My Hardware

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www.geocities.com/dt2pc  ~  Last updated: July 2004

Hardware Listing

Here is my hardware.  Notes follow below.

Notes

• I mail-ordered the components from Newegg.com, which I found to be extremely reliable, cheap, and fast to deliver.  I also looked at TigerDirect, but their prices (in my experience, at the time of writing) were slightly more expensive.  The other deciding factor was the Newegg sold retail CPUs, whereas TigerDirect only sold OEM CPUs (i.e. without the bundled heatsink and fan).
• I chose the Athlon 64 because of the long-term potential of the chipset; I didn't want to buy in to an Athlon XP when that is clearly not where AMD's focus currently is.  I'm excited about the idea of 64-bit Linux, as well.  Note that you can, however, get some great deals on Athlon XPs right now.
• I have heard lots of good things about this motherboard.  Check out the review in Personal Computer World's (UK edition) July 2004 issue for only one of many examples.  I have heard that with this particular motherboard it's very worthwhile to flash the BIOS to ensure compatibility with certain hardware.
• Crucial is a trusted name-brand memory.  It only cost a few dollars more than the cheap stuff, so I took the $10 hit and bought stuff I feel good about.  Note that I've chosen DDR-400; if your motherboard supports it, it seems fairly silly to buy anything slower (since the price differential is so low).
• With regard to the new hard disk, one of my criteria early on in building this system was SATA (Serial ATA).  The cords are smaller (better airflow in the case), it's faster than IDE (or Parallel ATA), and you don't have to mess with master/slave jumper settings.  Later on, after my wallet has recovered, I'll add a second WD 80GB hard disk and put the two in a RAID 0 array to boost performance (two 80GB disks in a RAID array are faster than one 160GB disk, and it offers more flexibility).
• I liked the look of this case, the fact that it had front USB ports, and its room for extra case fans.  Lots of room for flexibility here.  I almost bought a case with a built-in power supply, but I decided at the last minute not to, as every review of a built-in power supply (i.e. comes with the case) that I've ever read has said how crappy the power supply was.  Not something that I wanted to skimp on.
• The case fans were cheap.  Nuf said.  If they die I'll buy more.
• The thumb screws were a convenience.  You don't need them, but I don't want to think of opening my computer as a chore.
• My current mouse is a Microsoft IntelliMouse, and it still works fine, but it's not quite as precise as a new one, and it's not optical, so since I was paying for shipping anyway...
• The graphics card will more than suffice for most applications.  High-end gaming will suffer, and of course when the time comes I'll want to upgrade it with an AGP card (which is much faster than PCI), probably with 256MB of memory.  But I can be patient for now.  (Note that my old Dell had no AGP slots, so I didn't have much of a choice when I wanted to buy a card that could play Jedi Knight II on it.)
• Don't forget the anti-static stuff.  It's cheap, and frying your brand new chip is no fun.

A Note About Newegg

I can only speak about what I've had personal experience with, so naturally I cannot compare Newegg.com to other online retailers.  But I have been very impressed with the service to date.  I placed my order over a weekend, it was shipped that Tuesday, and it arrived in my APO/FPO (i.e. military overseas post office box) within one week (I don't know if it was the following Monday or Tuesday).  This is exceptionally speedy service.  The prices were also very good, and the layout of the website made finding what I wanted and researching components a breeze.  If you find a better site, let me know about it and I'd be delighted to try it out, but for now if I ever need to buy more components in the future, I'm starting with Newegg.

Assembly - Links to get you started

I found the following sites very useful when learning how to put all this together for the first time.

General "Build a PC" sites:

• http://www.tomshardware.com/howto/20020904/
• http://www.buildyourowncomputer.net/learntobuild.html
• http://www.pcmech.com/byopc/

General computer hardware sites for reviews, how-to's, etc:

• http://www.tomshardware.com/
• http://www.anandtech.com/
• http://www.pcworld.com/
• http://www.newegg.com/

AMD has some videos online for installing a processor (CPU) and its heatsink/fan.  These instructions are actually for an AMD Athlon XP chip, but it's nice to see something if you've never done it before.

• http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_869_4348^6678,00.html

FYI, the actual AMD Athlon 64 component page is here:

• http://www.amd.com/us-en/Processors/TechnicalResources/0,,30_182_869_9460,00.html

Next Step

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