Albright Builds a Computer (31)

2 Name: Albright!LC/IWhc3yc : 2006-06-25 06:20 ID:erMTJ0cy

After a little (too little) research, here's the hardware I settled on, and why.

  • Case: The case is simply the box that all of the guts of the computer are put into I chose an Inland MATX Micro-Tower Case. There are two main case standards nowadays: ATX, and Micro-ATX. This is a Micro-ATX case. As you may have guessed, Micro-ATX cases are smaller, but the trade-off is that they have less room for internal drives.

*Motherboard: The motherboard is the "board" which either holds or connects to all the computer's components. As with the case, when you get a motherboard, you can choose between ATX and Micro-ATX varities. The main difference is that the Micro-ATX ones will have fewer expansion slots. They will also vary on what kind of processor they will support. The motherboard is probably the most critical component of your new computer, so make sure to do your research when you go to pick one. I chose an Asus P5VDC-MX board. I recognized the Asus brand from the boards my roommate bought, so I knew it was reputable. This board supports the processor I wanted to use (more on that below). Also, this board has integrated video and sound support, so I wouldn't have to buy a separate video and sound card (although I did anyway in the case of the video card, as mentioned below).

  • Processor: Intel Pentium D Processor 805 operating at 2.66 GHz. This processor is a dual-core processor (meaning that it is essentially one processor operating as two processors), and is a decent value for the money. It's also highly overclockable. "Overclocking" is the process of tweaking a processor to run faster than it was originally designed to run, the side effect being that it can also run hotter (possibly self-destructingly so if it's overclocked too much). In actuality, I'll probably never need to overclock it, but it's nice knowing I can if I want to.
  • Video Card: EVGA e-GeForce MX 4000. I basically picked the cheapest video card I could find that had video-out capabilities (in this case, it has an S-Video port in addition to a standard VGA port). As mentioned above, the motherboard itself had video-out capabilities, but it couldn't do TV-out, thus necessitating the extra video card. The two biggest providers of video card circuitry are nVidia and ATI; this is an nVidia card. That choice was arbitrary, but it was a good choice for reasons explained later. The video card goes into a special expansion slot on the motherboard called the AGP slot; this slot is specially designed for video hardware. There's a more general-purpose slot called PCI which works with video cards as well, but since my motherboard only has two PCI slots, I didn't want to take one up with the video card; one of those PCI slots needs to be taken up by the video-in card, whilst the other one will be taken up by the...
  • Wi-fi card: Belkin Wireless G Desktop Card. I thought that this card would be well-supported by Linux, and it turns out that earlier versions of the card were, but the version I got, version 5000, isn't. More on how I recitified this situation later. (The version number can be found on a sticker with a barcode on it on the bottom of the box.)
  • Media drive: i/oMagic LightScribe Internal DVD+-RW/+-R. I chose this drive because it was fairly inexpensive, it supports pretty much any writable DVD or CD media you can throw at it, and it has this cool feature which uses lasers to etch images into the top side of the CD, making it a CD burner and labeler all in one. Cool! It turns out the "LightScribe" feature only works on special LightScribe media, and currently only on Windows (or on Mac, but with a proprietary program only available with drives purchased from one certain vendor); no Linux support as of yet. Oh well. I haven't burned anything with it yet, but as a CD-ROM and DVD-ROM drive, it seems to work well.
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