When you first decide to build yourself a custom desktop computer, the idea sounds great. It’s going to be cheaper than most of the pre-built systems at the store, perform better than most similarly priced machines, and you get the satisfaction of knowing that you built it yourself. But once you start reading up on all of the various components and configurations available, your excitement may turn to confusion, and your confusion into fear. Not to worry though, San Diego PC Support is here to help.
This is the first of many posts in our “Custom Built Computer” blog series, where we will cover every aspect of building your new computer, from choosing hardware to software installation. We will do our best to make even the most technical aspects seem like child’s play, and guide you through a successful computer building experience. Let’s get started.
Below you will find a general overview of the various components in a computer, what each component does, and how it effects overall computer performance.
The Motherboard
The motherboard is the biggest, most important part in your new computer. Much like the mother ship in your favorite sci-fi thriller, it serves as a link between every other component in the computer. Every single component in the computer hooks directly to the motherboard, and any time the components need to communicate with one another, they have to talk to the motherboard first. For example, if you need to open a Word document, the motherboard tells the hard drive to go find the file, then takes the file and sends it over to the processor, which then sends the information back through the motherboard to the video card, which then shows you the file. As you can imagine, if your motherboard is slow, this entire process will be slow. It is for this reason that we suggest purchasing only the best brands and models of motherboards.
The Processor (CPU)
The CPU, or central processing unit in your computer is, as you may have guessed, where information gets processed. Any time your computer needs to manipulate data, whether it be as simple as crunching numbers or as complicated as rendering graphics, if your computer is doing the manipulation, your processor is doing most of the work. It is a very important part of the computer, but oddly enough, speed isn’t always the number one concern. During normal use, such as surfing the web and reading emails, processors do not run at 100% of their potential. It is for this reason that the average consumer doesn’t need the fastest processor available. In fact, most people wouldn’t even notice the difference between a good duel-core processor and one that performs “4 times faster.” However, if you intend on playing newer, graphics-intensive video games or plan to regularly edit photos/videos you will want to go with a faster processor.
The Hard Drive
The main purpose of a hard drive is to store your data. Documents, pictures, videos, they are all stored on this drive. The only factor in determining how many files you can hold is the size of the hard drive. These days they come in sizes ranging from 120 GB (thats gigabytes) to 4 TB (terabytes, 1TB = 1000 GB). To give you an idea of what these sizes mean, a full length high-definition movie file, which is about the biggest file anyone ever deals with, is roughly 4 GB. An MP3 file is usually about 4 MB, which is 1,000 times smaller than our high-definition movie file.
The size of your hard drive won’t effect the performance of the computer, but there are a few specifications on hard drives that do. Most people will never know that these exist, but they are very important to look at when choosing a new drive. The first of these specifications is the hard drive speed. The higher the hard drive speed, the less time it takes for the drive to move to the sector of information you need to access, and the more data it can read from the drive per second. There are 3 common hard drive speeds sold today, 5400 RPM, 7200 RPM, and 10,000 RPM, and the faster the better. Unfortunately 10,000 RPM drives are still very expensive, so we suggest going with a 7200 RPM drive if possible.
Another specification to look for in a hard drive is the “buffer size.” All hard drives have a buffer, or an area to temporarily store data that will soon be transfered to or from the drive. A larger buffer is nice when dealing with larger files, or when editing movies. The average consumer can get away with using a smaller buffer and not notice a significant performance decrease. Typically only 32MB and 64 MB buffers are offered these days anyways, so price will often be the determining factor, but if you are optimizing performance you should go with the bigger of the two buffers.
The last specification to look at when choosing your new hard drive is called “seek time.” This is the time it takes for the drive to locate the data you have asked it to give you. The lower the seek time, the faster the drive will locate your file, and the faster it will get that file to you. Seek times are recorded in milliseconds, ranging from about 9ms to as much as 15ms. Now, you’re probably saying to yourself, “how would I ever notice the difference between 9 milliseconds and 15 milliseconds?” The answer is, you wouldn’t. But when your hard drive is loading a program, it is “seeking” hundreds of files at once, so a 5ms difference in seek time will be compounded by the number of files you are looking for, and the difference will become noticeable.
