August 2004
Beginner
352 pages
13h 42m
English
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Designing the Perfect PC
A sign you’ll see in many repair shops says, “Good. Cheap. Fast. Pick any two.” That’s also true of designing a PC. Every choice you make involves a tradeoff, and balancing those tradeoffs is the key to designing a PC that’s perfect for your needs. Each of the project system chapters has a graphic that represents the relative importance of different elements and looks something like what’s shown to the left.
Ah, if it were only true. Reality, of course, is different. One can’t put the highest priority on everything. Something has to give. As Frederick the Great said of designing military defenses, “He who defends everything defends nothing.” The same is true of designing a PC.
If you focus on these elements while designing your PC, you’ll soon realize that compromises are inevitable. If small size is essential, for example, you must make compromises in expandability, and you may very well have to compromise in other respects. The trick is to decide, before you start buying components, which elements are essential, which are important, which would be nice to have, and which can be ignored.
Once you have the priority of those elements firmly fixed in your mind, you can make rational resource allocations and good purchasing decisions. It’s worth looking at each of these elements in a bit more detail.
- Price
We put price first, because it’s the 900-pound gorilla in system design. If low price is essential, you’ll be forced to make compromises in most or all of the ...
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O’Reilly covers everything we've got, with content to help us build a world-class technology community, upgrade the capabilities and competencies of our teams, and improve overall team performance as well as their engagement.Julian F.
I wanted to learn C and C++, but it didn't click for me until I picked up an O'Reilly book. When I went on the O’Reilly platform, I was astonished to find all the books there, plus live events and sandboxes so you could play around with the technology.Addison B.
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I'm always learning. So when I got on to O'Reilly, I was like a kid in a candy store. There are playlists. There are answers. There's on-demand training. It's worth its weight in gold, in terms of what it allows me to do.