Building a PC, Computer Structure

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Table of Contents

Introduction
Casing
Motherboard
Memory
Processor
Hard Drive
Graphics Card
Optical Drive
References

Introduction

Computers are the need of the current world. No matter how old one is and how well acquainted with technology one should be, computer literacy and operations should be known to everyone to compete in this fast-moving world. Computers have changed appearances over time and now they are near a palm-size and can do almost all operations performed by workstations 20 years ago. In our case, a desktop is a must for day-to-day operations.

Casing

The first item to be purchased is the case for the machine. A case should be large enough to give a good exhaust system and entertain a 12” by 12” motherboard for expansion purposes. From the given list, we have Cooler Master Elite 330 (420W) and Thermal takes M9. Dave should go for the Cooler master Elite 330 (420W) casing with supply as it has enough room to contain a full-sized motherboard and spacious enough to keep the system cool. It has expanded capabilities in terms of increased optical drives as it can hold a minimum of three optical drives at a time. The chassis gap is also big enough to hold a 9 series GFX card.

Motherboard

The next component is the motherboard. This is the heart of the system and the entire PC performance depends on it. The entire system hardware setup depends on the mainboard. It should be able to allow fast data transfer and must have enough PCI slots to entertain further expansion. The motherboard should have 3 RAM slots so that Dave can have a large amount of physical memory available by installing more RAM chips to the system. It should have a PCX 2.0 interface for enhancing video performance. As Dave plans to plug in the plasma TV using the HDMI option, he should go for a motherboard that should support a new generation graphics card and MSI P45 Neo3-FR and Asus M2N68-VM fulfill the needs, however, I would suggest selecting MSI P45, Neo as it offers high connectivity along with all options Dave requires for extension the board has enough PCI slots so he can plug in a 1394 connector easily for the digital camera.

Memory

Next up would be the RAM for the system. To run a video editing tool, we need to have a large physical memory bank. The options are DDR-2 800 and DDR-3 modules. I would suggest going for the DDR-2 800 module with 2048 MB capacity as it is much cheaper and would suffice the requirements. Dave should install 2 chips which would give a total of 4 GBs that is adequate to operate the video editing tools more physical memory is required to run such software plus the fact that Windows Vista alone requires around 2 Gbs of memory to run smoothly.

Processor

The processor is regarded as the brain of the computer and it should be fast enough to entertain multitasking at every level. Amongst the choices present Intel core2quad Q8200 and AMD Phenom II X4 9950 seem to be the most suitable. Intel Core2Quad is by far the most appropriate processor for decoding activities as far as the price range is concerned. For encoding activities, we need a processor that can handle many calculations at a single point in time and the Q8200 has this ability as it has 4 cores to perform the massive operations, and furthermore it requires less power as compared to the previous versions.

Hard Drive

The hard drive is the primary storage device for the system and today the size varies from 80GBs to TBs. in our case, Dave does not require a huge hard drive as most of the data is to be burnt on DVDs. The choices available are Western Digital 320GB and Seagate 320GB and my advice would be to go for Western Digital as it is a good performer all along. Why 320 GB? Because today, an HD movie is around 4-7 GB thus 320 GBs would be adequate to contain a few of these videos and Windows Vista.

Graphics Card

The final item is the GFX card and as Dave wants to plug in his Plasma to turn the PC into a home Theatre then the options are ATI 4670 and 9600GT. Here I will suggest selecting ATI 4670 as ATI’s performance at this level is excellent and the Nvidia series can only compete with the late 9800 GTXX version of the product to compare with ATI 4670, it has Direct X 10.1 support, HDMI and HD ready as well at a comparatively cheaper price than 9600GT.

Optical Drive

As far as Optical drives are concerned, I would go for the SATA DVD recorder from IDE and SATA given in the list. The motherboard has more SATA connectors than IDE connectors further there is no need to go for a Blu-Ray writer as the HD DVDs can be written to a dual-layer media easily if they exceed the usual size of a DVD (4.2 GBs).

The table below compares the cost of building the complete system from TIMR and other bargain prices from various sources

Component	Cost at TIMR	Best Bargain Price	URL of the best bargain price
MSI P45 Neo3-FR	$147	$139	Web.
Intel Core 2 Quad Q8200	$298	$254	Web.
Coolermaster Elite 330 (420W)	$131	$95	Web.
SATA 320GB	$72	$72	Web.
2048MB DDR2-800	$78	$59.90	Web.
512M ATI 4670	$129	$114	Web.
(PCI) Firewire/1394 Card	$33	$8.80	Web.
SATA DVD-Recorder	$32	$27	Web.
Total	$920	$770

References

“Build Your Own PC”. 2009. Web.

CCPU Computers. 2009. Web.

Computer Target Online. 2009.

Gasior, G. “How to build a PC, A step-by-step guide to enthusiast system assembly”2009. Web.

Gocomp. 2009. Web.

Intel Processor ratings. 2009. Web.

ITSky Online Store. 2009.

Tom’s hardware guide comparison charts. 2009.

MSY Technology Pricelist. 2009. Web.

MegaWare Computers. 2009.

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