VIDEO GAMER X BUILDS A SUPER COMPUTER

The time has come to give birth to a personal computer so grand, it will tower above all those that have come prior and remain a monument to those that will follow. I have plenty of PC's, and I don't really need another, but essentially this will be a labor of love, a Michelangelo's Sistine Ceiling, ultimate PC. Now kiddies, I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you have a wad of cash big enough to choke a horse, because anyone can build a great machine for half the price of what I'm doing. I'm just lucky enough to have enough money to blow on this, and I'm not married, so I don't have the wife to bitch about me spending away the savings. A PC like what I'm building will probably not go obsolete for 4 years, but you know that game as well as I do, a PC is always obsolete, but at least mine will have somewhat a jump on things.

Mind you, I'm not buying ALL the stuff to build this computer all at once, or I might not be able to pay my bills this month. Rather, I want to complete it in phases, starting from the case and chassis, finally ending by installing the operating system. If you've never built a PC from scratch before, it can be rewarding knowing that put it together yourself, and this can give you a good education about how PC's work on the inside of the box. Once you make one yourself it's not hard to translate that knowledge to making money doing it for other people. Since I'm not tackling the whole job at once, this give my the opportunity to get feedback about what step I should take next before I spend the money and add the part.

To build a PC you need the parts, just like a car that you drive before it was a car it was a pile of parts, before that it was molten steel, before that it was buried in the ground wating for humans to mine it out and refine it. What great is I don't need to mine the aluminum, copper, and gold on my PC, smelt it, or even fabricate the dies to manufacture the processor and construct the components, I'll let someone else do that for me. Sure enough all the parts you need to build a PC can be obtained either in your local PC dealer, a big national chain like Circuit City, or found online. Putting a PC together is kind of like following the model instructions to a LEGO kit. There are some room for monifications, but mostly everything works the same and it follows a specific plan.

If you're at least a little bit knowledgable about computers you already know what you need to have a computer, and have it work, so some things are obvious. First you need the "shell" or case, and the chassis (the frame). Most PC's you buy in the store are branded with their manufacturer's logo's like Sony or HP, and have a specific form for a series of that product line. You don't have much choice there, most of them look the same, kind of bland and functional, sometimes they round off the corners or change the color or shape of the power light. Most PC towers you buy in the store are classified as MiniTower ATX cases. Mini Towers only usually give you two 5 1/2 Drive bays, and three 3 1/4 bays (2 are usually hidden with one containing the Hard Drive). PC Dealers and specialty shops often have what are called "white box" PC's. You have probably seen these, you go over your buddy's house and his PC is usually that creamish color, and there is usually no logo, or some oddball company you've never heard on a sticky lable on the front. There are a few classes of PC case/chassis that follow this scheme, Mini Tower, Mid Tower, Full Tower, and a Server, or Horizontal/Rackmountable case. When you have a Mid or Full tower you have a lot more room inside and more space for drives. You'll notice that a Full Tower has anywhere from six to ten 5 1/2 Bays, and several 3 1/2 bays. The Term ATX refers to a type of standardized size motherboard (aka mainboard) that fits into a certain position on the chassis. If you have a dual processor motherboard you will probably not be using an ATX case and chassis.

The case is just the shell where all working components go. Of course every PC needs power to run, so you'll need a power supply. The power supply feeds electrical juice to the stuff inside and makes the computer work properly. Usually the Higher the wattage the better. The power supply usually hangs out around the top of the case and has a cooling fan in the back, with a recepticle for a standard power cable. On the inside of the case a lot of wires will dangle off of the power supply, and these are designed to be connected to the other components inside the computer like the motherboard, hard drives, floppy drive, disk drives, fans, etc.. Often times when you order a computer case you get the power supply with it.

If you want to keep cool air flowing through your PC, you can add extra cooling fans. Often if you overclock your processor in some fashion it is wise to have a lot of ventilation or even one of those PC fridges. You have to ask yourself thought, do you really NEED to overclock your processor and risk melting your mainboard? I don't know, but no matter what you do extra ventilation doesn't hurt. You can often add fans into other parts of the back of the PC, or the sides and bottom.

The case will usually come with a power button installed, all you have to do is connect it.

You can't have a PC without a motherboard (the old school term for mainboard). If you could equate a PC to a car, the motherboard is like the transmission, and the CPU is like the engine. A standard one processor ATX board often looks like a panel about 12" x 8.6" it has a socket for the processor, DIMM slots for RAM, PCI and AGP slots for additional cards, connections for the Ribbon Cable, ATA, power button, RAID controllers, USB, Parallell, PC speaker, etc. When picking out a good motherboard you need to plan on what you might be doing with the computer. A motherboard with more PCI and an AGP slot will give you a lot of exapandability to add extra graphics cards, network cards, USB Ports, IEEE 1394, SCSI, and serial/parallel ports. It's also nice to have more Memory and have a board that is very upgradable so that as technology advances you can keep up with new and greater amounts of RAM. If you want to get optimum performance the motherboard's Front Side Bus speed should be taken into account. Now since there are two major processor companies, it's important to make sure your motherboard supports the processor you want. If you want AMD, then you need a board that supports AMD, if you want Intel, same thing.

The motherboard and processor go hand in hand. A PC can not "Compute" if there is no processor, or central processing unit. Right now there really only two major producers of top quality CPU's, those being Advanced Micro Designs, and Intel Corporation. Intel boasts bigger clock speeds (operations per second) than AMD but some supporters say AMD perform operations more efficiently. I know that Motorola, Texas Instruments, and Cyrix make processors as well, but I'll be damned if I've ever seen any press on these guys making stuff for mass market PC's. What the hell happened to Cyrix anyway? Are they dead and gone? I remember one of my first PC's was a Cyrix 486 33Mhz. Both Intel and AMD have a lower priced grade of processor, Celeron and Duron, respectively, and they may indicate clock speeds equivalent to their more expensive counterparts, but the difference is in the "cache" on the processor, the bigger the cache the more room data has to fit in before it passes in and out of the processor. Celeron and Duron processors have 128 kilobyte caches, while Athlon and Pentium 4 have 512 kilobyte. You can get the motherboard with or without the processor. It might be a good idea to buy one with a processor so you don't have to worry about bending one of the pins on the bottom or cracking your motherboard trying to shove it in, a costly mistake in either case. As of writing this article the fastest processor available is an Intel Pentium 4, at 2.53 Ghz, and I think yesterday they just released a Pentium 4 at 2.8 Ghz. (Sigh... when will it ever end?) That's equivalent to 2,800 Mhz for those of you still with slower PC's. Do you need all that speed? Well...not now, but probably later on, more apps will demand that on the processor.

RAM, or Random Access Memory, is essential to normal function of the computer. RAM holds programs in active memory so that you can keep them in use while the PC is turned on. The more RAM you have the more things that the computer can do at once, and often more RAM improves performance by speeding the time the computer has to pass information in and out, from the Hard Drive to RAM. The PC doesn't have to create Swap files on the Hard Drive, which really slow things down. The PC you have now probably has SDRAM or maybe DDR RAM or RAMbus, or if you are creeping along with an oldie from before 1997, you have EDO RAM (I feel sorry for you...). With the prices of RAM being so cheap you can now have extravagant amounts of the stuff to the maximum your motherboard can handle. I've seen 128 MB of PC133 SDRAM as cheap as 17.99 after a manufacturer rebate! If your PC is slow then lack of RAM could be a contributing factor. RAM gets slotted in on the motherboard. It blows my mind, but today it's not uncommon to see motherboards capable of supporting 1, 2, and 3 Gigabytes of RAM, bigger than whole Hard Drives were half a decade ago.

The Hard Drive is where all your information is stored, like a digital filing cabinet. People underestimate the importance of a good hard drive until they lose all the precious data from a crash. A good rule to follow is this one: The bigger your hard drive, the better. I think the biggest drives now can be 160, and 200 Gigabytes each. From what I gather larger drives are coming. You will find that the quality of a Hard Drive is determined by a couple of factors. For instance the RPM's of the drive translate to "seek time" required to fetch the information that is sitting on the drive and pass it into RAM. The faster this is, the quicker the overall performance of the computer will be. RPM's usually go by the following speeds, 5400, 7200, and 10,000. It's also nice to have a good buffer for the data transfer, most drives have 2 MB Cache buffer, some have 8 MB, which is better. Hard Drives follow a standard called ATA, and you may see notations like ATA 66, ATA100, and ATA133. Most motherboards and ATA controller cards are backwards compatable to all the standards. Vast amounts of hard drive space may seem impractical, but with broadband allowing the download of large files like Movies and Music in mass quantity, they are quickly becoming a necessity to many people.

Some motherboards provide integrated graphics support, but usually these are of basic quality, just enough to get you by, some gaming, listening to music, lackluster MIDI sampling, etc. It's always better to do graphics and sound off the motherboard with more powerful boards designed specifically for that function. You don't need too fancy a graphics card to surf the internet, write an essay, or create a greeting card, but if you want to play games, or work with very large digital photographs or rendered enviornments, you need a good one. Usually a good graphics card has it's own processor and separate RAM memory devoted just for visuals. If you are a gamer, in the modern era of 3-D gaming, the bigger the better. You can never have a "good enough" graphics card if you are a hard core PC gamer. Now, I've discussed the advantages and disadvantages of PC gaming before, but really a computer is the ultimate gaming system, one that you can modify at your own whim.

With most households in the United States having a PC, many are adding second, third or even multiple PC's with the prices falling so drastically in the last 2 years. This being the case a good technology to consider is networking. Currently this can be done with wires, through your own home phone or electrical wiring, or wirelessly. You can get an 10/100 Ethernet card for a PC for about $25. If you want a standard wired network, you'll need a box that fits in the middle of all the other PC's called a router, switch, or hub. A switch is better than a hub because you don't lose speed when all the PC's are using the network simultaneously. A router is required if you want to connect to the internet, and you want all the PC's to share the internet connection. Wireless is brand new, and currently there seems to be a standard taking a foothold called 802.11b, or WiFi. Wired networking is faster, but wireless is cool because you can take a computer like a notebook for instance and use it anywhere in your house or outside your house. I've just started seeing this, but apparently there's a faster wireless format called 802.11e that allows for something like 53Mbps instead of 11MBps. I'm not sure if BlueTooth, another wireless standard is going to catch on, or what devices will support this, aside from the few out there like the Sony DCRTRV50 Network Handycam that I own. It seems to be more of a novelty at this point. Wired and wireless network equipment can be combined. A Local Area Network or Wi-Fi network allows several PC's to act as a larger PC, and can share a printers or scanner from different locations. All the networking gear I talked about is getting cheaper by the day, and is growing very quickly in popularity.

If you still use dial up, and want the cheapest way to access the net, your PC must have a modem. There is really only one speed of this device nowadays, 56kbps, and the max you get on dail up according to the Federal Communications Commission is 53 kilobits per second. If it wasn't for the modem there would be no internet, and no boom of the late nineties. The modem has been incredibly important in connecting the entire planet together in one global network called the internet. I guess the latest thing in modems, which has pretty much hit a plateau anyway is V.92, which means you can put your internet connection on hold when a phone call comes in and you get 53k upload and download instead of 33.6 k upload with a V.90 modem. You can buy a modem like this for $20. The modem is slowing phasing out and being replaced by the Ethernet card and Router.

The 1.44 MB floppy drive is officially dead folks, okay, so...continually putting in a PC is kind of moot, but I guess you could say it's like a nostalgic homage to what PC's once were, a prior era when everything happened from that little drive. In reality, the CD-RW or "CD burner" has basically rendered the floppy drive totally obsolete. CD-RW is standard on most PC's, even very cheap ones. Blank CD's are very cheap now, and with music downloading soaring in popularity CD-RW's are flying off the shelves to go into older PC's, and blank CD's have now passed recorded CD's in total units sold. I knew this was going to happen from the very first day I logged on to Napster, and as it were now more people than ever have jumped onto the MP3 bandwagon, thanks in part to all the media coverage relating to the death of Napster. The RIAA pretty much shot itself in the foot by putting such a stink up about Napster, and if anyone didn't know about downloading free music in MP3 format, then after suing them and having it shown on every news station on the planet, they sure do now. Smart move. Uh..oh... what's this I hear, DVD-Recordable, oh my gosh, you mean, I can download movies... and save THOSE to disks too? Joy! As it is DVD Recordable technology doesn't seem to have a standard yet. In essense DVD disks can hold up to 4.7 Gigabyes of information, and some 9.4 Gigabytes. The quirky thing about DVD-Recordable is that there doesn't seem to be one standard, rather 3 that I can decern. When you go to get a DVD-Recordable drive notice something. Some will say DVD-RW, DVD+RW, and DVD-RAM. Now this one tripped me up until someone told me about it. I didn't know there was a difference between DVD-R, and DVD+R; I thought it was a printing gimmick on the boxes for DVD burners. Sure enough there's a difference. What I gather is that DVD+RW is going to be the standard for DVD recording, but wait, don't count your chickens just yet, there's this blue laser technology coming out that companies in Japan have agreed upon that will revolutionize DVD, allowing for recording of up to 27 to 100 Gigs of data on a single disc. 27 to 100 Gigs on a single disc? You've got to be shittin' me? That's just sick right there. I can't imagine what would go on something like that, but when I fathom the future of video games, it's not hard to assume that photorealistic environments could require massive amounts of information. Furthermore expect the eventual introduction of some kind of holography technology, such things may require such supermedia for recording and storage of data.

The previous things I listed are basically the components of a PC. Since I'm only concerning this article right now with the tower part of the computer, I won't get into detail with monitors.