Here's my crash course in computer hardware:
General Shopping:- If you want to run Windows you need a legit license. If you're in college you should be able to buy a copy of 7 through your bookstore for $40 or considerably less. If not you'll have to buy a license. Home Premium is around $100. You might be able to use a license from another PC, but you can only legally do so if you do not use the other PC anymore. Keep this in mind when calculating your budget.
- 32 bit OSes are limited to 4 gigabytes of memory. I highly recommend running 64 bit, because it's the current and future standard. The only downside is really old (early 90s DOS) software won't run natively on it, and you might have trouble finding drivers for old and/or obscure hardware.
- Cheap components are
always shitty. Specifically, avoid PC Chips, ECS, and ransom no-name parts like "SunshineTek".
- Cases are genberally exempt from rule #1, but for the love of [the diety of your choice goes here] DO
NOT BUY A CASE WITH AN INCLUDED POWER SUPPLY UNLESS IT IS AN ANTEC OR YOU DO NOT PLAN ON USING SAID POWER SUPPLY.
- The worst places to cheap out are the motherboard and power supply.
- Google/Bing/Yahoo/AltaVista the piss out of
everything you think about buying. "[CPU name and model number here" benchmark" will spit out bar graphs showing you the relative performance of different competing CPUs over the
- Unless you're doing a lot of gaming or are playing a lot of HD video, built-in Intel video is good enough for normal desktop use.
- If you're comparing two devices that both have 4 star reviews, but one has twenty reviews and the other has five hundred, you're probably better off with the latter.
- Bundles, bundles, bundles. NewEgg loves bundles and you should too. 99% of the time they're compatible parts you're going to need anyway.
CPUs- Given identical clock speeds and core count, an AMD CPU will have about 75% of the performance of an Intel. Their CPU architecture simply isn't as efficient.
- Cache (very fast memory built into the CPU) is king. That's one reason AMD can sell their CPUs so cheap; they skimp on the onboard cache and performance suffers because of it.
- More cores allows more
simultaneous tasks. A 3.0 ghz dual-core CPU will complete a single-threaded task faster than a 2.5 ghz quad, but if you're running a multithreaded program (one that can take advantage of multiple cores), the quad could pull ahead.
- Priority for judging a CPU's performance: model line, codename, number of cores, cache, clock speed.
- Never try to directly compare mobile and desktop CPUs.
Power Supplies- Antec and Corsair make really nice power supplies.
- Don't buy no-name brands like SunnyTech or CompuPower.
- Count on needing at least 650 watts to run a high end video card. If you run a midrange card, you can use a 550w power supply. Right now I'm running a Core 2 Quad, a GeForce GTX 260, and five hard drives on a 750 watt Corsair power supply.
- Some power supplies have "rails", basically individual power supplies. An 800 watt power supply with two rails is effectively a pair of 400 watt supplies in one case. If you get a power supply with two rails you will have to balance the load between the two.
Hard Drives:- Don't just look at capacity. RPMs and cache give you an idea of performance, of course the more the better. For desktops you want a 7200 RPM hard drive to boot and load your data from, there is quite a difference between 7200 RPM and 5400 RPM. 5400 RPM drives are fine for cheap bulk data storage.
- Don't bother with SSDs in desktops yet. Yes SSDs are fast, but they're very expensive for the capacity you get (4-10x the price of a hard drive of similar size), they burn out over time, and because you're not running off batteries you don't really have to worry about power consumption.
- Western Digital and Seagate are at the top of my preference list. Then come Samsung and Hitachi. I'm not partial to Maxtor drives.
- Contrary to the first point, don't bother with those fancy over the top 10k RPM drives. Unless you're doing hardcore gaming you won't notice much of a difference over a decent (and much cheaper) 7200 RPM drive.
- Some enthusiasts might tell you to run your drives in a RAID array. You don't need to. (RAID is a way to treat multiple hard drives as one, increasing performance, reliability, or both. It's great for servers and speed junkies, but you don't really need it.)
- Transfer speed matters, get a SATA 3.0 drive. SATA X.0 just means the drive controller can copy data at X megabits per second. 3.0 is common and cheap, 6.0 is faster and cutting-edge (therefore more expensive), 1.5 is old.
Motherboards- As I said before, avoid PC Chips, ASRock, and ECS motherboards. They're rubbish.
- Make sure the motherboard you get has solid-state capacitors. A lot of bottom-drawer motherboards use cheaper electrolytic capacitors (they look like little cylinders), which can go bad after a couple years. A few years ago there was a massive run of bad capacitors that affected nearly every electronics manufacturer.
- Gigabyte, Asus, Acer, and Intel all make good motherboards.
- Make sure the motherboard you pick matches the CPU you pick. They should both have the same socket and bus speed capabilities.
- MicroATX motherboards aren't necessarily less powerful than full size ATX boards. They're just smaller and have fewer expansion slots.
Video cards- The first digit of the model number is the generation. The second digit of the model number is like the trim level. The bigger these numbers are, the better. Newer cards at higher 'trim levels' can filter and process images better.
- More memory on the video card is good, however pay attention to the model number as well. A lot of manufacturers will throw extra memory on a low-end card to cheaply increase performance and make it look better.
- Generation and 'trim level' are generally more important than the amount of RAM the card has. If you can get a 1 gigabyte x20 card or a 768 megabyte x50 card for the same price, go for the x50. More memory won't make the card process images any better.
- You will need a good power supply to keep up with high-end video cards.
- SLI and Crossfire are technologies from Nvidia and AMD respectively that allow two video cards to work together. Good for speed junkies who need the latest and greatest, and also good for
cheap frugal people who can buy another one of their video cards in a couple years once they're cheaper to extend the life of their PC. Don't worry about this right now; it's a nice thing to have but not essential.
Cases- Just pick a case you like the look of. Thankfully, motherboard layouts are pretty much standardized, so any case should work for any motherboard. Just be careful if you get a full ATX motherboard and are looking at minitower cases, some of those can only take MicroATX, which are a few inches shorter.
- Cheap cases might not be made as well as decent ones. You can weed out the really crappy ones by ignoring the ones that cost less than $30.
- Dust filters are awesome.
That should cover the common-sense stuff. Time to play computer shopping!
e: I like this combo. It's got everything you need except the OS and video card for $520. 2.8 ghz quad core i5, 1 TB hard drive, 4 gigs of RAM (which will leave 2 free slots for later expansion)...
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.606598Throw in a $75-$100 video card and you'll be set for years. For example, this Radeon 5670:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127523
