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PC Component Selection
Most computer retailers do not publicise what PC components they use. They will describe the cthe round about of a  custom built computer, but don’t detail the brands of the computer parts they use. They use generic hardware with a list spec but is seldom as high quality as inferred . Building your own computer means you can accordingly choose the parts you need, you must ensure you get good, name brand hardware which will have high performance and reliability.

Prices
You can get more hit of your money building your own PC. In most of cases, you will have comparable PCs and equally priced, where one is pre configured and other would be home built custom computer. Preconfigured custom built computers are often cheap than what you can build for your own, but when you consider the hardware choices within, the price is offset in favor of what you building. If you don’t get enough time to build your own computer then you most likely want to buy a pre built PC. If you don’t mind spending time, considering the better performance parts and enjoying building your custom built computer then you can do better doing it yourself.

Support
Pre built custom computers do come with manufacturer support, on the other hand Customer support is the key concern for do-it-yourself. When you build custom computer yourself, there is nowhere to take the PC for service. Some computer retailers have questionable records on customer support whereas some are quite good at it ( We have 99.9% positive feed back record ). Having a good customer support for your PC guarantees of having a problem-free user experience, and it certainly guarantees that they will take responsibility for your PC if it doesn’t work.

Garantee
On pre-built Computers, there is usually a warranty on the whole custom built computer, and in many cases, you are offered an extended service plan at the time of purchasing custom gaming computers. Home built custom PCs are not with full system warranties, but if you build your computer with good name brand hardware, most of the components will themselves have warranties. So, really, either way, you can be covered here.

Operating system

Pre-built custom PCs come with installed software on it, usually the operating system itself. The actual price of the software is pretty good, because manufacturers get great deals on this software because they buy in bulk. On the other hand these custom built computers sometime come with too many software installed, meaning garbage that you do not want. While when building your own computer you might pay a little more for the software, but you will get what you want plus you can set it up how you want. In general, building your own PC can be an ideal way to buy a custom built computer.

Never use a PC you don’t build yourself. It’s huge money saving with having custom built computer you have ever thought and as technology progressed, you may incrementally upgrade the custom built computer, once it goes out of date; you pretty much need to start anew with a new custom built computer.

Best value graphics cards

HOW TO BUY
Most graphics cards are based on either the Nvidia Geforce or ATI Radeon family of chips. Each has their strengths and both offer state-of-the-art image acceleration and comparable features.
Performance improves as you move up a range. Top chips offer more features and draw more pixels or textures in a single pass than cut-down, lower-cost options. All current graphics processors are fine for  office work, but hardcore gamers currently favour Nvidia’s Geforce 6800 or new 7800 series and ATI’s Radeon X850 XT chips.And is very important when you are building a computer from scratch ,that you should not belittle your system by underating the video supply
Ensure the card you buy can display favoured resolutions with at least a 75Hz monitor refresh rate to avoid eye strain from flicker (if using a CRT monitor).
There are usually three clock speeds quoted (in megahertz). Core clock is the internal speed of the graphics processor. Memory speed (or memory clock) is the speed of data transfer between the graphics card’s onboard memory and the graphics processor. Ramdac speed is the capability of the digital-to-analogue converter that provides the graphics output from the card.
Graphics cards use their own dedicated video memory to store data, images and textures. The more you have, the better the performance. A card with 64MB is fine for office tasks, but we
recommend at least 128MB or 256MB for the latest games and video applications.
Around £40 will buy you a Geforce FX 5200 or Radeon 9200 card with 128MB of Ram, which is good for 20 action/strategy games, image editing and less demanding 3D games.
To play 3D action games smoothly, look at £100-£150 cards. Serious gamers should consider the Geforce FX 6800 GT at £280-plus, Radeon 850 XT at £320-plus, or FX 7800 GTX at £350-plus.
Depending on the motherboard, you’ll need an AGP or PCI Express graphics card. PCI Express is the newest interface standard, offering up to double the bandwidth of an AGP 8x slot for even faster and more complex graphics. Both ATI and Nvidia offer PCI Express versions of most of their cards. Nvidia also has its SLI (Scalable Link Interface) technology that lets you use two PCI Express graphics cards in SU-enabled motherboards for ultimate performance. ATI’s rival technology Crossfire is due soon.
Look for support for both analogue (VGA) and digital (DVI) displays, and S-video and composite video outputs for use with TVs. Some ‘all-in-one’ cards have a built-in TV tuner

Most PCs are Windows XP, and the Home Edition is fine. If it’s for a small business or you need features such as remote access, buy XP Professional. Few PCs are sold running Linux, and we’d recommend only  the technically confident buy a Linux-only system. Linux can always be installed later. Finally, don’t overlook the monitor, especially if you’re using the PC for gaming or imaging; buy the best you can afford, otherwise it may no be an advantage to learn how to build a desktop computer online.

Which is the best operating system .. depending on your intended use , tthey all have pros and cons , though Xp is still the leader , despite efforts to bring vista to the front , the biggest advantage of xp is the flexibility and the vast ammount of software available .

Even with the huge head start ,Vista enabled developers hated the os , and many just plain refused to issue programs for it .

Many of my specialised apps , refuse to run to vista , and those that do run slow . Too many funky toys make for a super bloat ware, and really, if you are computing for business , or just like to be quick in all that you do , slow boat Vista is not the way to go . I do run vista , on tthe family pc , but only because it’s so pretty! When you use the how to build a computer online websites always try to build for the future.

Internal ,external dvd drives

DVD DRIVES
HOW TO BUY
DVD drives have largely replaced CD-Rom, CD-R and CD-RW drives in all but a few entry-level PCs and notebooks. Many systems still offer DVD-Rom drives as secondary drives - used for playback of discs only - while a growing number have a DVD writer or rewriter for burning your own DVDs as the main system drive.
DVD burners can be divided into internal and external drives. Internal drives are cheaper than their external counterparts, but require a level of knowledge so you can install them yourself. You can opt for one of the external offerings which can be hooked up simply via USB2 or Firewire.Most drives are multi-format, meaning they can write to all key media types, so make sure yours supports DVD+R, DVD+RW, DVD-R and DVD-RW discs. Newer double and dual-layer drives can write to new discs which can store 8.5GB versus the 4.7GB capacity of existing discs. This is useful for backing up your DVD movie collection or chunks of your hard drive on a single disc.Alway look at the build a computer online information articles or evev the shopping sites , they often have reviews of the latest equipment or media.
The dual-layer drives cost little more than single-layer drives, so are a good investment. The same cannot be said for the cost of dual-layer discs. A branded, dual-layer 8.5GB disc will cost around £3.75. Rewriteable blu-ray discs will not arrive until the end of 2006.

Hard drives and DVD drives
Ide , ultra ata, sata and the rest

HOW TO BUY

If you’re building a high-performance system, buy the fastest drive you can afford; if you just want lots of capacity then slower drives offer better value.
OEM or ‘brown box’ drives are cheaper - this is the bare drive without the extras, such as cables, included in retail boxed versions.
The transfer rates in today’s Ultra ATA drives are 100Mbytes/sec (133Mbytes/sec for Maxtor drives), while  Serial ATA (Sata) drives are rated at 150Mbytes/sec. Check the seek times, spindle speed, buffer size and the real density of the platters (disks).Thsi is a major thing to remember when you build a desktop computer.
Usually in milliseconds, seek time is how long a drive’s heads take to find data on the disk. The speed at which the spindle holding the disks spins ranges from 4,200rpm for a notebook drive to 15,000rpm for some SCSI drives. Generally, faster speeds give better performance.
The larger the buffer (cache), the more recently written or stored data is held in the drive’s memory, resulting in less time seeking the data on the disk.
Areal density is the amount of data stored on a given area of a drive’s platter. The more data per square centimetre (gigabytes per platter), the less disk movement is required to bring it under the heads.
Originally Integrated Drive Electronics (IDE), then Enhanced IDE (E-IDE), this common parallel interface is usually written as ATA (AT Attachment), modified with speed improvements in recent years to Ultra ATA/xxx, where xxx is the peak bandwidth in Mbytes/sec. To differentiate Ultra ATA from Sata, the term Parallel ATA is used.
Faster Sata drives are more expensive than Parallel ATA. Sata uses two pairs of high-frequency cables, working at low voltage.
SCSI (Small Computer System Interface) drives are technically no different to ATA drives, but support up to 16 devices on a single channel and you can have multiple channels in a PC. The disadvantage, though, is price.
Most motherboards support Raid (Redundant Array of Independent Disks), which connects multiple drives, to improve performance or provide fault tolerance.
One problem you may hit is the inability to access the new drive’s full capacity. Some older Bioses only support drives up to 137GB. This may be solved by updating the PC’s Bios. Retail boxed disks often come with software to fool the Bios into recognising the disk, or you can buy a separate disk controller card, which fits into a PCI slot.Always to remember to have such an option when you build a desktop computer yourself.