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Suggested Reading - Books

Wiley Press - Extreme Tech PC Building Series
Dec 09, 2005 - Contributed By dB Masters
An excellent series of books dealing with the building of a custom PC.

Wiley Press, as part of their "Extreme Tech" series of books, has released a set of three books which I recently got to take a look at, those books being:

- Build the Ultimate Gaming PC
- Build the Ultimate Home Theatre PC
- Build the Ultimate Custom PC

As indicated by the titles, all three books deal with loosely the same topic, the differences being the use of the PC being built. They take into account the specific strengths and weaknesses of a gaming system or a home theatre system and what is most important to PC playing those roles. The third in the list, "Build the Ultimate Custom PC" shows one how to build what is basically the biggest, baddest computer possible.

All The Pieces

Each book starts by covering how to be ready to build a PC, safety concerns and other such topics. After that it's into the meat of the subject...which is all the components. Starting out with the different style cases, the books discuss the different styles, which is pretty much desktop and tower (don't recall seeing a mention of the rack mountable cases like the one I use) and the different sizes, form factors, power supplies that each case comes with.

After that we then get in to the fun stuff, motherboards, CPU's and memory. This covers all the different available busses for device cards, bus speeds, memory speeds and the different architecture between different types of RAM and CPU's and how it all fits together.

Then it's on to the different drives your PC will need, not only hard drives, but also CD/DVD drives...heck they even cover floppy drives, and honestly, I don't know many people that have them any more. Armed with the knowledge of the available bus types and speeds on your motherboard, you will be able to select the best drives for your system.

Also covered, in pretty good detail, is the subject of video cards and sound cards. These two components, handling two of the most readily noticeable results of computing, are subjects that any custom computer builder will need to take time and research.

Video cards don't necessarily come in a million different bus types or anything like that, but they do have many, many differences that are not necessarily noticeable by just looking at it unless your are an electronic engineer. The thing you may notice is how many ports are on the back of it, which will indicate how many monitors it will support, and what types of plugs they will support, as well as what type of adapters come with it. In addition they have different types and numbers of processors on board, different types and amounts of memory as well.

Sound cards, as any HRC regular knows, has a great many variables as well.

Putting It All Together

Ok, so, you know everything about the components, you go out and buy the parts that will eventually turn into your dream computer. Great...now what...

These books then go in to a look at all the different cables involved in making a PC. Explaining what they look like and where they are used.

Before you begin assembling your computer, you should inspect the equipment you got while taking it out of the packaging, making sure there are no obvious problems with them. There is some information that will help you in knowing what to look for when inspecting circuit boards, cables, cases, power supplies and the like.

Then the fun part, you get to assemble your computer, tweak the configuration, burn-in the hardware, install and configure your operating system and get it up and running.

Recommendation?

Building a computer for the first time can seem intimidating. There are a lot of pieces to it and a lot of money at stake, a little research and careful planning can make it a whole bunch less stressful. These books seemed to really cover all the bases from beginning to end. While I have been building computers for years, technology keeps on moving ahead, so a little refresher course is not a bad idea either.

Good books, really, they cover a lot, don't cost a fortune, and are easy reads if it's a subject you are interested in.

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