Building my own Personal Computer: hyperlinks anyone?

[Welly Wu]

I've done some searches through Google but I'm not getting the search results that I am looking for. I am searching for computer magazines that focus on building your own PC. I've seen the magazines at my Barnes & Noble workplace but I have failed to copy down their websites. Besides, I don't exactly know whether B&N carries all of the best build your own PC magazines anyway.

So, I need your recommendations. Please submit some links related to my theme. If you can get some websites with a distinct eye toward building either a dual-boot or pure Linux hand-built PC, then that would be excellent! My brief survey of the computer magazines at my B&N store don't really stray too far from the Micro$oft Windows OS.

 

[MichaelFranks]

Check your distro/kernel compatibility listing if you are curious about a particular piece of hardware. Barring any driver problems the os shouldn't matter much for hardware choices. If a company hasn't released code for a particular driver then you should consider other choices anyway, right?

Have a good time, building computers is way fun!

edit: no ati, and certainly no creative!

 

[Welly Wu]

Thanks! I still need websites too.

My very sketchy thinking is to build a dual-boot PC with Micro$oft Windows XP Professional SP-2 and Fedora Code 2 Linux for just productivity purposes. No gaming. Very little entertainment features too. I don't want to divert money from my HI-FI reference system to get the same capabilities from my hand built PC. I need magazine recommendations and their websites. I need to get myself intimately familiar with the nitty-gritty of building a PC and the troubleshooting techniques. I want a productivity PC...period.

I still need recommendations. Anyone: please reply!

 

[loveheadphones]

just try and get some computer magazines after stripping them at b&n... or have coworkers hold 'em for ya

 

[bootman]

I dug up these:

PCMechanic

PCStats

PCWorld

PCMag

 

[Talonz]

www.hardforum.com

That's a site a frequent very often, they are helpful and most of the residents are knowledgeable.

 

[Welly Wu]

Quote:

Originally Posted by loveheadphones just try and get some computer magazines after stripping them at b&n... or have coworkers hold 'em for ya

Thanks for that. I'm already onto that opportunity. I am looking for websites because the information is constantly updated and fresh. Building up a free (for me) backlog of slightly old computer magazines is definitely something I've been looking into.

 

[bLue_oNioN]

Hey Welly!

Are you looking for component recommendations as well?

 

[Stephonovich]

Quote:

Originally Posted by MichaelFranks no ati, and certainly no creative!

Why no ATI? Sure, the 3D support has gone a bit downhill (for newer ones, at least, but actually, Gentoo does a very decent job at it), but if he's not gaming, who cares? If you can find an old Rage 128 (or if you want something fairly modern, a 9600 SE or something) go for it. As for Creative, from an audiophile standpoint, I agree. However, the emuk101/2 chipset very well supported in Linux.

I'd recommend you do some searching on PC Magazine's site. It's a pretty general magazine, but I seem to recall a few pretty decent articles on home built PCs.

 

[mustang]

I'd recommend looking here as well

http://forums.anandtech.com/

 

[Elec]

Budget?

If you just want productivity, you can get 'er done pretty cheap, especially if you don't care much about having something real future-proof. Last year's technology is fine if you don't plan to run next year's hot new apps. This is less important if you don't game.

I'd vote for an AMD Athlon XP 2500+ or better, nForce2 motherboard, at least half a gig of name brand value RAM (like Kingston Value), and some sort of older but well-known (for Linux purposes) video card. Probably a GeForce MX series card would be fine and cheap if you have no gaming aspirations. If you want a DVD burner, the NECs are pretty good for around $75, otherwise you might as well go with a DVD/CDRW combo drive from Lite On. They're around $30 I think. Any old hard drive will do for productivity, I'd recommend the biggest 7200rpm drive you can find cheaply, 40 gigs is probably a good minimum. Don't skimp on the power supply, as cheap usually = bad and a bad power supply can compromise stability or kill your components. Look for 350W or better, usually Antec, Fortron, Sparkle, Enermax, or PC Power & Cooling (expensive) are good names. Cases are kind of personal preference, but make sure you take a look at the dimensions, form factor, number of drive bays (internal and external, where external means you can get to them from the outside for something like a CDROM), and fan mounting options. The motherboard can likely have sound, ethernet, firewire, and USB 2.0 onboard if you choose carefully, so no need to buy extra cards for that stuff.

As always, www.newegg.com is a great place to price out parts (and buy from too!). As far as assembly goes, it's not too hard once you learn what all the parts are because they all tend to go in just one place and fit just one way, but it can be a bit tricky. I'll second the recommendation of hardforum.com for reading material or a place to ask for help. I've been a member over there since '98, and the people generally do know their stuff if you have to ask about anything.

 

[Welly Wu]

Hardware recommendations are very much welcome!

Budget productivity PC is my game and my guess is that somewhere between $1500 USD is my maximum budget. I would like to spend between $1000 USD (not less than that) up to $1500 USD maximum.

My main concern is that I get decent power and speed to run mostly open source productivity applications like OpenOffice, Fedora Linux, Mozilla FireFox, etc. After that, my other main concern is system stability and compatibility. Lastly, budget counts too. I'll be writing down some magazine names and I'll hunt down the websites too.

I'm building a desktop PC and the budget must include some kind of monitor too. A cheap UPS is in the budget as well.

 

[bootman]

Have you seen these?

They are built as servers so reliability is a given.
They are sold with no OS and are fully Linux compatible.

I have built a ton of PCs and I couldn't build as reliable a machine for less.

 

[bLue_oNioN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by Welly Wu My main concern is that I get decent power and speed to run mostly open source productivity applications like OpenOffice, Fedora Linux, Mozilla FireFox, etc. After that, my other main concern is system stability and compatibility. Lastly, budget counts too. I'll be writing down some magazine names and I'll hunt down the websites too.

Those applications don't need much power at all -- unless you will also be compiling on Linux?

The tricky part is finding a monitor that fits your budget well enough (the minimum 1000USD, I mean). Personally, I never skimp on monitors because that's what you REALLY wind up using all day long.

I'll be back soon with some recommendations!

 

[bLue_oNioN]

Quote:

Originally Posted by bootman Have you seen these? They are built as servers so reliability is a given. They are sold with no OS and are fully Linux compatible. I have built a ton of PCs and I couldn't build as reliable a machine for less.

The base price looked nice until I realized that it was a major skimp on parts. The configuration menu does allow you to add in a whole slew of things though... but that's when the costs start to mount.