There are very few folks who know their subject as well as Robert Bruce Thompson. He has been keeping a web-log for several years now where he discusses many subjects, especially about is daily adventures with building computers, managing a home-network and diagnosing problems with them.
Probably the single biggest reason that many people don't put together their own systems is the simple lack of knowledge on how to do it. This book provides a great introduction on how to do it.
The best reason to do it for yourself is then you will have the piece of mind that you have quality parts in your system. Picking good hard drives, video cards, motherboards, means you are less likely to have a computer failure. Cheap parts are the major reason large corp. retailers put out a lot bad systems... they got some parts that were cheap, but that fail a lot. Thus, causing their customers a lot of headaches. Sure, you might get a dirt-cheap computer system, but you get what you pay for.
The other best reason to build a system on your own is that you will learn something in the process. If you can build your own system you will start to be able to do your own tech support. You won't have to wait to get your system fixed: you'll have the knowledge to do it yourself.
Better than the simple list of hardware (which since this is a physical book will be out of date very soon after publication) is the discussion on how to do it. The questions you need to ask yourself before picking hardware, etc. What do you want to do with the system? Do you want to play high-power games? Maybe you just want to surf the web and do some light word processing. The system can then be customized for you and you don't get one-size fits all system from some corp. retail giant.
And don't forget about his web site. He keeps updated lists of recommended hardware on it, as well as details as to his adventures of computer-problem land. A lot of tips can be picked up there. A good way to keep abreast of the authors thoughts and opinions as to the state of the industry.
Anything by Thompson is worthwhile. Building the Perfect PC
I came to this book fairly late in the design process of my own new custom PC, but it was uncanny how closely the book tracked my own needs.
The book's approach is superb: After a few chapters on the basics of building PCs and buying parts, the authors describe five different PCs: A mainstream system, a SOHO server, a "kick-ass LAN party PC", a home theater PC, and a small form factor PC. The issues for parts choice are carefully explained, and there are step-by-step instructions on assembling each one, with some of the best photos I've ever seen in a book like this, all of them in color.
As I said, I had most of my custom PC design completed before I found the book. I had already chosen the very quiet Antec Sonata case (recommended in the book) and the authors pointed me at the Zalman Flower HSF, a CPU cooler that runs almost silently. I learned a number of things about high-performance disk drives from the book that I didn't already know, ditto RAIDs. My unfinished design turned out to be very much like their description of a mainstream PC, and my final PC will be quite a bit better for having read the insights in the text.
I may someday want to build a media server, and I learned a lot reading the section on the home theater PC, though I had to tuck it all in long term memory for future reference.
The book is probably most valuable for people who don't want to spend the time studying every PC component technology to the extent that they could confidently spec their own custom system. It would be quite easy to just make a "blind copy" of one of the designs presented here, and the mainstream PC and small form factor PC look very effective for general PC neeeds.
The book is beautifully written, clearly laid out, and probably the most useful of the small pile of PC hardware books I've been accumulating and poring over this past year. Clearly the best of breed.
This book has gotten some pretty good reviews, which is one reason I chose it over other, similar titles. So I hate to be the voice of dissent, but here's how I feel about this book.
I think this book is extremely useful in theory. What I mean by that is you can sit back and read the book without actually doing the projects and learn quite a bit about PC components. For example, I now know that Antec is a really good brand to choose for the case. I saw the layout of a motherboard and have a better understanding of what the different sections of it are for. And maybe most importantly, I learned about the little things to look for when choosing the individual components, especially to make sure that they are all compatible with each other and, of course, with the motherboard.
However, when I finally started reading one of the chapters on actually *building* a system, that's when it fell apart for me. I read the gaming PC chapter, because what I'd like is a gaming PC. Well, it didn't take long before I was thoroughly confused. I felt like a lot of the steps were given in broad strokes and weren't detailed enough for a novice like myself.
Now, I know what you might be saying: you can't just read these sections "theoretically" like you can the first few chapters. You need to sit down and actually put the pieces together yourself. Well, that's fine and all, if someone gave me a bunch of free components to use. But I have no desire to spend $1000+ when I don't even understand the instructions I'm reading in the book in the first place. Example:
"Position the free-floating retention bracket over the plastic nub on one side of the black plastic retention module base."
Uh...what? And no, I'm not even taking that out of context. The instructions were just difficult to follow. And yes, like I said, it might be easier if you had the components in your hands, but this isn't like picking up some cheap items at the grocery store to perform a high school science experiment just for fun. This is serious and expensive stuff.
Something else that didn't give me too much hope was the fact that after inserting the motherboard into the case and putting it all together, the authors discovered that the back-panel I/O template had some metal tabs that actually blocked the ethernet ports on the motherboard. First off, if *they* make this mistake, I can certainly imagine myself doing much worse. Second, they don't even tell us how to fix it. They simply say that they would have "started over" -- which is absolutely no help at all, since it isn't at all clear how you would prevent this from happening a second time (none of the other ports were misaligned, so it can't simply be a matter of trying it again and hoping the tabs don't block the ethernet ports the second time around).
I also browsed the other sections and found another interesting dilemma they got themselves into. In the budget PC chapter, they chose to use a CPU cooler that ended up not fitting properly against the motherboard, and only after a lot of work and "minor surgery" did it finally fit. In other words, a hardware compatibility issue -- exactly what the authors had been warning us to avoid.
A final example of what I would call the "impracticality" of this book is this: in the chapter on building a mainstream PC, we are given this advice before installing the motherboard:
"Check the motherboard documentation to determine if any configuration jumpers need to be set."
Again...what? The authors don't explain what this means or how to do it, and they don't even mention this step in the chapter on building a gaming PC. I suppose it's possible that the particular motherboard they used in that chapter doesn't need any jumpers set, but I doubt it. I think they just left it out of that chapter. I shudder to think what else could have been left out, and having to face that problem all alone when I'm in the middle of putting all my components together.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm not listing these things just to show how incompetent the authors are. They seem to really know a lot about what they're doing. My point is, if they can make these types of mistakes, then certainly anyone new to building a PC can (and probably will). Furthermore, as I said in the case of the metal tabs, they don't even say how to fix the problem.
If anything, this book has shown me that building a PC is just as difficult as I imagined it might be, and that it isn't always a clean and easy process. It's a really exciting thought to put all these pieces together yourself, but I don't know if I'd start by doing it with new, top-of-the-line components. One thing for sure I will do is take apart my parents' current computer as soon as they get a replacement, and I might even have this book on hand just to see if I understand it better then.
Finally, the binding of this book is terrible. One section has already fully bent back, looking like at any moment the pages will start coming out. Even worse, the entire spine of the book has torn away from the back cover. If this happens in the front, then the entire cover will come off the book! And I am very careful with my books, so this isn't from rough treatment. This book has moved from my desk to my bed, a matter of two feet, and after three days it's already falling apart.
So all in all, I would recommend this book if you are interested in reading about building a PC, but I'm not so sure everyone will find it all that easy to follow when it actually comes time to build it. Furthermore, since the authors use (necessarily, I understand) very specific components in their projects, it seems possible that when you go to build your own PC using different components, some entirely different issue might pop up that the authors don't discuss since they aren't using the same equipment as you. This, of course, cannot be avoided, but to me it just shows that building a PC still might be a somewhat intimidating process. - Assembly - Ebook - Build A Pc - Build'
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