Building a new PC - A Guru's Way!

By: Brann 'Bitch Magnet' Mitchell

No, let me guess-you're tired of looking through that month old Dell catalogue and you want to upgrade. Perhaps playing Counter-Strike on that 386 is not as much fun as it used to, even though you tweaked it to get 5 frames a second. Maybe you just want to build your own 'God-Box'. First one needs to ask two questions, how much power do I need and how much can I pay for it? In my situation I wanted a machine that could perform multiple roles. I needed to fill three jobs with my new machine-web server, audio station, and a little gaming. The budget was set at $2000 USD. And this is the Killer Rig.

The Sum of its Parts
There are quite a few components that make up a computer. Your choices won't be my choices. You may have your own preference, and that is the way it should be. What I can offer is what I did for my own system. And since we can all benefit from experience, here's mine!

Let's take a quick look at the box:

Case and Power Supply -- Tricky to get perfect (why do people mod them?), there are special cases for extra cooling, then there are just regular 'bad beige' cases, to the extra-fancy iMac wanna be's. Power supply should be at least 300 watts, especially for AMD powered rigs. You can solve instability problems just by upgrading your power supply.

Motherboard -- This is the second most important part of the machine as it provides stability, expandability, and compatibility. Why the second? Read on, my dude.

Video -- Are you into games? Thought so. 3D and the PC are here to stay.

Disk -- Bigger is better. Faster is better. SCSI is best! I am that biased.

Audio -- You see it on the monitor but your ears are very important also. Headphones or big bass rumble are my recommendations.

Controls -- Not much here, except wireless is cool, and optical is all the rage. Just don't be into 'flicking' that optical mouse around or you're likely to be looking at the roof and not your opponent. Split ergonomic keyboards are a very good thing.

Monitor -- In my view, this is the single most important aspect about a computer. You don't look at your computer; you look at your monitor. I've been pimping this message for years now, so do your eyes a favor, and get the most expensive, feature-leaden, refresh monster of a monitor that you can afford. Lie, cheat, or steal (well, don't go too far) to get the best you can afford! You'll thank me later, I promise.