Computer Info

Nowadays you want more than 1 gig of RAM if you possibly can – most mainboards (more PC way of saying motherboard ;)) have slots for 2 RAM sticks, and you can pick up 2gb of RAM for around £40 if you know where to look.

As for the mainboard itself, it’s more important to ensure the mainboard can cope with the processor you’re intending to put on it. A lot of internet PC retailers will sell a bundle – matched mainboard and processor. Also, it’s important that your PSU (power supply unit) can pass enough juice to the components. As for cases, a midi case (nothing to do with music) will fit most mainboards.

To be honest, with the low cost of relatively PCs nowadays, you can probably get a ready made PC, especially if you don’t need a monitor, for not much more than the cost of the components and, depending on your knowledge of the internal workings of PCs, the extra monetary cost will outweigh the grief of putting a PC together.

STAY AWAY FROM COMPAQ’s (if my memory serves me right they were bought out by HP…but still, had a few Presario’s…never lasted a year without going Pete Tong)

KruXx wrote:

to be honest none of this has made the slightest bit of sense to me, the answers you’ve gotten have changed the topic and now you seem more confused than you were to begin with.

Woah, slow down there… No sense? Topic changed? I see nobody talking about their last vacation, girls or the idiot who thinks he’s come up with an idea for an emissions free engine!

You’ve not said nothing that hasn’t been said before.

KruXx wrote:

A motherboard which can hold 2gig of ram is easy to come by, and can be picked up fairly cheap £70+ / $110+

£70+ != $110+

At current exhange rates £70 Sterling roughly equals $140 US. You can’t even say that the $110 is because ‘things are cheaper in the states’ as I’ve just found a motherboard that supports Intel Core 2 Processors, a 1066Mhz FSB, 8Gb DDR2 memory, PCI Express (16x), 4x SATA 3Gb/s connectors, S/PDIF input/output (both optical and coaxial) and much more… for $86.25 US!

[url:3635qepn]http://www.mwave.com/mwave/Skusearch.hmx?scriteria=BA24085[/url:3635qepn]

Oh, and speaking of Intel…

KruXx wrote:

try to stay away from Pentium as they are made mainly for applications that are windows based.

Oh yeah, because AMDs are designed for all those DOS/non-Windows based applications! AMD Fanboy by any chance?

KruXx wrote:

At the moment e-buyer has an offer on External & Internal hard drive units.. 500GB for £70

Oh dear, oh dear! Stay away from external hard-drives unless absolutely necessary!! Especially USB ones. USB hard-drives use main CPU processor time to transfer data to/from memory, internal IDE drives use DMA (Direct Memory Access) or advanced variants which requires no CPU to transfer data. If internal SATA drives don’t have DMA I’m sure they will have something similar.

KruXx wrote:

Don’t buy a PC from Dell

Thats the only thing you’ve said that others haven’t (and I actually concurr with that, Dells are sh*te!)

When it comes to building your own computer there’s only 1 peice of advice you should listen to: Go for the best of what you can afford and make trade-offs between componants/parts depending upon what you want the computer to do…

If you want to do audio you don’t need a super whizz-bang (expensive) graphics card… even if you want to use Photoshop you still don’t need that super whizz-bang graphics card… if you want to play high-end 3D games then you’ll need that super whizz-bang graphics card.

You don’t also need 500Gb of hard-drive storage (well not unless your planning to store hundred of thousands of MP3s, thousands of WAV files, hundreds of DVD quality films or millions of uncompressed images). You can go for a slightly smaller (cheaper) hard-drive and spend the rest on a better/faster processor.

Here’s a little trick though: If you have a computer that is capable of holding 8Gb of RAM but you don’t need to use the full 8Gb then only use 4Gb of it! After a couple of years if you start to notice applications slowing down then add the other 4Gb of RAM and it will feel like you’ve had a completely new computer… which is always a nice feeling!

Shades