Organization of This Book
The first two chapters of this book comprise a short but comprehensive course in planning the perfect PC and choosing and buying components for it.
Chapter 1, Fundamentals, focuses on things you need to know, things you need to have, and things you need to do before you start to buy components and build your new PC. This chapter explains the advantages of building a PC versus buying one (YOU control the quality, performance, reliability, and quietness of your components), provides design guidelines, and explains the inevitable tradeoffs in performance, price, size, and noise level. We list the tools and software you’ll need, and provide a detailed tour of the motherboard, the most important and complex PC component. Finally, we provide detailed troubleshooting information, because it’s easier to avoid problems if you know from the beginning what to look out for. After you read this chapter, you’ll be prepared for the next step: actually buying the components for your new PC.
Chapter 2, Choosing and Buying Components, tells you everything you need to know about how to select and purchase the components you need to build your new PC.
Note
When you design and build your own PC, you get something that money can’t buy if you purchase a preassembled machine: total control of quality, reliability, performance, and noise level.
We explain the important characteristics of each component and how to choose among alternatives. We also recommend specific components by ...
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