Building A System from Scratch, Part I - What do you need?
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Firstly, having made the decision to do it yourself, you need to assess your needs. While we all want the best possible PC that money can buy, if all you'll be doing is word processing, there's not much point to spending $400 on a graphics card. So the first thing to do is decide on your budget based on your requirements. Give yourself a ballpark figure that you can either fall slightly short of or slightly exceed.
You need to take your software requirements into consideration at this stage as well. Although it is possible to run your PC completely on free, open source software if necessary, be aware that this software will usually be download only, and may be trickier to install than software purchased from a retailer. If open source does not appeal to you, remember that official, and importantly, legal software can often be bought very reasonably on auction sites such as Ebay.
With integrated sound, graphics, and connectivity on many modern motherboards, you can get away with buying fewer separate components, but at the very least, you will definitely need one of each of the following:
- Case with at least two case fans
- Power Supply Unit, if one is not included with the case.
- Motherboard
- Processor
- Heat sink and processor fan
- RAM Module
- Hard drive
- CD ROM drive
- Floppy drive
- Connecting cables
- Monitor
- Keyboard and Mouse
Depending upon which motherboard you decide to go for and what you intend to use the computer for, you may also need one of each of the following:
- Sound card
- Graphics card
- Modem
- Network card
- DVD ROM Drive
Of course, once you have built your PC and begun to store all your increasingly important data on it, you'll need to think about doing backups. It's a good idea to work this into your plan and budget for it at this stage, so you'll probably find that you can justifiably include a re-writable CD or DVD drive instead of either of the ROM drives, or even a combo drive that reads and writes both DVDs and CDs.
Next: Where to start: the motherboard >>
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