If you’re building a computer yourself, you need to know about all the components that go into the computer. You’ll be connecting them together and fitting them into your case, so you need to know about their size, mounting points, electricity requirements, and information ports. For example, you should know how many 3.5” drive bays your case has, and how many SATA3 ports your motherboard has, in order to determine how many hard drives you’ll be able to put in your computer.
If this sounds confusing, or these are foreign terms to you, you should take some time to research the physical components you are looking to put into your custom computer, and familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of how big each component is, where it will go in the computer case, and how you will connect it to the power supply and the motherboard.
This all assumes you’ve already chosen your case and your motherboard. Choosing a case is pretty simple. The major considerations are size, form factor, and aesthetics. Do you want a full-size tower, a mid-tower or a mini PC? That whittles down the options. If you want to have SLI or multiple add-on cards this further limits the selection of mini PC cases. Most cases have room for several hard drives, but today some cases don’t have a bay for an optical (CD, DVD, Blu Ray) drive.
Choosing a motherboard is much more involved. Arguably, choosing a motherboard is the most important part of selecting parts for a DIY computer. Perhaps even more so than the CPU. If you know what processor you want, let’s say a new Skylake Intel Core i5-6600K that narrows down your motherboard selection to only the motherboards that support the new Skylake processors.
However there are many motherboards that do, and there are several chipsets that they use. What is a chipset, you may wonder. A chipset is the part of the motherboard that connects the different parts of the computer together. It lets the processor talk to the memory, hard drives, video cards, network adapters, etc.
Different chipsets have different technical abilities that largely determine the features of the motherboard. Some chipsets allow for the use of multiple graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire, while others do not. If you’re looking to run two or more GPUs in your gaming PC now or in the future, this is an important fact to consider. Some chipsets allow for more memory that others. For example, H110 chipset motherboards will only have two slots for DDR4 memory, while H170 motherboards will have four.
Selecting a chipset and motherboard to use can seem daunting. There are hundreds of motherboards to choose from. I recommend starting with selecting the chipset. Think about what kind of processor you want, how much memory, and whether you’re going to need multiple video cards. That will determine the chipset, and narrow down the choices of motherboard. This site lets you shop for computers by chipset: http://www.avadirect.com/. Next think about the size of case you want. If you’re going for a mini gaming PC, this will further narrow down the options. Finally, you’ll have just a handful of motherboards to choose from, and you could just pick a brand.
If this sounds confusing, or these are foreign terms to you, you should take some time to research the physical components you are looking to put into your custom computer, and familiarize yourself with the basic concepts of how big each component is, where it will go in the computer case, and how you will connect it to the power supply and the motherboard.
This all assumes you’ve already chosen your case and your motherboard. Choosing a case is pretty simple. The major considerations are size, form factor, and aesthetics. Do you want a full-size tower, a mid-tower or a mini PC? That whittles down the options. If you want to have SLI or multiple add-on cards this further limits the selection of mini PC cases. Most cases have room for several hard drives, but today some cases don’t have a bay for an optical (CD, DVD, Blu Ray) drive.
Choosing a motherboard is much more involved. Arguably, choosing a motherboard is the most important part of selecting parts for a DIY computer. Perhaps even more so than the CPU. If you know what processor you want, let’s say a new Skylake Intel Core i5-6600K that narrows down your motherboard selection to only the motherboards that support the new Skylake processors.
However there are many motherboards that do, and there are several chipsets that they use. What is a chipset, you may wonder. A chipset is the part of the motherboard that connects the different parts of the computer together. It lets the processor talk to the memory, hard drives, video cards, network adapters, etc.
Different chipsets have different technical abilities that largely determine the features of the motherboard. Some chipsets allow for the use of multiple graphics cards in SLI or CrossFire, while others do not. If you’re looking to run two or more GPUs in your gaming PC now or in the future, this is an important fact to consider. Some chipsets allow for more memory that others. For example, H110 chipset motherboards will only have two slots for DDR4 memory, while H170 motherboards will have four.
Selecting a chipset and motherboard to use can seem daunting. There are hundreds of motherboards to choose from. I recommend starting with selecting the chipset. Think about what kind of processor you want, how much memory, and whether you’re going to need multiple video cards. That will determine the chipset, and narrow down the choices of motherboard. This site lets you shop for computers by chipset: http://www.avadirect.com/. Next think about the size of case you want. If you’re going for a mini gaming PC, this will further narrow down the options. Finally, you’ll have just a handful of motherboards to choose from, and you could just pick a brand.