Building the Perfect PC, Third Edition

Preface

The more things change, the more they remain the same. When we sat down to write this preface—always the last thing we do when writing a book—it was déjà vu all over again. For the second edition, we reused the preface from the 2004 first edition, and for this third edition we’ll largely do the same.

In one sense, things have changed a lot over the years. None of the components we used in the second edition are still available. They’ve been replaced by bigger, faster, better, cheaper parts. But those are mere details. In a fundamental sense, nothing has changed. The reasons for building your own PC are the same. The decisions you need to make differ only in the details. The skills you need to master are the same, and the satisfaction you’ll gain from designing and building your own PC is as great as ever.

So, on with the nearly original preface, which needed only slight modifications to update information about the system configurations in the book and other similar details.

Building PCs isn’t just for techies anymore.

It used to be, certainly. Only gamers and other geeks actually built their PCs from the ground up. Everyone else just called Dell or Gateway and ordered a system. That started to change around the turn of the century. The first sign was when general merchandisers like Best Buy started stocking upgrade components. If you wanted to expand the memory in your PC or install a larger hard drive or add a CD writer, you could now get the components you needed at ...