How to choose good PC hardware

When I wanted to buy a PC, I read a few documents regarding what good PC hardware is all about. I came to know that a lot of PC assemblers do not mix and match components properly. They try to sell what they can make most money from, usually in the name of the latest and so that "you are not obsolete a couple of years down the line". The consequence being that you end up paying more money for less performance (because you have hardware that is under-utilized).

It is very important to know what you want and what you are buying. Spend some time studying how different hardware components go together. Take quotes for good matching hardware from three or four stores and then go for the best deal. Even if the person you are buying hardware from is known to you, you should be careful and see what you are being given. This procedure will take some time. I expect that you would have to spend about 3 to 4 hours with each store for arriving at a quote after you mix and match the right components. And bargain freely, hardware retailers have big margins.

If you are not patient enough to go through the entire document, this is an executive summary:

• Get a processor, ATX motherboard (NOT mini ATX or baby ATX), and memory that use each other at their full capacity. The FSB and speed of each of these should be matching exactly for best results. The latest processor is NOT the criterion. AMD based machine means more savings and you can use that money elsewhere in your computer, like the sound card, video card, monitor etc.
• The monitor that you buy must have a vertical refresh rate of 72Hz at the resolution that you want to run it at. It should also have tilt and swivel base functions on the front panel. Pick up the same one that was shown to you at the stop.
• Buy a PS/2 mouse and keyboard. The mouse should be an optical mouse. The keyboard should be ergonomic, try it and then take it. The case of the computer must not have sharp edges.
• Buy a 7200 RPM hard-disk (Lesser RPM means more time for access and hence would be slower). Preferably from IBM, Quantum, Seagate.
• There should be facility to connect the audio cable from your CDROM to your sound card. The speakers should have an external power supply and they must be magnetically shielded. You may get a better deal if the CDROM drive, sound card and speakers are in one pack (but make sure that each one of them will NOT need the other to work).

And this is the full story ...

The following were the documents that I read and came up with this checklist.

• http://www.tldp.org/HOWTO/Unix-Hardware-Buyer-HOWTO/ Eric S. Raymond's HOWTO explains in great detail about PC hardware and is an excellent resource even if you just want to know about PC hardware and not buy it.

• http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/pchardnut3/ This book, titled PC Hardware in a Nutshell, 3rd Edition (mind the edition), is a good book on buying PC hardware and more. This is a better description of the book.

• http://www.sharkyextreme.com/theguide/ Sharky Extreme Hardware Buyer's Guides has detailed advice on hardware for different kinds of users.

• http://catb.org/~esr/writings/ultimate-linux-box/ Read this if you want to buy high-end hardware that runs well with Linux.

NOTE: This information was gathered during mid 2002 and may become obsolete (it isn't in Oct 2003), but do check the information in the links that I had provided above. I would be happy to hear from you with corrections to the text / facts here.

Tick these off when you are buying stuff for you PC and talking to a retailer about the price and the components.

Processor:

• Should be one or two generations below the latest. You should also note that you DON'T need the latest processor so that you are not obsolete a few years down the line. As you will learn very soon, there are lots of other factors that involve a good PC and the processor is just one very small element among those.
• Should not just be compatible with the bus speed on the motherboard and memory speed, but it should be used at its maximum capacity along with them. Essentially it is the motherboard FSB, processor FSB and the memory speed that you should look for. Match the three such that you get the best and none of them is under-utilized.
• Don't be under the impression that Intel is the only brand of processors under the sky. AMD makes processors that run any software that is written for Intel processors, and in my opinion, you will get a better motherboard (at a lower price) with support for other goodies that would go into a PC if you buy an AMD processor. Few of my friends have AMD based machines and they are quite happy running Linux and WinXP on that.

Motherboard:

• Take an ATX Motherboard. AT and Baby AT are out of use, don't buy those.
• There should be gold plated contacts in expansion slots and RAM sockets and no base metal.
• You must be able to disable shadow RAM, Caching of memory used by expansion slots. Must have a good turbo mode and should pass bus mastering tests.
• Always use a processor which utilizes the bus rating at its peak.
• In case you plan to upgrade to a faster processor at a later stage, you should have the motherboard speed rated higher than that of the the processor.
• If there is hardware on the motherboard that monitors voltage, temperature and the fans, it is good.
• BIOS brands that are good are AST, AMI, Phoenix, Mylex and Award.
• I would go for a motherboard that does not have on-board LAN, sound, AGP. For those features, I will take a motherboard with more number of PCI slots and a 4x AGP slot and use add-on cards. Your mileage might vary.

Bus:

• Choose a motherboard that has PCI bus only and NOT a dual PCI/ISA one. The latter gives about 10% less performance.
• There should be on-board USB and PS/2 mouse and keyboard ports.
• Rather than choose a fast processor, prefer a faster BUS and use processor and memory with compatible speed.

Memory:

• Memory should be compatible with the speed of the CPU and the motherboard. If the motherboard is not capable of driving RAM at its full speed, you should go for lower speed RAM that matches with the motherboard capability.
• Current technology is moving towards RD-RAM but DDR-SDRAM is good and gives twice the performance of SDRAM. RD-RAM and DDR-SDRAM are good as they do transfer is chunks and give faster throughout.
• If you are buying SDRAM, see to it that it is on 168 pin DIMM modules. SIMM is obsolete.

CRT Monitor:

• The dot pitch should be 0.26 or smaller (0.28 is the most common and a dot pitch of 0.26 should be preferred).
• The vertical scan frequency should be 72 Hz or better at the resolution that you intend to run it at. This is to ensure that there is no flicker.
• Do NOT buy an interlaced monitor. They are being phased out. Take a non-interlaced model only.
• Since the picture tube might move from its position, and you don't want to bend your neck while looking at it, there should be Tilt and Swivel base etc. functions on the front panel.
• Go for a 17 inch monitor that can do 1280x1024 1024x768 @ 72Hz (or 1024x768 @ 72 Hz).
• Pick the same monitor that you test out at the shop. A different one might behave differently.
• Viewsonic E2/Graphic series monitors are very good if you don't have fixed ideas (like your retailer) about the brands.

Keyboard:

• Since you will be using it a lot, buy a good and respected brand of keyboard. It is very important the keyboard be ergonomic. TVSE keyboards are very good. Though they cost more expensive than other brands, the price is really worth it and I recommend it.
• The keyboard interface usually is PS/2 and anything else wold mean wasting that PS/2 interface one your motherboard specifically present for your keyboard.
• If you plan to run anything above Win95, I think it goes without saying that you should have extra keys for shortcuts and Windows keys.

Mouse

• Do NOT buy a serial mouse. Get a PS/2 mouse.
• You must go for a 3 button mouse or a scroll mouse and NOT a 2 button mouse.
• Take an optical mouse. You don't want to trouble yourself with a ball-mouse.

Floppy Drive:

• Most floppy drives are almost the same price. Buy a Mitsumi, Teac or a Sony floppy drive.

Hard Disk:

• If you are assembling a machine for a multi-user environment, I assume you already know what to buy (SCSI, for larger disks and better expansion) and that you are reading this just for fun. SCSI disks are expensive and need extra controller as against the on-board ones.
• The disk should be DMA transfer capable (for IDE or EIDE).
• Your hard-disk should be able to run at a minimum of 7200 RPM. Disks at a lower speed means that the data will be read and written to your it at lower speed. Disks happen to be a bottleneck, so you should really go for a 7200 RPM disk. If you are a little richer, you can buy a 10000 RPM disk which is better but needs cooling.
• Pay attention to the seek time in the manual of the hard-disk. Even a 1 millisecond difference in the seek time can cause a visible difference in performance. The typical seek time is what you should look for and NOT the track-to-track or maximum seek time.
• Disks with higher capacity are slower (because they have higher seek time). So if you are really after capacity, you should buy two disks of lower capacity than one of higher capacity. This also makes sense from safety point of view for your data.
• The media transfer rate (NOT the interface transfer rate) should be 7.2 to 10.8 MB/s.
• The average (NOT least) rotational latency should be as less as possible.
• First tier disks are those from IBM, Quantum, Seagate and the second in line are from Matrox, Conner, Western Digital etc.

CD Drive

• Avoid proprietary ones like Mitsumi and Sony interfaces. Avoid parallel port interface CDROMs, they are too slow. CDROM XA is not widely used and is also expensive.
• The CDROM drive should be a double speed drive meeting MPC2 standard.
• Note that a 32x CDROM drive is typically half the speed of a hard drive.
• If you, like me, want to play audio CDs from the CDROM drive, there should be a headphone jack or two RCA jacks for speakers. Volume control and pause / next-track facility should also be present on the front panel of the CDROM drive.
• Look for drive door or seal that protects the head from dust.

Video Card:

• Accelerated card using operations like Bitblt.
• Must have good video bandwidth (changes/sec).
• Card should have a good amount of on-board RAM (atleast 8MB). Pick up on that has dual ported video RAM. That is good and DRAM is not very impressive.
• The recommended vertical frequency is 72 Hz at the resolution that you want to run it. 60 Hz is the bare minimum and 80 Hz is cool. The horizontal frequency should be as high as possible.
• The card should atleast be VESA at 1024x768 resolution or SVGA 1024x768 resolution.

Sound Card:

The minimal features that a sound card should have are these (These conditions are NOT usually met by on-board sound cards).

• 16-bit sampling (for 65536 dynamic levels rather than 256).
• Mono and stereo support should be present.
• Should be able to run in full-duplex mode.
• Sampling rates should be ranging from 8K/sec (voice) to 11KHz (AM-radio), 22KHz (FM-radio) and standard audio (44.1KHz).
• Card should have a MIDI interface via a standard 15-pin D-shell connector.
• Should have RCA output jacks for headphones or speakers and a microphone jack for sound input.

Other good features, depending on your requirements are.

• Audio cable from CD Drive to card only for CDROMs thru speakers.
• There should be atleast a general MIDI interface (very important feature). Old and cheap cards used FM synthesis which is like imitation music.
• If the sound card has an on-card DSP, it will function on its own and free the CPU for other stuff.
• Should have wave table (WT) synthesis (with WT ROM of about 8MB). Possibly also WT RAM.
• 3D using Sound Retrieval System, Q-Sound and Spatializer, but 3D sound cards give noticeable noise on the output.
• The card should be creative Labs sound blaster specification compatible.
• Avoid built in amplifiers with more than 4 watts per channel and also cards that require specific CDROM type.

Speakers:

• The speakers should be in a magnetically shielded enclosure. Else, they will affect other magnetic sensitive stuff kept around, like your monitor and TV).
• It should also have with volume, bass and treble control on the outside and NOT just via software control.
• The speakers should be powered by an external power supply or battery and NOT by the on-card 4 watt signal.
• Preferably, buy a sound card, CDROM drive and speakers as one pack (it is cheaper that way, but don't buy it if the sound card requires the specific CDROM drive).

Modem:

• But an external modem and NOT an internal one. The internal modem uses software to most things that it should actually do in hardware and consumes more CPU cycles.
• See to it that your modem supports V.90, V42bis compression and is compliant to ITU-T standards. Some modems support proprietary standards and even though they are advertised to be better, they need the same standard to be followed by the ISP to which you are connecting using it.

The Case:

• There should be proper airflow throughout to prevent heating. There are certain cases that come with a provision for vents on the side, to allow for the CPU fan dust.
• The case should have provision for USB devices, speakers etc. to be plugged in from the front side. I find it inconvenient to (un)plug stuff from behind the case.
• There must NOT be any sharp metallic or plastic edges in the case, It should be easy to attach various drives and the card clips should be sturdy.
• Full or Mid Tower cases are good as they allow for easy expansion.
• Radio frequency interference (plastic coated with conductive coating).

Power Supply and Fans:

• All brands of power supply and fans are more or less the same price in a given range. Choose the best brand [Usually cases and fans go together and would be of the same brand].
• There should not be any noise. The more silent the setup, the better.
• Variable speed motor with thermostatic control cuts noise quite a bit.
• It is good to have an extra fan or two besides the one on the power supply in your setup.

UPS:

• Online UPS or SPS intelligent interface along with s/w for shutdown would be good, but then most UPSs are decent enough without these features.