Cabinet:

A desktop or tower case is required to hold all your components together. It is

your personal preference on which one you decide to choose. The desktop or
tower cases come in two form factor, AT and ATX. Nearly all the cases made
nowadays are ATX as the motherboard manufacturers make majority of their
motherboard in the ATX form. All cases come with PSU (Power Supply Unit),
space to mount your FDD, CD-ROM, HDD etc. The case that I would be using for
the demonstration is an ATX Midi Tower case as shown below.
Mother Board

A motherboard is a Printed Circuit Board (PCB) that connects your processor,

memory and all your expansion cards together to assemble a PC. Most
motherboards made nowadays are ATX. An ATX motherboard has the standard
I/O (Input/Output) connectors such as PS/2 ports, parallel ports, serial ports, etc,
built onto the motherboard. Old AT motherboard on the other hand uses I/O
cards and cables which need to be plugged into the motherboard, which gets a
bit untidy. AT motherboard requires AT keyboard and AT power supply. ATX
motherboard fits into an ATX case and comes with an ATX power supply. The
following is a picture of an ATX motherboard.

As you have seen from the enlarged image, the motherboard comes with various
expansion card slots and connectors. It comes with 3 different expansion slots, 1
AGP, 5 PCI and 1 ISA slot. The AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) is where you
would connect and AGP graphics card. The PCI slots is where you would
connect cards such as sound card, modem, tv card etc. The ISA slot is quite an
old type of bus which is handy if you got some old hardware such as an old ISA
modem or sound card. The other connectors includes the Intel socket 370 CPU
connector, the DIMM slot for SDRAM, IDE connector for connecting your HDD,
CD-ROM or other IDE devices, and FDD connector.

Processor

The processor also known as CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the brain of a
computer. The faster the processor, the faster it will execute instructions and run
your programs. The leading CPU manufactures are Intel and AMD.

If the system is going to be used for spreadsheet, databases, graphics and

playing advance games then you should consider an Intel Pentium 4 / Pentium D
or an AMD Athlon 64 / Athlon 64 X2 processor. Pentium D and Athlon 64 X2 are
both Dual Core. Which means they have two CPU in one Chip. They are also 64
Bit and will support the new Windows Vista Operating System. These processors
are very fast and are capable of handling most of your computing needs., Intel
i486 Dx processor shown on the following image.

Ram

Memory is the name given to silicon chips that stores volatile computer data.
Volatile means that the contents of memory will be lost if the power of the
computer is switched off. Memory stores some of your operating system and
application data while it is being run. The more memory you have in your system,
the more application you can run simultaneously and will provide an overall
better system performance.

Memory comes in many form. The older system uses SDRAM, while the current
system uses DDR-SDRAM (Double Data Rate Synchronous Dynamic
Random Access Memory). Depending on your CPU bus, you have to use
SDRAM to match your CPU bus speed. For example, PIII 750 runs at the bus
speed of 100Mhz therefore you need SDRAM that run at 100MHz, known as
PC100 SDRAM. However if you are going to use PIII 866 you will require PC133
SDRAM which runs at 133Mhz bus speed. You also have to make sure that your
motherboard can support these speeds. New generation of memories are
currently out. Intel P4 use rambus memory known as RDRAM and the new AMD
processors use DDR2 SDRAM. Some of the well known memory manufactures
are Crucial, Kingston and Samsung.

The following is an image of an PC133 SDRAM

Graphics card

Graphics card provides display output to your monitor. While choosing a graphics
card consider what you would be using it for. For 2D applications such as word-
processing, spreadsheet etc, a basic graphics card with around 8MB or 16MB
graphics memory will be sufficient for your needs. It will also allow you to run
your monitor at various resolutions. However, if you require 3D functionality for
running 3D applications or playing 3D games you will require a 3D graphics card
with at least 128MB or even 256MB of video memory.

graphics card are used with a PCI, AGP or PCI-Express bus. However, most
current motherboards have AGP or PCI-E slot and we should therefore use an
AGP or PCI-E graphics card if your motherboard has an AGP or PCI-E slot. PCI
Express graphics card offers much higher graphics bandwidth which results in
higher performance. The current top end graphics card are made by Nvida
(Geforce cards) and ATI (Radeon cards).

GEFORCE II 64MB AGP card as shown below.

Sound Card

It offers many benefits such as running multimedia applications with sound,

listening to wave, midi, and MP3 music files or even plays audio CD's. to play
games on our PC then having a sound card is a must. Most current
motherboards also have basic built in sound. One of the most popular sound
cards is the Creative's soundblaster range.

a Creatives Sounblaster Live 1024 shown below.

Modem

Modem stands for Modulator Demodulator. It converts digital signals to analogue

so that it can travel via your telephone line, and vice-versa. A modem is an
essential item if you are intending to connect your PC to the internet.

There are many kinds modems out there based on the Rockwell/Connexant v.90
chipset. There are two kinds of modem, software and hardware. Software
modems uses your CPU resources to perform its tasks and is run on a virtual
COM port. Hardware modem performs its tasks using the onboard chipset and
therefore does not take up the CPU resources. It also runs on a physical COM i.e.
communication port 3. Software modems, which are also known as winmodem
can only run on a windows operating system, while the hardware based modem
can run on other operating systems like linux. External modems are mostly
hardware based and connect to the serial port. You can also get external
modems that connect to the USB port, however most of these are software
based.

Analogue modems are currently on the decline as they are being replaced by
Digital modems which are used for high speed broadband internet. Also known
as ADSL modem or ADSL routers. ADSL modems are mostly external although
you can get Internal ADSL modem's. Many people are also using Wireless ADSL
routers as it offers an excellent way to share internet connections with multiple
PCs. Some common ADSL Router suppliers are Netgear, Belkin and D-Link.

a Connexant 56K v.90 software modem shown below

Floppy Disk

FDD to access floppy disks. Although floppy disks are limited in capacity, only
1.44 mb, every old PC is almost guaranteed to have a FDD. Floppy disk drives
and now coming the end of their life span as some current PCs are built without a
floppy drive. This is due to the popularity of USB Flash drives. Floppy disk is
ideal for storing small files and documents, creating boot disks, and transferring
small files.

Samsun 1.44 mb floppy drive shown below

Hard Disk

Hard disk drive stores all your data including operating system, applications, user
files and documents. It is a non-volatile storage, which means the contents of the
HDD is not lost if the PC is switched off.

There are three different types of HDD, which are IDE/ATA, SCSI, SATA (Serial
ATA). Majority of home PCs are equipped with IDE Hard drives. SCSI hard
drives are mostly included in servers and powerful workstations as they offer
better data transfer rate which results in better performance than the IDE drives.
However modern SATA drives are not far behind SCSI drives in terms of
performance with the introduction of the newer SATA 300 drives.

A home user can have minimum drive size would be 80 GB to 120 GB. The
major HDD manufacturers are IBM, Seagate, Maxtor, Western Digital and Fujitsu
an IBM ATA100 drive as shown below.

CD-Drive

Nearly all operating systems and applications software comes on CD. It is

therefore essential to have a CD-ROM drive for installing your applications.
Certain programs requires the CD to be in the CD-ROM drive for that program to
run. For example, various encyclopedia and games. CD-ROM can also be used
for playing standard audio CD's on your PC.

To watch DVD movies on your PC then we would require a DVD-ROM which can
perform all the tasks of a CD-ROM as well as play DVD movies.

CD-ROM's come in various speeds, the faster drive, the faster it will install our
applications. DVD drives specifies two types of speeds, one for the software
installation and other for the DVD extraction. For example a DVD drive with 16x
32x 40x 52x specification means that it is a 16 speed DVD and 32 speed CD.
Some of the CD/DVD-ROM manufacturers include Toshiba, Poineer, Hitachi, LG
and Samsung. LG cd-drive is shown below

Monitor

Monitors come is various sizes and refresh rate. 17" monitor are becoming entry
standard monitor. 15" monitors are OK if we are running it at a low resolution and
not using it for long hours. We can run these monitors at higher resolution and
refresh rate, which means they are more comfortable to view and we can work
with them for long hours. Monitors are measured diagonally. If a monitor is 17" it
does not mean that it is the actual viewable area. Some 17" comes with a
viewable area of 16" which is good where as others can be as low as 15.6".
Monitors consist of thousands of pixels (the tiny dots you see on the screen).
Smaller pixels produces high definition sharp display. Settle for something which
is at least 0.25 mm dot pitch. If you purchase a 17" monitor make sure it can
handle refresh rate of at least 85 Hz at 1024 * 768 resolution. A 19" monitor
should handle at least 1280 * 1024 at 85 Hz.

Currently the most popular viewing device are TFT Flat panels. They are now
more affordable than before. Most people prefer TFT Flat panels as they save lot
of desk space. They are also more comfortable view. Samsung 14” monitor
shown below

CD-Writers

CD Writer / DVD Writer are a very good option for a backup device. It allows us
to backup the contents of our HDD onto a CD-R, CD-RW & DVD-R disc. It also
allows you to backup your existing application CD's., it is an affordable backup
device.
Like all other PC hardware a CD/DVD Writer comes in various speed. A 32
speed drive can write a full 650MB CD in around 4 mins and a 52 speed drive
can write it in around 3 mins and so on. CD-ReWritable's are available in IDE and
SCSI interface. We will require a SCSI card if choose to get a SCSI model.

CD / DVD Writer is more than just backup device, you can use it to create your
own Audio CD, Photo CD, Video CD etc. We can also use your CD or DVD
meida just the way you use hard drive, using the usual drag and drop file copy.
Most CD/DVD writers are bundled with software which can perform all the tasks I
have mentioned. Samsung CD-Writer is shown below

TV- Tuner Card

A TV card gives you the option of watching TV on your monitor. TV cards are
quite useful as it offers more than just watching TV. You can connect your VCR
to the TV card so that you can watch video's too. One of the useful things about
having a TV card is that you can use it for capturing Video. Using the necessary
software we can capture video in various format such AVI or MPEG files. One of
the popular TV card is Haupauge WinTV PCI as shown below.

Older TV cards were all analogue device. Now you can get Digital TV cards
which allows you to view Digital terrestrial TV channels. You can even get Digital
Satellite and Cable TV cards.