Building a PC?
 

I am thinking about building a new PC from the ground up, but first, I have a few questions:

1) How much should I expect to be paying for the parts, as opposed to buying a pre-made one.

2) What parts have to be compatible with what other parts, and how do I find out if they are.

3) Where (in Canada) can you reccomend to get parts (preferably online)?

4) How much time should I expect to take building it (assuming I understand basically what the inside of a computer is like, but have very little experience with adding/removing/replacing parts)?

5) What parts am I going to need, and possibly some reccomendations for cost effective pieces.


Thanky0u in advance to anyone who can help out, and I will keep you all posted on whether I actually decide to do this (I would need to find a way to make some money first).

Re: Building a PC?
 

Cost is about the same, but the good thing is of course you can build to exactly your specifications.

Just remember that you will need a good power supply, and a box that will fit both your motherboard and any drives you have.

You might want to think about one of the new micro form factor ones, such as shuttle pc use, as they take up very little space indeed...

As for time... Usually software installation and driver configuration takes far longer than putting the actual machine together.

As for spec - I've built an Intel Pentium 4 with nVidia graphics card and creative audigy 2 sound card, and it all works happily together and crunches seti work units like nobody's business

Re: Building a PC?
 

It depends on the specs, and whether you need to buy software as well. If you only count the cost of the hardware, it's generally quite a bit cheaper to build yourself.

Everything has to be compatible with other parts, otherwise it wont work. ;)

These days there's a better than good chance that everything you buy will work happily together, but need to make sure that the parts are suitible. You need to make sure the CPU has the same socket as the motherboard, if you get a motherboard with an AGP slot, you need to get an AGP video card instead of a PCI-E card and vise versa. Same goes for hard drives (SATA or IDE) and so on.

It depends on your skill level. If you've never built a pc before, you'll need to read all the manuals first and then take your time installing the parts, referring to the manuals while you work to check you've got it right. It could take between a couple of hours and a whole day.

The basic parts you'll need are:

Case
PSU
Motherboard
CPU & HSF
Video card
Hard drive/s
Optical drive/s
Monitor
Keyboard
Mouse

If the motherboard you choose has onboard video and you wont be using the pc for games etc, you might not need to buy a seperate video card.

Most cases will come with a PSU (power supply unit), but check that it'll be suitible.

The CPU will come with a HSF (heatsink/fan), which will be suitible unless you want to overclock.

As for reccomendations and other parts you might need, it depends on what you want to do with it.

My only problem with building PCs is that I'm always afraid I'll order a PSU and it wont fit in my case :D

I've got 5 spare power supplies, 180watts and up, and none of them fit in my hp pavilion :(

@Atmo - What do you mean by Optical Drive\s? Things like CD-ROM, Floppy, DVD, etc?

Also, can somebody give me an idea of what a good price to pay for some of the parts? I've done some reasearch, and I've found that a Motherboard is usually less expensive than a processor. Is that correct?

/edit - Also, does the motherboard come with memory, or do I need to buy seperately?

Optical drives are CD and DVD drives.
Floppy drives are not optical, there magnetic, like hard drives.

Yes, the motherboard is generally cheaper than the processor, but you have to have both. And the motherboard will probably not come with memory (unless you get a bundled package) so you will have to buy memory. Get at least 512MB.

Okay, I went through and looked at a bunch of parts, and picked out this list, and got a total price of $776 Canadian! Less than what I would have expected. I have a keyboard\mouse\monitor, so those are optional and I didn't include them. Could somebody please look through and tell me if anything conflicts? If so, could you look through the site and find something better? If anyone is feeling especially generous, they could also look at www.bestbuy.ca, but only if somebody has nothing better to do.

/edit - Oh, okay, I will need to get memory seperately. I'll look for that.

/edit 2 - Memory - http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18 x2

/edit 3 - I'm trying for whatever is cheapest, but still decent. My budget, well, I don't really have a budget, as I don't have any money right now :( I'm hoping to find a way to get some money, and possibly get my parents to pay for part.

What exactly are you planning on generall using your PC for? What's your budget? Those two questions alone are what need to be answered in order for us to help you choose the right parts.

If your system supports dualchannel, be sure to get at least two sticks of the same exact memory. (or four, or 6, etc.) so it works

Here's his parts list (with clickable links ;))
Case - http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18

Motherboard - http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18

Processor -
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18

Video Card - http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18

Hard Drive -
http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18

Other Drives -
Burner - http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18
DVD - http://www.futureshop.ca/catalog/pro...=&newdeptid=18



I'd recommend staying away from a Celeron.

Blah nonstandard oem cases!

Dells clam-shell case is the bane of all cases.