How to build a custom PC by

1. How to build a custom PCby Joseph Duenas Joe Espinoza Benji Hernandez

2. 1 Creating a Static Free Environment 2 Safety Procedures 3 Tools Needed 4 Parts Needed 5 Cases 6 Motherboard 7 Parts of Motherboard 8 Hard Drive 9 Floppy Disk Drive 10 Processor 11 Cooling System 12 Memory 13 Video Card 14 Power Supply 15 Mouse, Keyboard 16 CD-Rom 17 Sound card 18 Modem 19 Bios 20 Operating System 21 Speakers And Devices 22 Round Cables 23 Final Tweaking 24 Special Thanks 25 Final Thought Table of Contents

3. To Create a Static Free Environment You must create a static free environment because it will damage your pc severely. To create one you must have an anti-static wrist strap and a anti-static mat. 1. Creating a Static Free Environment

4. 2. Safety Procedures Always hit the start menu and press shutdown button to properly shut it down. Your computer must always be turned off before being worked on. Never have any liquids around your work area. No technician is ever caught with food or drinks near the work area.

5. 3. Tools Needed If you are a very casual PC user you can probably get by hacking around with an old screwdriver and a pocket knife when you need to work on your PC. However, if you plan to do any reasonable amount of work upgrading, building, troubleshooting or repairing PCs, a proper tool kit is a good investment. There are many different types of tool kits available for the computer enthusiast, with tools selected specifically to make the lives of those who work with PCs easier. As with most things, tool kits range widely in size, quality and price. At the low end are $5 kits that are barely any better than the screwdriver and pocket knife. At the high end are kits costing over $100 that include everything but the kitchen sink; these are overkill for most people (including me). Most people can do just fine with a toolkit costing between $15 and $50. These are often available pre-assembled into "genuine artificial leather" carrying cases, sold at most general computer stores

6. Motherboard Mouse Keyboard Hard Drive Memory CPU Cooling fan Heat sink Ribbon Cables Modem Power supply Video Card Sound Card CD-Rom Floppy disk drive Monitor 4. Parts Needed These are the basic parts for building your pc. You can always go advance but it will cost a bit of money. Ex. CD-RW, DVD-ROM, DVD-RW, Wireless Mouse and Keyboard, Flat Panel Monitor, Faster Processor, Faster RAM, Water Cooling System, Round Cables, and a Hard Drive that holds a lot more.

7. 5. Cases The case that your computer is housed in is an important consideration if you plan to add drives to your system or do a lot of work on it. Some manufacturers have well-designed cases that are easy to open and service. Tower cases have two types of covers, wraparound or side panels. Side panels are typically easier to work with, and wraparound cases can be painful to work with as they never seem to fit back on properly. One thing about towers is that you have to carefully consider where you are going to place components. The standard IDE ribbon cable is 16" (41cm) long, and has two connections for devices. You can't get longer cables, because that's what the standard is. Another kind of cases are the custom made towers. Like the one you see on your right they are made for your style. You can put lots of stuff like neon lights, water cooling system, multiple hard drives, a good amount of drives, and light led fans. Also with your custom case you can put Plexiglas on the side or wherever, do it could look stylish.

8. 6. Motherboard The motherboard has been an integral part of most personal computers for more than 20 years. Think of a motherboard as a scale model of a futuristic city with many modular plug-in buildings, each using power from a common electrical system. Multiple-lane highways of various widths transport data between the buildings. The motherboard is the data and power infrastructure for the entire computer. Motherboards (also called mainboards) are actually a carryover from architecture used for years in mainframe computers . Various circuit cards performing various functions all plug into many similar sockets on a common circuit board. Each circuit card performs a unique function in the computer and gets its power from the socket. .

9. 7. Parts of a Motherboard • Front Panel • Bois • Floppy Connecter • 2 Dual Channel Masters • 2 SSRAM • 2 DDRRAM • ATX Power Connector • VIA VT8366 • Socket A • PS/2, Mouse/KB • USB Ports • COM1, Com2 Ports • Audio in/MIC/Out and game ports • AGP Slot • Five PCI Slots

10. 8. Hard Drive The Hard Drive disk is the data center of the computer. The hard disk Hard disks were invented in the 1950s. They started as large disks up to 20 inches in diameter holding just a few megabytes . They were originally called "fixed disks" or "Winchesters" (a code name used for a popular IBM product). They later became known as "hard disks" to distinguish them from “floppy disk." Hard disks have a hard platter that holds the magnetic medium, as opposed to the flexible plastic film found in tapes and floppies. drive differs in three ways size, speed, permanence.

11. 9. Floppy Disk Drive If you have spent any time at all working with a computer, then chances are good that you have used a floppy disk at some point. The floppy disk drive (FDD) was the primary means of adding data to a computer until the CD-ROM Drive became popular. In fact, FDDs have been an key component of most personal computers for more than 20 years. The invention of hard disks relegated floppy disks to the secondary roles of data transfer and software installation. The invention of the CD-ROM and the Internet, combined with the increasingly large size of software files, is threatening even these secondary roles.

12. 10. Processor Abbreviation of central processing unit, an pronounced as separate letters. The CPU is the brains of the computer. Sometimes referred to simply as the processor or central processor, the CPU is where most calculations take place. In terms of computing power, the CPU is the most important element of a computer system. These are some processing units known as the main brain of the computer such as the Intel Pentium 4 and a AMD Duron processors.

13. 11. Cooling System The cooling system is very important because it keeps the processor cool so that it can work at its maximum speed. Water cooling may make your computer look thoroughly extraordinary - even with a PC built in a conventional case, you still need to put the reservoir and radiator somewhere, and they're likely to attract comment - but, done properly, it's a reliable, inexpensive way to get substantially more speed from a CPU.

14. 12. Memory There are two types of memory Random Access Memory (RAM) and Read-Only Memory (ROM). RAM is volatile and will not be saved when you shut down your computer unless you have a diskette or a compact disk to save on. ROM is non-volatile, which means that you can shut down your computer and the data will still be saved.

15. 13. Video Card The video card is just as important as the screen – and more often overlooked. During the years 1999-2001 the overall quality of video adapters have been improved. Earlier there was some very lousy products in the market. Follow my articles to know more of the video adapter! A video card is typically an adapter, a removable expansion card in the PC. Thus, it can be replaced! A video chip set of some brand (ATI, Matrox, NVIDIA, S3, Intel, to name some of the better known). This one to your right is a ATI Radeon9800XT Pro 256mb.

16. 14. Power Supply In a personal computer (PC), the power supply is the metal box usually found in a corner of the case. The power supply is visible from the back of many systems because it contains the power-cord receptacle and the cooling fan. Power Supply

17. 15. Mouse, Keyboard The part of the computer that we come into most contact with is probably the piece that we think about the least. But the keyboard is an amazing piece of technology. For instance, did you know that the keyboard on a typical computer system is actually a computer itself? Mice first broke on to the public stage with the introduction of the Apple Macintosh in 1984, and since then they have helped to completely redefine the way we use computers. Keyboard Wireless Mouse

18. 16. CD-Rom Drive The first is the DATA TRANSFER RATE of the drive. This parameter is widely touted by manufacturers and has been given a good deal of press. We've gone from single speed drives with a data transfer rate of 150 Kb/s to 32x drives at 4800 Kb/s (the 32x means that it is 32 times faster than 150 Kb/s e.g. 150x32=4800). Speeding up the data transfer rate of a drive is a relatively easy thing to do. A drive's manufacturer designs a drive that simply spins the CD-ROM faster. That's why there has been such a big increase in the data transfer rate of drives in the past few years. It's just not that big a feat to design a drive that spins faster. The other factor affecting a CD-ROM drives performance is ACCESS TIME, also called seek time. This is the average time it takes to reposition a drive's read head to a new location and start reading data. Access time has improved relatively little in the course of developing new drives with faster and faster data transfer rats. It's not that the drive manufacturers wouldn't like to greatly increase access time, it's just not an easy thing to do. CD-ROMs

19. 17. Sound Card The voice in your computer that lets you know when you've received a new e-mail is made possible by the sound card. Before the arrival of sound cards, personal computers (PCs) were limited to beeps from a tiny speaker on the motherboard. In the late 1980s, sound cards ushered in the multimedia PC and took computer games to a whole different level. This is one of the best sound cards available. Premium 24-bit/192 kHz, 8 channel integrated interface with 2-in/6-out analog, S/PDIF stereo digital output, surround sound support. With this sound card you will receive the perfect sound effects.

20. 18. Modem The word "modem" is a contraction of the words modulator-demodulator. A modem is typically used to send digital data over a phone line. The sending modem modulates the data into a signal that is compatible with the phone line, and the receiving modem demodulates the signal back into digital data. Wireless modems convert digital data into radio signals and back. Modems came into existence in the 1960s as a way to allow terminals to connect to computers over the phone lines. A typical arrangement is shown below:

21. 19. Bios The BIOS software has a number of different roles, but its most important role is to load the operating system. When you turn on your computer and the microprocessor tries to execute its first instruction, it has to get that instruction from somewhere. It cannot get it from the operating system because the operating system is located on a hard disk, and the microprocessor cannot get to it without some instructions that tell it how. Bios Bios Startup

22. 20. Operating System If you have a computer, then you have heard about operating systems. Any desktop or laptop PC that you buy normally comes pre loaded with Windows XP. Macintosh computers come pre-loaded with OS X. Many corporate servers use the Linux or UNIX operating systems. The purpose of an operating system is to organize and control hardware and software so that the device it lives in behaves in a flexible but predictable way.The Operating system (OS) is the first thing loaded onto the computer – without the operating system, a computer is useless.

23. Simply, speakers are air pistons that move back (on the negative cycle of an electrical signal) and forth (on the positive cycle) creating different degrees of air pressure. Low frequency signals reproduced by subwoofers are "non-directional." That is, it's most difficult for humans to tell where lower frequencies are coming from. So you can (theoretically) put a subwoofer anywhere without worrying about a loss of sound quality due to poor aiming and direction. 21. Speakers and Audio Devices

24. 22. Round Cables With a myriad of IDE, SCSI and floppy drive cables inside your computer case, they will often increase the clutter and restrict the airflow. With a little bit of work, however, you can easily tidy the mess and greatly increase the airflow through your case. Rounding cables reduces the area the cables take up and not only does it look much neater, the increased airflow should make things much cooler inside your machine. Rounding cables typically involves slicing them into small strips and binding them with cable ties, but there are a couple of other ways to round your cables as well.

25. 23. Final Tweaking

26. 24. Special Thanks

27. 25. Final Thought