Comments on: PC Construction Resources?

By: samlei72

samlei72 — Thu, 11 Feb 2010 01:20:33 +0000

this is very informative, useful and full of information.

http://www.transworldconstruction.co.uk/Service...
http://www.transworldconstruction.co.uk/Service...

By: Srdjan Pejic

Srdjan Pejic — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 14:09:01 +0000

I always found Tom's Hardware to be a good site for reviews and tutorials.

http://www.tomshardware.com/theme-build-your-ow...

By: bryanl

bryanl — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 12:05:30 +0000

Things haven't really changed too much in the past 10 years. Those new power connectors are most likely SATA.

By: Wilson Bilkovich

Wilson Bilkovich — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 11:58:07 +0000

Here's one possible resource:
http://arstechnica.com/hardware/guides/2009/10/...
AnandTech has a lot of good information as well, but they haven't recently summarized things into a guide.

If I had to pass on a few observations, they would be:
A) Motherboards are more important than they once were, and are back to being as expensive as they were in the Pentium Pro days.
B) Building 'complete' PCs is more important than before; you rarely need more peripherals than a video card and storage; making sure those are well-matched to the rest of your parts is your #1 chance to succeed or fail. This includes simple things like making sure your CPU is fast enough to keep your video card busy when you want it to, as well as trickier things like making sure your parts don't have known incompatibilities with each other.
C) Cases are important again; instead of lots of small warm parts, PCs have relatively few white-hot parts now. Here is a good resource for case reviews; spend some time on this step, it is worth it: http://silentpcreview.com/

Also, this is the era of optimizing for latency, rather than throughput, generally speaking.

By: jszmajda

jszmajda — Mon, 23 Nov 2009 10:44:02 +0000

Not *quite* what you're looking for, but whenever I build a new PC I use the ArsTechnica guides at http://arstechnica.com/guides/ (current guide is http://arstechnica.com/hardware/guides/2009/04/...). The “Hot Rod” is always a good bet in terms of price / performance trade-offs.