My current PC, circa 2005, is showing signs of its age. With that in mind, February this year I started the hunt for a new list of parts. My starting point was a list from toms hardware. Possibly from that, I settled on an Intel Core 1 duo as the CPU. Moderate price, fast end, not new (hence price will have moderated). The Intel site led me to pick the E8400, primarily on price

Motherboard. I looked around and for no real reason, spent more time on the ASUS website, out to look for reviews, back to the site etc. Eventually settled on the Asus P5Q Pro, again moderately priced, reasonable spec and good reviews. My alternative was the Asus P6T, rejected on price grounds.

Having that combination I then needed to match the other bits and pieces with that.

PSU. Asus are helpful here, as are Antec, both providing a true indication of what you'll need. I'd previously simply gone for a 'big' (my definition) PSU and hoped. This time I started counting the outlets I needed, type of cable etc. Of specific interest are the motherboard - standard? sort of. Just odd. PCIe (6 or 8 pin for the graphics card?). Number of disks (I'd settled on 2, accepting that I'd probably add another later). I had it in mind that I wanted a good quality power supply, i.e. I was prepared to pay for a good one and rest assured it would last. I'm currently looking to replace a fan in my present machine, in a box marked 'no replacable parts'. Eventually I didn't buy a quality one (price constraints). I've no notes on it, but IIRC I was looking at Antec, but the range was plain confusing. Since I eventually chose an Antec case, this would have made sense, had I been able to choose one. I eventually took the lazy way and picked one from the supplier, the OCZ 600W Stealth Stream PSU. No idea how that will turn out.

Case. Again I'd gone overboard and chosen a quality case, then came back constrained by price. Antec P182 had good reviews, Hexus reviewed it well (within the price constraints). The issue here (for me) was did I really want to have 10 drive bays? No was the answer. I would have liked a removable motherboard tray, lots easier to work on, but only needed once.

Discussion on the Asus user forum had noted problems with the Intel CPU fan. That made me consider buying the bare CPU and a separate cooling fan. I'd settled on this, reviewed this Zalman fan, again it's a question of getting what you pay for. Eventually I was dissuaded by the height, wrt adjacent components? I did find a horizontal fan, which required all components within x mm of the CPU not to be more than y mm high! I simply didn't have that information, so I bought the 'consumer boxed' Intel CPU, complete with fan, which I've installed. As and when that goes, I'll know which fan will fit and replace it.

Memory. Kingston and Crucial both offer a great memory finder service. Even then I struggled, eventually coming down (again, price performance trades) for this 4Gb kit. I've had the Ballistix memory before and never had problems. I was totally ignorant of the terminology, so had to translate 4-4-4-12 into the latency figures. The ASUS user forum (remember, they're overclockers) talked of dropping 'the' voltage to 1.45V (what bloody voltage!!!) but I never did figure that one out. A 'helpline' IRC chat line at Crucial came up with the statement that the bios ought to sort it. Since I've no intention to overclock the system, I'm happy to let the manufacturer sort that one.

Disks. From reviews, I'd picked out Samsung spinpoint F1, but the review was too old and I couldn't find any. I settled for a pair of WD Caviar disks. reviewed OK and a reliable manufacturer. I wanted two, one for local backup. My last PC was a full test rig built by this mag, with which I was quite pleased (and it did make choosing components that bit easier!)

The DVD I couldn't find as any pick, so I bought with the bulk of the stuff, choosing a Sony drive. Seems they are now a comodity item. I have no reason to add blue-ray, especially at the current prices.

The graphics card was hard. I'd been fooled last year upgrading one, I'm totally lost with the rapidly changing backplanes on a PC. The old systems were slow to change, but with graphics needing more and more bandwidth, it seems to have gone mad. I eventually settled on PCIe 2.0 as the most recent, then went hunting. Constraints were that it should all work with Linux and be moderately priced. I soon settled on an Asus ATI card, but then had difficulty with choices. this was coming out tops, when I found this, which is quite recent. Research showed me that I should be able to get a generic driver to work with it, and Asus is shipping an Open Driver, so it should be in the repositories within weeks of the Windows drivers. Only trouble is, I'm just that bit early, so I'm on a waiting list for delivery. Seems 50nm tech isn't quite as productive as larger scale, so it is taking them a while to ramp up. Not always a good choice to be early.

The end result?

Final word on 32 vs 64 bit technology. I'm moving over to 64 bit. But slowly :-) The problem (with Linux) is that not all the apps are ported to 64bit. Nor can I access my 4Gb memory using 32bit addressing. So! The need (I asked Intel) is for a full suite supporting 64 bit. That goes from .... processor, Bios, OS and through to applications. No, I hadn't realised either. My solution is to load a 32 bit version of the OS, then install PAE which provides access to the remainder. I'll probably move to a full 64 bit OS when I'm more sure of the apps I want in that version. This explains PAE in combination with Fedora Core 11, due out 9 June if their current schedule remains. I want to wait for that, couple of reasons, the new (updated?) ext4 will be in use, and I'm hoping to see Bash v4 included, or I'll download it. kerneltrap.org has another view of PAE in Linux

More to come when I get the system up and running