build and test every permutation with the alternative components we listed. Those alternatives are simply what we might have used if our requirements had been different. That said, we would expect the alternative components we list to work in any combination, and would be very surprised if they didn’t.

There are rare exceptions. For example, we built the SOHO Server system around an Intel server board, but listed an Intel desktop board as an alternative. Recent Linux distros should run properly on either of those motherboards, but no Intel desktop board supports Windows Server 2003. When we are aware of a potential conflict or compatibility issue, we say so.

Chapter 7, Building a Small Form Factor PC, shows you how to build a fully featured PC that is small enough and quiet enough to fit in almost anywhere. Depending on the components you choose, you can make the SFF PC anything from an inexpensive secondary system suitable for a dorm room or child’s bedroom to a primary general-purpose system to a home theater or PVR system to a barn-burner of a portable gaming system to a dedicated “appliance” system or small server. We actually built two of these systems, one configured as a satellite DVR system for the master bedroom—with full recording functionality and the ability to play video stored on the main server or home theater PC—and the second as a general purpose mainstream PC.