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Build Your First PC – Part 2 Happiness is a quality case When you buy a PC from someone else and it’s their problem to fix things you’ll not care much about the case it lives in. When you’re building your own and expect to be poking around the inside both before and afterwards you’ll appreciate the importance of a good case. You can spend £25 on a case or you can spend £100 or more. What do you get for the extra money? Antec SX630 Antec produce a wide range of cases which can be viewed at www.antec-europe.com . I have opted for the rather excellent SX630 which is part of their Performance Series. The SX630 costs around £80 and comes with a 300watt PSU (Power Supply Unit). It has a bigger brother, the SX635 which sports a 350watt PSU for those who intend running a lot of internal drives or any other power gobbling hardware.
As well as the obligatory fan in the PSU, the case also comes with a second fan fitted which makes sense as modern PCs generate an awful lot of warmth inside with the CPU, support chips, graphics card and drives all pumping out heat. For the overclocker or those with extra heat problems, there is room for a third snap-in fan at the front. Finally, the leads are well labelled and include a good selection of power connectors, enough for quite a few drives. It has to be said, the front panel isn’t the most handsome on the planet but that apart, the Antec SX630 provides an excellent home for your PC project that will leave the finished machine feeling like a Rolls Royce. Motherboard Another place where it pays to pay a bit more is the motherboard. You can buy cheap and cheerful boards for £40 or so which may well work fine but when you do hit problems you’ll find the support is lacking. Sticking to well known brands is the best way to be sure that updates and patches will continue to be made available for some time after you buy the board. As the motherboard is the heart of your PC, if you have trouble with that, your PC is doomed from the start. If you don’t intend doing anything too taxing with your PC then you might want to consider saving a bit of money by buying one with onboard sound and graphics. However, if you intend playing games or using it for music then you’ll soon hit the limitations so consider what the PC is going to be used for before choosing. I have opted for the Gigabyte GA-7VTXH+ which is an Athlon board with onboard sound as well as 10/100 networking. The networking will save on a PCI slot and the sound will be good enough for most things as it has 4 speaker support and a Creative Labs chipset. The board also has ATA133 support for the latest generation of fast hard drives although it lacks on board RAID. I picked up the board for about £90.
The rest of the board’s features are the VIA KT266A chipset, 200/266 FSB support, up to 3Gb of RAM and a Dual-BIOS system which provides a backup BIOS should the main one get corrupted by a virus or failed upgrade. The supplied drivers support Windows 95/98/Me/2000/NT/XP i.e. the lot. The board also comes with anti-virus and firewall software from Norton which is a useful bonus. Gigabyte’s web site ( www.giga-byte.com ) has lots of information and a good support section with updated BIOS’s available as well as FAQs etc. The advantage of going with a well known manufacturer is just this level of support. Hopefully, if you do have any problems either Gigabyte or a trawl through www.google.com’s Groups section should reveal the answer. Prior to buying the board I did a search on the motherboard name in Google Groups and it seemed to be highly rated by existing users which is always a good sign! In part 3 I’ll be looking at the processor and memory and putting these first few components together as well as looking at the precautions you need to take to avoid harming your new purchases.
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The
first thing you notice with the SX630 is just how well engineered it
is. None of the usual thin metal cabinet with sharp edges here. The
case is also awash with nice touches you’ll come to appreciate as
you start building your PC. The case side has a neat lockable fold
out panel making it easy to get inside. The front plastic panel that
surrounds the drive bays has a couple of quick release tabs and
inside, the drive cages can be removed making life much easier when
fitting the various floppy and hard drives as well as any CD or DVD
devices you choose to add. It even has a useful user manual which is
a first for me having seen an awful lot of cases over the years.
Traditionally
Gigabyte haven’t been very overclocker friendly but GA-7VTXH+ not
only supports the kind of adjustments needed for overclocking but
even includes a program to safely make the adjustments for you! 