Part 2: Choosing The Right Vendor
So you've followed our advice, assessed your usage patterns and come up with a list of suitable components. Then you read component reviews and found the exact manufacturer and model for each part. When you weren't sure, you even questioned the members of our community forums. Perhaps you've even based some of your own picks on our System Builder Marathon article series, designed for this exact purpose. And now you're ready to make the big purchase.
With so much money on the line, you want to make sure the transaction goes smoothly, of course. Cruising through the building process you suddenly slam on the brakes: where is all this stuff going to come from?
Experienced builders often have a favorite source that they will recommend exclusively, but their reasoning might not apply to your circumstances. Each type of seller has strengths and weaknesses, and even hazards to avoid. Among these are the "big box" computer shops, smaller local stores, online vendors large and small, and even auction sites. Each varies in terms of the selection, convenience, cost and support they offer.
Purchasing Convenience
Online Merchants
Not everyone has the time or inclination to shop. Fortunately, the online buying process starts with easy site-to-site comparisons and ends with the parts being delivered right to your door. Customers no longer need to battle traffic driving between stores or make special trips to other parts of town (or even to other towns entirely) to find everything on their lists.
Vendor search engines like Tom’s Hardware Stores compare prices on a huge selection of parts from such popular sites as Directron, Newegg, TigerDirect, and ZipZoomFly, but often miss a few specialty parts. Online specialty stores like EndPCNoise and FrozenCPU provide less common parts, and locating competing sources is as easy as entering the specific part name into a generalized Web search engine. This may require filtering through dozens of "hits" to obtain a short list of sellers, but that takes only a few extra minutes.
Local Stores
Buying locally eliminates shipping time and avoids any potential inventory screw-ups that might further delay the shipment. While local variety is less than the Web offers, national chains focus on popular items that meet the needs of most buyers. Smaller, locally-owned shops may specialize in lower-volume parts, but finding the right one could be difficult.
In addition to instant-purchase gratification, local stores offer the convenience of display samples. This hands-on approach allows one to feel the action of keyboard keys, check out the weight and fit of a mouse or game controller, and examine the visual quality of displays. Seeing an item in person also allows one to more easily judge its visual impact, something simple photos and measurements don't always convey.
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Ah i still remember when the original came out... good times
umm.... You forgot to mention super towers in the case section. Like my armor+ case which has 10 expansion slots. I think it's a really important part that should have been included, considering the pcie craze going on right now, and considering the extra space and cooling they offer. Other then that nice article. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod [...] -_-ProductGo ahead count them (below)
No, no forgetfulness, there is no such thing as a supertower. There is such as thing as an Ultra ATX full tower, but Ultra ATX was never recognized as an actual standard. Oh, and there's this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/forum/ [...] e#t2106367
And this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ultra_ATX
Which links back to this:
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/c [...] ,4677.html
All of which are inconsequential to first time builders. I'm sure someone, somewhere has a 12-slot case, but that's still not an industry standard unless it's adopted by the industry.
I only started working on computers a couple years ago when I started making mods to my HP desktop(Since I have realized how poorly I was spending my money on HP's crap). I did my first build a year ago and Tom's Hardware has been a great resource.
Good time to thank the MANY very smart people on the forum who are always helpful. And thanks to Tom's for a great resource.
I think there needs to be some discussion about OSes. Noobs going "I installed 16GB of RAM and quad 5850 but I only see 2 GB of RAM!" make me sad. You hinted at 32 v. 64 bit, but didn't say why. Also, they can be a big part of the price($90). For a low end box, its almost always better just to find a good deal on a refurb and call a day. Linux is great and everything, but...
Avoiding sales tax is a big reason why people use online stores. Of course, we all pay our state what we owe on our own right...
I never formally learned how to build computers, rather through tinkering and work with skilled people, but this guide is pretty much exactly what I do. I usually put the the power supply in last though, just to make the cable management easier. Good guide for beginners, do want.
I could be wrong, but are you sure the links on the first page to a 1996 case comparison is really from 1996 ? I just can't imagine a silverstone chassis being tested before silverstone existed as a company ...
Here is a very similar guide I created late last year for the Homebuilt Systems forum... Step-by-Step Guide to Building a PC
It is a little more up-to-date but due to the limitation of number of pictures per post, not as detailed as I wanted it.
Crashie, imo you should add a bit more into for your harddrive page. I would definetly include the fact that raid excludes smart status from being read, and that it is much harder to find out which drive is broken in raid than in ahci mode. Also the fact that many desktop drives don't properly support raid would be wise to include (error handling taking too long, and the controller thus dropping the drive). And as a last thing on raid, I would have expected you to mention that if the user is going with windows 7 or certain linux distributions, they can choose to make windows perform raid 0 or 1 (raid 5 on 2008r2), thus retaining compatibility with desktop drive firmware and smart notifications.
As I have time to read more pages (@ work, can't read it all at once) I might have more comments.
but plugging connectors and inserting screws shouldn't take more than a couple hours, even for the most inexperienced builder.
Some more complex builds take more than two hours, and mine almost always take more. I'm very thorough when it comes to cable management, and that takes time. Aestetics are as important as product selection. A customer is only happy if it looks expensive. No matter the price.
Reducing drop distance is as easy as moving work away from the edge of a desk, and reducing damage from parts getting knocked to the floor is as simple as leaving them in the box until they're ready to be installed.
I almost always assemble new systems on a carpet on the floor. This way there's plenty of room, the surfaces of a chassis won't be scratched, and things can't drop futher than I lift them. And it is a very easy and cheap way of avoiding visual or functional damage.
Gotten to the part about installation. Somehow I find a noise & cooling section missing? Why isn't there one? I know you're no expert on liquid cooling, but you know enough to tell people that small selfcontained liquid systems are good for tight places like mediacentres, but doesn't cool better than equally cheap air cooling and the pumps aren't more quiet than ordinary fans. Ignoring this topic isn't fair.
Also there's no mention of noise - bigger chassis = less noise (longer path for the internal noise), rubber washers etc help too. Especially on low grade chassis. You can often get away with using a cheapass chassis if you use washers and quiet fans.
I seriously dislike the images of the tim .... really. imo it should look more like it did on my photo below (my current gaming rig at home with arctic matrix)
Edit: The layer is so thin, that in a proper resolution picture you can still make out the writings on the cpu below it. My phone is not a very good camera though.
Oh - and I would advice people to install the ram modules before the montherboards goes into the system since harddrive cages sometimes obstruct clearance. And also check the system header before, as the text is hard to read later.
I seriously dislike the images of the tim .... really. imo it should look more like it did on my photo below (my current gaming rig at home with arctic matrix)Edit: The layer is so thin, that in a proper resolution picture you can still make out the writings on the cpu below it. My phone is not a very good camera though. Oh - and I would advice people to install the ram modules before the montherboards goes into the system since harddrive cages sometimes obstruct clearance. And also check the system header before, as the text is hard to read later.
If you can still see the writing on the CPU through the thermal paste you most definitely do not have enough on
Having now read it all, here are some simple troubleshooting advice I think might be useful:
a) If the floppy drive light keeps lighting up, the data cable is reversed
b) If at system powerup the system shuts down again immidiately (notice the cpu fan just spinning very briefly, and then stopping) there is a problem with power.
b1) If the system can't be powered again before the power plug has been removed and reinserted, the psu has detected a fault and shut down. Usually a shortcircuit. Most commonly by the floppy power connector (also used for some front displays) or a modded fan plug being defective (using 5v as ground instead of ground, resulting in 7v to the fan)
b2) If the system can power up and do the same over and over, the motherboard is doing the shutdown. Check all cables, and eventually unplug anything non critical.
c) If the system doesn't display anything onscreen, check motherobard.
c1) If it's an earlier system, ide cables might be reversed and prevent the motherboard from posting.
c2) If the graphics card isn't recognized it, the computer should beep in a regular interval (check to make sure internal speaker is attached if none is on the motherboard)
c3) If the memory isn't recognized, the system should beep in a nonlinear fashion.
c4) Try removing the memory modules and booting. If the system doesn't beep at you, there might be a hardware defect in power supply or motherboard (assuming atx and esp plugs are in place)
d) If you can't enter bios try holding the applicable key (usually del, f2 or f10) pressed even before you power the system.
e) If the system won't accept user input (windows antique and older os installation) check that bios is set to legacy usb enabled (default is mostly auto or disabled).
f) If system doesn't want to install, make sure your boot harddrive is set to be the first in the bios. Raid setups are categorized as scsi devices by the bios and prioritized lower than regular/legacy storage interfaces. When you change from legacy to ahci or raid (or the other way around) the boot order might get broken. Reboot into the bios again and check the right order. Some operating systems won't install if the System partition isn't on drive 0 (boot loader limitations)
g) If the system boots but isn't stable check cpu fan that it is running, and that pushpins or latches are properly fixed. If no problem found, check bios to see if memory is running at proper timings. Sometimes xmp profiles cause the system to become instable (some bios have overclocked the chipset by default, set memory boost back from turbo to standard, or disable xmp).
Think that's about all that can go wrong before software truely enters the picture.
ps. sometimes with windows vista and 7 you have to remove ide and ahci drives to install on raid at all. Else the system will extract files, but be unable to create boot partition.
If you can still see the writing on the CPU through the thermal paste you most definitely do not have enough on
Absolutely wrong.
The more you have on, the worse your thermal conductivity is. The layer has to be only thick enough to cover cracks and the slight uneven surface, that is all. The headspreader (at least for intel) is purposely slight courved to make the cooler align better, so any attempts to make it 'flat' with tim will actually reduce cooling effectivity.
Btw crashie, can't you, or someone else at thg, make a similar, but slightly less dummyproof, article about how to build a ssi based system. Basicly if you need more than one processor, or you want ecc memory as an intel user, you can almost exclusively choose ssi boards.
If you can still see the writing on the CPU through the thermal paste you most definitely do not have enough on
You're 100% correct of course, I don't know how many times I've pulled a cooler after trying his method only to find a dry spot. Of course, the only reason I pulled the cooler is because the system started getting warmer as it settled in, rather than cooler. I have dozens of processors that aren't flat enough to use his method, and at least that many heat sinks with the same condition.
His method only works if the mating surfaces are almost perfect. I don't advocate lapping a sink to beginners.
And the article already explains that the stuff about the paste being "too thick" is just a myth these days, because the paste doesn't have enough viscosity to hold up as a thick layer when the mounting hardware is applied. The photo in the article shows a bunch of spikes in the paste from pulling it apart after a test fit, but if you look a little harder you can see that paste on other parts of the heat spreader is see-through thin. Applying full mounting pressure makes it see-through thin everywhere the parts fit tight. It's in the photo, you just have to look.
Thanks for being correct!
Love articles like these. While it's been awhile since my first build, these are perfect to send to my Dad to read for some fun.
Love the site and the forums for all the info and resources.
why do you link to your PSU review section when it is actualy out-dated ? and the only PSUs are 500W+ ... how about reviews of some modern 350-500W PSUs for smaller systems ?
My friend ordered a $300 high-end ASUS motherboard because you guys used it in a system builder article and he thought that means Tom's editors prefer that board over other $200ish boards. By the time he told me and I recommended a $200 Gigabyte board that has the same feature Newegg already shipped out his order.
Tom’s is a bad place for people wanting to build their own computer. The editors usually don’t do “best bang for the buck” built but rather build to a fixed budget that often means under/over-powered PSU, tri-SLI/crossfire and other parts that sane people usually wouldn’t choose.
BTW, the forum is a good place for people wanting to put together a decent computer. I am just ranting against the system builder series.
Excellent article to get a new builder started. I would love to see this done for troubleshooting though. It seems that 90% of the problems people have are solved by the same solution.