building a computer

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radiac.net Building a computer is a good thing; you get exactly what you want, you get the boxes, manuals and drivers for each component, you know how it fits together, you can describe your system when required and, if you choose well, you can upgrade bits very easily when the time comes. And not only that, but you get so much satisfaction when you turn it on for the first time. If you're serious about computers, you've got to build one. Most of this guide was last updated on the 7th of February, 2002, so is completely out of touch with the current hardware situation. Things move so quickly that I can't hope to keep up - instead I have marked out the old bits in grey boxes. But even if I could, there is no substitution for doing your own research - try doing a google search for the product you're interested in, with ' review' on the end. Oh, and thanks go to growse and xyral for giving me info and ideas and sorting me out on a couple of things :)

First things first

The first thing to do when you decide to build a computer is to decide the basic specifications. The rough idea is to first pick your processor, then your motherboard, and then the other components - at each stage checking that each new component will work with the previous items you have selected, and if not, go back and make it all match up. Check socket types, bus speeds, memory requirements etc, then check them again. If you don't know what an acronym or a number means, find out before you buy it!

Processors

Choose the processor carefully and design the rest of the machine around that. You're looking for certain things when you pick your processor: speed (obviously), what type of socket it needs to plug into, and what kind of RAM it likes. It's often a waste of money to get the very best - you pay a premium to say you have the top of the range, and it won't stay the best for long. Go for one that fits your budget, it's your decision where the trade-off for value and performance is. Don't be tempted to get a cheap one and wait a few months for the one you want to drop; you'll probably never get around to upgrading it, and you'll be stuck with a rubbish processor for the life of your machine. Here's some information from 2002 that gives you an idea of what you had to look for back then; might help you get an idea of what to look for now. There are currently two categories of mainstream desktop processors, expensive and good, or cheap and not so good. I can't give a particularly in-depth analysis on them, but I'll give the main points...

Manufacturer Processor Speed range Name AMD AMD Duron 1Ghz - 1.3Ghz

Comments Cheap processor. Socket A. Supports DDR SDRAM. Expensive processor. Socket A. Supports DDR SDRAM. I'd go for this or an XP if I had the choice. It seems that this range has been discontinued to make way for the XP, but they're definitely still around and up for sale - apparently this has better overclocking possibilities than the XP... Expensive processor. Worth noting that AMD kinda cheat here; they give their processors numbers to compete with Intel; in fact, their XP 1800+ runs at

Thunderbird ? - 1.4Ghz

AMD

XP

1Ghz - 1.3Ghz

1.5GHz, but is comparable with an Intel P4 1.8Ghz. Socket A. Supports DDR SDRAM. I'd go for this or a Tbird if I had the choice, although apparently this is locked and so isn't so good for overclocking. Intel Celeron 500Mhz - 1.3 Ghz Cheap processor. Later ones have a Tualatin core; they are basically a crippled P3 (but need special motherboard support - watch out for that). Socket 370. 650Mhz - 1.2 Ghz Expensive processor. Slot 1 and becomes socket 370 models at around 933Mhz. Supports RDRAM and DDR SDRAM. 1.4Ghz - 2.2 Ghz Expensive processor - top Pentium chip. Supports RDRAM and DDR SDRAM. ? - 933Mhz Cheap processor. Doesn't run very hot at all; it uses a passive heatsink, which is a good point. However, it has performed pretty diabolically in tests, and appears to have some, um, issues... so I'd steer clear if I were you.

Intel

Pentium 3

Intel

Pentium 4

VIA

Cyrix 3

Also you can get dual processor machines - they are great, but they limit your choice in OS to Win 2K, Win NT and a *nix system. There are only a few motherboards out at the moment which support dual processors, compared to the number for single processors. Apparently dual Athlon MPs run a lot better than dual Intels, but AMD are relatively new to the dual processor game, so we'll have to wait and see.

Worth noting that AMD are working on a 64 bit processor which will, unlike the Intel's 64 bit effort, have backwards compatibility - and apparently it could be coming out this year.

Motherboard
The motherboard is the bit that holds everything together, and as you may imagine, getting it right is crucial to building a decent machine - get it wrong and at best things won't fit and it won't turn on, at worst things will get damaged. There are a lot of motherboards out there (sometimes called mainboards) - the choice is scary. Your choice will be cut down by what you want to plug into it - primarily your processor, since that determines what type of chip socket you need. Those motherboards will then accept certain types and speeds of memory, and will have various interfaces and on-board gadgetry. There are also lots of makers of motherboards. I like Abit motherboards, have bought 5 or 6, haven't had any problems yet. Make a list of motherboards that do what you want, then, if you still have a choice, I'd go for Abit, although it is just personal choice - I know people who love and hate the various manufacturers, so it's up to you. Pick on specs, then price, then just go for the one with pretty colours.

Jargon; ATX = the computer can control its power supply (ie turn itself off when you shut down)... AT = it cant. First, cut away the ones that won't support your chosen processor[s] (check what slot/socket it supports). Then check what type of memory and the memory speed it supports, what graphics card socket it offers, what hard drive interfaces it provides. Motherboards also often come with on-board graphics, sound and network cards. These can be a mixed blessing - if you're happy with them, it cuts the overall cost of the machine. However, they do increase the cost of the motherboard, and in my experience the only thing of quality is onboard network. If you want decent sound and graphics, go for separate cards. Bear in mind though, if the mobo that you want has somethign onboard that you don't want, you can disable it later. The expansion choices tend to be for internal cards; things like ISA, PCI, AGP, PCIe etc. Decide what you will need to plug into it. Then you have internal drives such as hard drives and CD/DVD drives, which run off IDE, SCSI, SATA etc. One thing you may want to pay attention to is motherboard size, case size, and connector positioning. Look at where the drives will go in your case, and look where the connector positions will be. I have

often built a machine only to find that the IDE cables don't quite reach the drives, or that the SATA connector juts out into a drive bay. Worth bearing in mind.

Memory
RAM comes in different types, different sizes (physical and memory) and different speeds. Check what types of ram your processor and motherboard require - things have probably moved on since 2002: There are currently two popular speeds of SDRAM; 100mhz and 133mhz. There's RDRAM, but that's expensive and I haven't bothered looking at that. There's also DDR SDRAM is effectively double the clock speed, since it reads and writes on both edges of the clock cycle. Choose a large amount of ram. It's fairly cheap now, and dropping all the time, so go as high as you can afford. If you're running Linux you could start at 128MB for a machine to play with, but you shouldn't really consider anything less than 512MB if you want to do anything serious. For Windows 2000/XP you're looking at 1GB for a decent machine, and Vista wants as much as you can afford. But either way, you can never have too much RAM. Check your motherboard, check your bus speeds. Decide how much RAM you need, then double it. But most importantly, check around for reviews of reliable suppliers - don't be tempted to get cheap RAM, it's cheap for a reason. I have done it in the past, and regretted it - dodgy memory makes your machine unreliable, and you only have to end up spending twice as much to get decent ram in the end.

Graphics Card
Although you can go with on-board graphics, if you want to play games or do anything remotely graphical, you're going to want a separate graphics card. Look around some tech review sites for benchmarks. Unless you have a swimming pool full of cash, you probably don't want to go for the very best - even though the bar on the graph may be longer, it's probably not worth the extra premium you'll have to spend. On the other hand, unless you want to upgrade your card every year you won't want to get the cheapest - that's false economy. I usually go for a card that reviews well, and is two or three spots behind the best. Then look around for the good deals - one chipset may be implemented by many different manufacturers, and although there will be minor differences in tech, they'll mostly differ on price.

Sound Card

If you are going to plug speakers into your computer, it would be worth buying a separate sound card. Creative hardware is great, but the software is bloaty and wants to eat your system, so it may be worth looking around at some of the alternatives. You can find very fancy sound cards with front-mounted bays full of audio sockets and remote controls - but, talking from experience, they're often just a waste of money. I usually end up getting the cheap Creative cards - you know they'll be good quality, but they don't cost the earth. Unless you're an audiophile who has a fancy speaker setup, just pick some that will worth with your 5.1-or-whatever speakers. If you do go with Creative, it would be worth checking to see what processes are running one you'd installed the software, and checking with Google to find out what they are; some Creative processes are very wasteful of resources, and some are even worse.

Hard Disk
Think how much space you want. Then triple it. At least. I thought 'Hmm, 5gb should be good...', got a 25gb and one year on it was full. Next machine I went for 120GB storage, and I still ran out of space within 6 months. Then choose between IDE, SCSI and SATA. You'll probably want SATA, which is the newer standard that's gradually replacing IDE. Because it is comparatively new it does face some compatibility issues (in Linux in particular), but it's usually nothing a patch won't fix. SCSI is rediculously expensive and sometimes has compatibility issues, but is faster and more reliable. IDE is the slowest. SATA is often the same physical hard drive as the IDE drive, but just with a faster connection to your motherboard. You can link hard drives together by using RAID (redundant array of inexpensive/independent disks); RAID 0 is where you stripe the data across hard drives so it's a lot faster (about SCSI speeds, requires min of 2 hds). RAID 1 is where you mirror hard drives so if one hard drive fails, you have a backup and can replace the failed drive without losing data (requires min of 2 hds). RAID 0+1 is where you do both (requires min of 4 hds). RAID 5 is where you stripe the data and have a third hard drive as a parity check, so you can stripe and mirror, but cheaper (requires min of 3 hds). As for manufacturers, look at Maxtor or Seagate. I always used to swear by IBM, but then 6 of my 8 drives failed. And FWIW, I've only ever heard bad bad bad things about Fujitsu drives.

Cases
Simple and obvious fact: the more you spend, the nicer they are. It's often a good idea to get a really good one - I bought a Lian Li PC60 in ~2001, and 6 years later I continue to use it, just with a different machine inside. Things you should look for in a case are the number of drive bays (internal for hard drives and external for CD/DVD), and reviews of build quality. The ability to separately remove the front, top and sides is a handy bonus, and will make installation and maintenance a lot easier. But possibly the most important thing in choosing a case for a performance system is air flow. Air flow is important because you want to keep your machine cool. Fans in the front and in the back are great - they draw the air in, over the hot components and pull it out the back. Filters are also crucial, unless you want to have a monthly clean with an air duster. Then there's also the sound factor. Lots of fans can mean a loud machine, and there's nothing worse than that. Some cases make a point out of silencing the hard drive vibrations and clicks, clonks and whirrs from your machine, and you'll be surprised how much a different it can make. Silent fans are worth their weight in gold, especially if you want a media PC. Just make sure you get one which will be compatible with your motherboard (i.e. if your motherboard is an ATX, get an ATX case).

Extra bits
Monitor - 17" if you're pushed for cash; 19" if you're serious and 21" if you're loaded/going blind. Widescreen optional, multiple monitor setup is nice. TFT is the flat one, CRT is the big chunky one you don't want. CD/DVD drives - be aware the faster it is, the noiser it will be. There's a huge range of CD and DVD drives; some have trays, others are slot loading; some just play, others burn too. Some are cheap, others are not. I never have much luck with my drives - my Plextor tray is broken, my Pioneer slot loaders are unreliable, and my unbranded drives are slow or fail to even detect the disc. I don't know what to advise here, other than read reviews, and don't skimp. And the other bits such as a mouse, keyboard, modem (always external) and speakers. Read reviews for these things, and see what you can find.

Finally connectors, screws and leads. Most things should come with your components (with the cases, drives, sound cards etc - you'll probably end up with too many) - but some motherboards only come with one IDE or SATA cable, so it may be an idea to get another one just in case. Also bear in mind that the power cable may not be for a UK power supply, so couldn't hurt to pick up a couple of those too.

Making it
These pictures are from the computer I built in 1999, but they get the general message across. The text is, however, up to date.

Getting it to turn on
First open all the boxes and make sure everything that should be there is there, that it's intact, and you've got enough leads. Order the stuff you're missing (if it's your first time then you'll prob have forgotten summat :) ). Earth yourself and your tools (touching a radiator works for me). Next strip the plastic/metal surrounds from the case (ie the sides, top and front - in some the top and sides will be one big bit of bent metal, others will be separate) so you can get in at everything, and sit the case so that the big hole where everything goes is facing up (ie if it's a tower case, sit it on its side). You should have found some risers and screws in with your case; risers may look something like this (only a little less blurry):

This type here push through from the outside and clip in neatly... others may screw. They may look different - if they do, don't worry; it's just so we can screw the motherboard into the case without the circuitry on the back touching the case and blowing up or something. The case will have lots of holes, but you only want to put a few risers in... sit the motherboard in the case and make a note of where the screw holes in the motherboard line up with the holes in the case. Take the motherboard out, put the risers in, then put the motherboard back in and screw it down:

Be careful not to twist or bend the motherboard while doing this. Ok, now you've done that, go have a drink.

Now we've screwed the motherboard to the case, connect it up. The case will have little leads for the LEDs on the front, the power and reset buttons, and the internal speaker etc. Look at your motherboard manual for details as to where they go - really the only important ones are the power, reset and speaker ones (the speaker will report any errors when we come to turn it on):

As you can see, it already starts to get messy. Also don't forget to connect the biggest plug from the PSU to the motherboard. Should only go in one way round, and most should click in. Good. There are sometimes additional power cables for the motherboard - check your instructions in case. Now we've finished putting the motherboard in:

Next, connect the processor[s] and their fans and heatsinks:

My PII came with its heatsink and fan built on, but the Celerons and Thunderbird were seperate, and they are fun to install - they hurt my fingers. You may like to apply some thermal compound, such as Arctic Silver III, in order to increase heat conductivity between the processor and the heatsink - I've put some instructions at the bottom. Also, if you're going to use a screwdriver or summat to prise the heatsink clip in with, make sure you dont accidentally scratch your motherboard, rip out a resistor and have to send it back saying 'It was like this when I got it' cough cough... Next goes the memory. Get the memory and put it into the motherboard. Easy; open the white clips, slide the RAM in (nearly all RAM can only go in one way round), and the white things will clip in when they're done:

Now the graphics card (unless you have onboard graphics); remove a backplane thing if you need to, the graphics slot should be at the top:

Finally connect the monitor to the graphics card, plug the monitor in, turn it on. It should come up with a 'No signal' message or similar. Now for the moment of truth. Connect the computer to mains. Check for a power switch on the PSU (at the back - not all have them); flick it to 'on' if there is one. Push the power button. You should see the motherboard boot itself up, then complain that it can't find a bootable media or similar. If it doesn't, check the connections, check the jumpers, check the manuals, and try again. If possible, replace components from other computers you have. If you locate a faulty component, pop it back in the box and post it back. You're a bit screwed if it's the motherboard, but hey, that's life. I haven't had a motherboard fail yet, but then someone has to be unlucky. Turn it off again and have a cuppa.

Getting an OS

Put the hard drive in it's bay:

Connect it to the PSU and controller (ie Primary IDE). If it is IDE, set it's jumpers so that it's master surprisingly, this will be your primary master... SCSI is more complicated, go read the motherboard manual. Next put the floppy drive and cd drives into their bays:

Connect them to the PSU and their controllers. Floppy has its own. If you're having one CD drive and one hard drive on IDE, put the CD on a different controller to the hard drive. Basically one controller can control only one device at a time. If you're going to have two hard drives, put them on different controllers because you'll use them more than the CD drive. Now you have a computer you can install an OS onto. Plug in a keyboard and mouse now. Try booting off the CD drive (most new motherboards support it). Failing that, boot from floppy. When I got to this stage on this computer, I chose to run DOS, fdisk and format to set partitions, cos I like it. Use

whatever you like, but these are hard to beat for control. Due to the wide variety of OSes, I can't go into details here. Good luck.

The 'extras'
Now, having turned the machine off, plug in any other drives and cards you may have; ie a zip drive:

sound card, network card:

modem, scanner, printer etc. I suggest installing each thing separately, and rebooting between each install - may take extra time, but makes it easier to keep track of problems. Follow the installation instructions which come with each device.

Enjoy
Now all you've got to do is put the case covers back on:

Take lots of photos, install some software and invite your friends round.

Misc hints
Applying thermal compound: Arctic Silver III
Arctic Silver III comes in a little tube. There are very comprehensive instructions onarcticsilver.com, but here's my abridged version. Worth reading the official instructions. 1. Clean both the bottom of the heatsink and the processor core (the little silver shiny raised bit in the middle of the processor) with a lint-free cloth 2. Put some Arctic Silver III on the bottom of the heatsink, or if you have a heat spreader, put it on that 3. Scoop a little off and put it on the other thing that didnt have any 4. Put your hand in a plastic bag, and rub the thermal goop into the bottom of the heatsink using a finger in a clockwise motion. 5. Clean the bottom of the heatsink again with your lint-free cloth. That'll leave the compound in the microscopic ridges but not on the surface. 6. Next, spread the compound thinly and evenly on the processor using a razor or credit card or something similar. Finally, something that Sainsburys are useful for; their reward card. 7. Now put the processor into the motherboard and clamp it in if the holder has a clamp. It probably will :p 8. Now put the heatsink on the processor and clamp it in place, moving it around as little as possible. 9. Wash off any thermal compound from your hands using washing up liquid - the compound is basically grease, so normal hand soap dont do jack. 10. Pat yourself on your back, or if you find that difficult, get someone else to do it for you.

11. It will now apparently take about 48 hours to reach maximum efficiency. Or something.