Building a Computer the Fat Joey Way.

So if you managed to muddle through my last blog you know that I'm building a new computer for my mother. Her old E-machine finally bit the hard one and died quietly in its sleep. My mom has three goals when it comes to using a computer...

1. Play solitaire or bejeweled until her eyes burn out of her head.
2. Check her e-mail.
3. Download pictures from the camera her boyfriend bought her for Christmas.

That's it. That's all. Nothing fancy or high powered... she does not play games other than the a fore mentioned abominations so she really doesn't need anything that is on the bleeding edge of technology (my mom's translation = expensive).

That being said there are a few rules when speccing out a system that I am going to review. These are simple truisms that everyone should follow when building a new system.

1. Your motherboard is the foundation of your build. Don't skimp here. Cheap motherboards are the source of many a good builds downfall. Paying less than 50 bucks for a brand new motherboard which has one of the latest chipsets is a bad, bad, bad idea. You should ideally look for mobos from companies that have good reputations and have been around for a while. This build utilizes one of Biostar's T-Series boards. It sports the AMD/ATI 780G chipset.

Remember to match your processor to your chipset...

Intel Processors work best with Intel Chipsets.
AMD Processors work best with AMD/ATI chipsets.

AVOID nVidia chipsets, VIA chipsets, and Chipsets with weird numbers or lots of identifiers... for example I have no idea what an Intel 915GFX board is... but I would much rather have an Intel X58 board. The more identifiers (the G, F, X) the more features have been tacked onto the original chipset (which is 915) to make it more palletable to consumers and OEM system builders.

2. The more tech you slap in there the more problems you are going to have. I love the latest and greatest tech gadgets. I really am a technophile... that being said when your speccing a system you really need to think about what your going to be using it for.

When I spec a new system I research the upgrade paths carefully because I don't want to be boxed in if I decide to upgrade later on. I usually try to purchase processors and mobos that have been around for at least one generation cycle (about 18 months) because most of the bugs and cruft have already been worked out via BIOS and driver updates. So I can be assured the tech is fairly stable. This saves me the agony of having to troubleshoot new tech glitches along with the normal amount of troubleshooting that goes with a new build. So the moral of this story is be conservative.

3. Quad cores are nice and give you bragging rights. Dual cores are better than quad cores depending on what your working on... and cheaper too. Content creators, Video editors, Photoshop guru's, illustrators, cartoonists, should all get Quad core procs; because, the software that you will use scales well with four cores.

Gamers, light duty photo editors (removing the red eye from pictures), compressing videos to put on Youtube, and general word processing and web browsing should use dual core procs. The software that you use does not scale (i.e. you won't see any performance difference between a dual core and quad core clocked at the same speed) well or at all with more than 2 processors.

Ok, thats it for this round.. to finish off I am going to list some of the tools that your gonna need for your first build.

1. A magnetic screw driver (philips head... I hope whoever invented non-magnetic screw drivers burns in the tenth level of hell... fuck you dude).

2. A good pair of needle nose pliers.

3. Cable ties

4. A small, bright flashlight.

5. Optionally you may want to pick up a screw kit with some extra screws and motherboard standoffs... as well as a voltage meter and ground tester... Powered screw drivers from like Black and Decker are kind of overkill... in fact I prefer to use manual tools simply because they give you a better feel and control over how much you tighten your screws... its way too easy to strip screws when your using powered tools.

Ok, thats all folks. Later. Fat Joey