aceman67

if you've never built a computer from scratch before, here's a list of what you're going to need:

• A computer case, make sure its big enough for everything you're going to put in it
• A power supply, minimum 500 watt, but I would suggest not skimping on this and get a 1000 watt
• A motherboard that will support what you need (the processor you want, the ram you plan on buying and the video card you're going to be using)
• Ram, at least 2 gigs. If you use a 32 bit operating system, get 4 gigs, if you run a 64 bit OS, get at least 4 gigs.
• Hard drives. Very important. Make sure you get enough space as well for what your going to be doing on your computer. Minimum 100 gigs for this day and age. Choose SATA over IDE drives, you get better performance and you can set multiable drives up in RAID as well (You will get better performance with particular types of raid configurations, like having two sata drives mirror each other, that way if one drive fails, the other one will have an exact copy of what you have stored, that and the computer will read the same file off both drives decreasing read time, there is also another raid config that takes two drives and makes them act as one larger drives. if you use two identical drives you do get increased performace, there's also another way to do this, if your mo bo supports it, you can take two sata drives that are not identical and set them up in JABOD (Just a big drive or just a bunch of drives), you don't get the same performance you would with identical paired drives.)
• A processor that your Mo-Bo supports. Make sure its dual core. Don't go skimping on this one as well, and remember speed isn't everything, make sure you look into what size the L2 cache is and the speed of the front side bus, as those two things determine how well your proc performs
• A video card. This day and age, its strongly recommended that you have a video card that is at least 128 mb, I would recommend 256. Shy away from the larger memory sizes like 512 and up, as their memory speeds don't quite match those of the 256 models. (My nVidia 256 GeForce 8500 out performs the 512mb version of the same card)
• A DvD burner. Required now a days. Make sure its Dual Layer.
• Extra case fans. All the new stuff that is coming out generates a great deal of heat, and heat is bad. makes computer go bye bye if it gets too much, so make sure you have plenty of ventilation, I myself have 4 case fans in my case.

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