everything you need to know about building your own PC

2. Case Mother- CPU RAM Hard Optical
• Power board • Heatsink (memory) Drive Drives
Supply
• Fans • CD-RW
• DVD-RW
• Blu-Ray

3. Make sure your case fits your
motherboard!
ATX, 12 x 9.6
Mini-ATX, 11.2 x 8.2
Micro-ATX, 9.6 x 9.6
Does it come with a power supply?
How much power?
http://www.journeysystems.co
m/?power_supply_calculator
How many molex and how
many SATA connectors does the
power supply have?
Does it come with case fans?
What size?
Inflow and outflow!
Molex Power SATA Power
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4. What form
factor?
ATX?
Mini-ATX?
Micro-ATX?
What socket size?
Intel?
1366 i7
775
AMD?
AM2
AM3
Maximum RAM?
SATA & IDE?
Expansion slots?
PCI
PCIE
AGP
Onboard Video?
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5. Intel or AMD processor?
How many gigahertz?
Dual Core or Quad Core?
Heatsink included, or purchase separately?
Do you want to overclock?
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6. How many slots in the
motherboard?
What’s the maximum per slot?
How much do you really
need???
DDR2 or DDR3?
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7. IDE or SATA?
Refurbished?
How large do I need?
80 gb—Surfing/Word
160 gb—Photos
250 gb—Music files
500 gb-1 tb—Movies
How MANY do I need?
Redundancy is key!
Internal or
external?
RAID solutions
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8. DVD-RW
Reads and writes CD’s and DVD’s
$25
SATA or IDE?
Blu-ray burner
$180
SATA
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9. Windows XP?
Windows Vista?
Windows 7?
Linux Ubuntu?
Linux Fedora?

10. http://www.newegg.com
http://www.geeks.com
http://www.tigerdirect.com
http://www.ebay.com