Building your PC:
The Getting Started

Case:

First we'll start with the case. This was a new purchase as I wanted to buy something with more power (400W in this case) and which had sufficient space inside to enable further expansion. Hence I chose this model which has sufficient space for four large external drives and five internal drives as well as a floppy drive and a zip drive. The midi tower format also provides for a large volume of air inside the case, a feature that can aid with cooling.

This motherboard also came with front audio and USB 2.0 ports, which is extremely useful if you have a digital camera to plug into your system. As an addditional bonus the case also came with its own integrated fan; and possibly more importantly it was half price due to the number of other items purchased at the same time.

Motherbaord:

Again, and fairly obviously, this was a new purchase. I'd already sourced my CPU so I was wedded to a socket 478 motherboard. I also wanted a SATA drive as this machine would be used for some hefty file analyses so the faster the drive the better. I also had a legacy ATA-133 hard drive and the motherboard had to support this. There was also the issue of USB 2.0 which I wanted built in. After going to a number of websites and checking out a large number of alternate motherboards I sellted on the ASRock P4i65GV which had all the features I needed (as well as supporting front panel audio and front panel USB).

The motherboard also came with on-board graphics (which I didn't need) and on-board ethernet (which wasn't necessary as I had an ethernet card), which was definitely a nice to have. Memory support on this motherboard was also DDR which would improve overall system performance for the CPU and hard-drive-intensive tasks that I needed the machine for.

Central Processing Unit:

The CPU, an Intel Celeron D335 running at 2800 MHz was sourced second hand (though only just) from eBay. This did mean that I had to source my own heatsing and fan as well as thermal compound (but I probably would have done that even with an OEM package to improve cooling).

Obviously after chosing the CPU this choice affected a number of other purchases such as the type of motherbaord (above) as this had to support the CPU and the cooling fan had to be matched to the CPU and the motherboard's housing.

Processor Fan:

Another item bought new, mostly because this had to be matched to both the motherboard and the CPU (not as difficult as it sounds as the motherboard was a modern one). In effect all I had to do was buy a fan and heatsking combination that supported a socket 478 CPU.

The spring clips with this fan and heatsink assembly also make it easy to install whilst ensuring good thermal contact between the heatsink and the CPU itself.

Memory:

For the memory, it obvously had to be compatible with the motherboard and if I was going to buy more than one module then they would need to be matched in terms of speed and type. As it happens, I was very lucky to find my first memory module (the elixir one, at the bottom). I used my own eBay misspelling tool to search for PC Memory and one of the misspelling hits I found was for "PC Memroy". As no one else had bid on this item (it was effectively hidden because of the misspellings) I managed to snap it up at a true bargain price. I now had 512Mb of memory of PC3200 at 400 MHz-CL3. To make the total memory up to 1Gb I sourced a second equivalent module from Kingston.

Case Fan:

To provide additional cooling for the system I also bought an aluminium case fan. This needs to be the same size as the fixings for fans on your case (for mine these were 8cm).

Case fans can either be driven off the fan connector on the motherboard or they can (as in this case) connect directly to the case's main power supply. Having this be metal is good both in terms of reducing vibration (and therefore noise) and in terms of improving the overall thermal transfer.

DVD Drive:

The DVD drive is also a new component here, purchased to replace an old CD-ROM drive. In this instance the drive is an MSI D16 16-speed DVD-ROM and a 54-speed CD read/writer/rewriter.

With the way software titles are going these days I'd say that after the hard drive the DVD-ROM drive is probably the second most important internal peripheral for ypur PC. Prices for these are falling dramatically at the moment so now is the time to upgrade to a DVD drive.

IDE Hard Drive:

This IDE HDD was bought quite recently for an old system and now it's being recycled for the new PC. This is an ATA-133 Hitachi DeskStar which is 120 GB in size so it's a good drive with large capacity and well worth salvaging. This was therefore going to be incorporated into the new machine as a secondary drive (though the primary drive on the IDE chain). This drive was goinig to be partitioned into a 40Gb Windows volume and an 80Gb data volume.

SATA Hard Drive:

This serial ATA hard drive (SATA) was a new purchase. The SATA interface is both faster and more stable than the standard IDE hard drives. As a result I bought a fast Maxtor 80Gb drive to be my main drive in the PC. This was going to be an 80Gb volume running Linux as my main operating system.

This was also an opportunity on my part to try-out a SATA drive in a very high-usage setting with lots of disk accesses occurring.

Floppy Disk Drive:

I did seriously consider re-cycling one of the pile of floppy drives that I have lying around the place. However, they were all either white or beige and would have spoiled the look of the machine I was building so I opted instead for buying a new floppy drive second hand on eBay instead.

For a while I also seriously considered not installing a floppy drive at all. However, a number of recovery disks (especially for flashing bios) still need a floppy drive as a primary drive so I decided to continue using one.

Graphics Card:

Though there was a graphics chip on the motherboard, this was neither very powerful and was also dependent on the main CPU to drive it. As a result I decided to purchase a new graphics card. The card eventually chosen was an MSI GeForce FX5200. The choice was partially restricted as the motherboard I'd chosen had an AGP slot for a graphics card. The motherboard was also fairly restrictive in terms of the cards it would support. However I did opt for the 8x card with 256MB of DDR RAM. It's neither the fastest nor the best card on the market today, but it was more than adequate for my requirements at the time.