I really enjoy building and maintaining computers. I like figuring out what's wrong with them and I like building them from scratch. So doing research on what makes computers "go" is more play and less work for me. These general notes are from my own experience over the years. I hope they help you.
I have this Excel spreadsheet that I use for building computers from scratch. It helps me keep track of all of the parts. You're welcome to it. To download it, just click here. Feel free to use it, change it, whatever helps you the most.
Now, using this spreadsheet as a guide, let's talk about each component of building a box. These notes also apply if you're buying a box from Dell or Digital Tigers or an independent builder. As far as buying components, I've bought a lot of stuff from NewEgg and they've been great - but there are certainly other places to get computer parts. Just use your best judgement and shop around.
1 - The Case OK....don't scrimp on the case. It needs to be big enough to allow for easy access to the guts, and it needs good airflow through it. You'd be amazed at how much air enters and exits a computer while it's on. I use at a minimum a "mid-tower" case, and preferably a "full tower" case. You will likely be getting a case without a power supply.
Your case: a- should be easy for you to open the sides to, so you can get inside at the stuff and clean it. b- should have enough empty drive bays to accomodate your drives - hard drives, optical drives, floppy drives (yes - I still like floppy disk drives - must be the grey hair.) c- should have several fans or fans spaces (for fans to be added later). My "Rockets" can have 2 fans up front to pull air in, 2 in the back to exhaust it, and also have the fan in the power supply to pull air through it. Ventilation is important. You've got to get the heat out, so look at how the air flows through it.
Keep the cardboard box and packing material that your case comes in. It'll help you when you move - you'll already have a box and packing material to transport your QCharts computer in.
2- The Internal Fans Use good fans. Use quiet fans. Fans usually have decibel ratings on them. Lower is better. Also, you may want to look at the CFM rating (Cubic Feet per Minute) and get one of the higher CFMs. Fans are generally pretty inexpensive, somewhere around $10 to $15 each.
3- The Power Supply This is really important and often overlooked. For most configurations, you need a minimum of a 500W power supply. The main thing is that quad video cards consume power. You need to be able to supply it. A lot of Dell and other off the shelf computers come with a 250W power supply (or thereabouts). That's not enough for running a quad card. A quality power supply in the 500 to 600 W range will likely cost you about $100 to $120 or so.
4- The Floppy Drive Yeah - I know - a lot of you are like the what ???? But, I've been building my own computers since 1991 and I always had a 3½" floppy drive in them. I still do. Sometimes it DOES come in handy and they are cheap. I recommend putting one in if you can. They are handy to boot from if you have a computer that won't boot. I know, you can boot from USB drives and CDs also, but it's quick and easy to slap a Floppy boot disc in and see if the box will boot. And they are usually only about $13 or so. So I put one in when I build a computer.
5- The Hard Drive OK - here's one of the biggies. The only drives I use are 7200RPM, SATA II at 3.0GB/s transfer rate and an 8MB cache. I like Seagate drives the best. Capacity isn't really an issue for me, as most of these computers that I build are only used for QCharts and nothing (or not much) else. So an 80GB drive would do fine. IF you are going to use this computer for MP3s and email and etc etc, then you may want a bigger drive. But the hard drive needs to be fast. The 3.0GB/s transfer rate isn't fully realized, but it's faster than the alternative 1.5GB/s rate - so that's why I make sure the drives I install are at 3.0. Specifically, the Seagate drive I've used before and had good luck with is the Seagate Barracuda 7200.9 - model # ST3320620AS - You can look it up here for the specs. Here is a link to the PDF of the data sheet for this series of drives.
The Motherboard The motherboard should have support for:
- SATA II hard drives with a 3.0GB/s transfer
rate - built in networking (also WiFi if you want it) - built in sound (if you want to keep from using a stand-alone sound card)
Find a name brand board - ASUS, Abit, Gigabyte, and Intel are a few good ones, but are by no means the entire list. Do your research on the board you are looking at. Find the manufacturer's website. Do they have a tech support forum? Register and sign in. What are others saying about the motherboard you are considering? Do they like it? Had problems with it? Again, read - do your research. I've had good luck with the ASUS boards A8N32-SLI Deluxe and M2N32-SLI Deluxe in the past. (note: these boards require AMD processors)
The Processor I like dual core processors. I've used AMD processors (Athlon x2 Dual Core) in the computer's I've built. But the Intel dual core chips should be fine. If you can swing a fast, quad-core processor then do it. It's a matter of matching the fastest processor you can afford to the motherboard you want to run. The ASUS M2N32-SLI boards I've run use AMD processors. So that's the biggest reason I used AMD chips. I really liked (and still do) that motherboard. But if you find a board that you like the specs on, and it uses Intel dual core chips, that's fine too.
The question comes up - "Is QCharts a multi-threaded application?" The answer is yes - it is. That's why you want a dual core processor. Because it makes for a faster overall environment to run QCharts in. Because QCharts can move different processes on to different cores.
Nowadays, quad core processors are more and more common. If I were building a new computer today, I'd be building a quad core.
The RAM I've had good luck using Corsair RAM. You want fast, quality RAM. As fast as you can afford. I've used DDR2 RAM in all of the Rockets. You want RAM that runs at least at 800 MHz. Speed counts. The motherboard that you decide on will have the specs for the RAM it needs, so pay attention to those, and get high quality, fast RAM. DDR2 is an older spec now, so use the RAM your motherboard needs, and use high quality, name-brand, FAST RAM.
Video Card(s) I'm a big fan of quad cards - that is video cards that power up to 4 monitors at a time. Once you go to a multi-monitor workstation, you'll have a hard time going back to only one screen. The Rockets I have built have either run 4 or 8 monitors. So I either use one or two quad cards.
All video cards used must be PCI-e x16 cards. No x1 cards allowed. Here is a disscussion on the evolution of the PC bus structure. Scroll down the page and you can see a chart of bandwidth comparisons. You'll see why PCI-e x16 is the only solution. Obviously, since the video card plugs into the motherboard, you'll need to have a motherboard with at least one PCI-e x16 slot to hold the quad card.
The two quad cards I personally run are: 1- The Matrox Low Profile Quad video card Model: QID-E128-LPAF (link) 2- The PNY nVidia Quadro NVS440 x16 (link)
Yes, you can run dual cards (one card that powers up to two monitors) - but the same rule applies - they must be PCI-e x16 cards. And to power 4 monitors, you'll need 2 dual cards, instead of one quad card. This means your motherboard will have to have (2) PCI-e x16 slots - one for each dual card.
Monitors On the subject of monitors, bigger is better. I love a lot of screen real estate. I'd have an entire wall of monitors if I could.
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