Buying a Prebuilt Computer - Picking the right form factor

Now you have decided that you need a new PC, and hopefully narrowed it down to a few different brands of PCs. There are a few different sizes of PCs, and you need to figure out which one fits into your life best.

If you don't have a lot of space, choose a Small Form Factor. If you're putting it on the ground and sticking it back underneath the desk, size doesn't play an important role in picking a new PC. Sizes typically don't affect the price too much. You may pay a little bit more for the smaller-sized PCs, but now they are all built with the same hardware.

I know that you are thinking about the new PC in terms of having it now, but think about what it will be like four or five years down the road if you plan on having the PC a while. You might want a Blu-ray player, more RAM, or a bigger hard drive.

These points should be considered when you go to look for a new PC. Small Form Factors typically are built for the hardware in the case now, and offer few expansion options. A hard drive and RAM could be upgraded, but may only have a single PCI-Express slot. A typical tower might have a couple of PCI slots, a couple of 1-4x PCI-Express slots, and a PCI-Express x16 slot.

Picking the right hardware

The only stuff that really matters to how fast your PC is, is the hardware that runs it. The best thing to do is to check out benchmarks on the hardware that is in a PC you're considering.

Some areas in which manufacturers are trying to make an extra buck or two are memory and graphics cards. If you are tech savvy enough, you can buy RAM from a third party store and put it in yourself. It's a pretty straightforward installation. Hard drives are also in the same boat as the memory.

The only other hassle might be transferring over your data. As far as graphics cards, they don't really rip you off; they just take the users as number hungry as opposed to paying attention to performance. Many places will offer 512 MB cards, but they are the low-end cards; they just have a lot of RAM. This makes them seem more powerful than they are.

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