Memory (RAM):

RAM (Random Access Memory) is vital to a computer system. The more RAM your computer has, the more information that can be processed simultaneously. All your programs, games and applications that are currently in use are stored in your RAM, and so the more RAM you have inside your computer, the more applications you can run.

Advice: If you choose 1024mb or 2048mb DDR RAM, and a DUAL DDR motherboard, your memory will run at dual speed (800mhz!)

Motherboard:

A motherboard as name suggests is the most basic key component in a PC. The motherboard is where CPU (Central Processing Unit) of your computer resides. Motherboards have several features built into them, which include controllers, chips, buses and so on. We have included a few definitions of individual parts of a motherboard to help you along your way:

PCI PORTS:

Motherboards have a number of PCI (Peripheral Component Interconnect) ports . You put items such as the modem, network card, USB card, TV card etc fit into these ports.

USB PORTS:

USB (Universal Serial Bus) ports are ports on your computer that allow you to connect peripherals such as the printer, scanner, webcam, external cable modem, mobile phone, portable hard disk and much more to your computer quickly and fast.

AGP PORT

An AGP (Accelerated Graphics Port) port is where you connect your graphics card to. An 8x AGP port is the fastest currently available.

ATA

ATA (Advanced Technology Attachment) is a disk drive implementation that integrates the controller on the disk drive itself. There are mainly 3 types: ATA 60, ATA 100, and ATA 133. An ATA hard drive will talk to the rest of your computer via an ATA cable which connects to your motherboard. Most computer these days have 4 IDE ports via 2 IDE channels which connect via the ATA interface.

IDE PORT

An IDE port is what you would connect your optical drives, or hard drives to. Each IDE cable has 2 connectors for connecting a device.

SERIAL ATA (SATA) (Serial - Advanced Technology Attachment)

SATA is a serial interface. The speed of the interface for the current phase is ATA 150, ultimately being envisioned to rise to 600 megabytes/sec (ATA 600). Existing ATA drives use a 64 bit wide bus to communicate with the IDE drive. To do so requires a wide, flexible ribbon cable. One of the main problems with the ribbon cable is that, with multiple disk drives (HDD's, CD, and DVD), the Ribbon cables begin to block the airflow through the chassis, impeding cooling. SATA solves this problem by replacing the ribbon cables with thin cables containing two differential cable pairs. In addition, SATA promises a higher speed interface for the future. Another reason for the SATA is that it reduces the number of traces on the motherboard as the connector has significantly fewer pins than the parallel ATA. With Serial-ATA there is no master/slave configuration, and therefore you can easily and hassle free add or remove hard drives. Additionally, with a Serial ATA card you can add additional hard drives. This breaks the barrier of only being able to add 4 IDE devices with parallel ATA. You could, if you needed the storage, have say 4 hard drives as well as a CD writer, DVD writer and DVD ROM.

TABLE OF CONTENTS:

• CPU Comparison: AMD Athlon or Intel Pentium? What is the difference?
• Digital TV cards and TV/Radio Tuners for Media Centre PCs
• DVI, Sound Cards, Network Cards, Wireless Adapters
• FDD, Case, Power Supply Unit
• Firewire, Monitor, Keyboard, Mouse
• Front Side Bus(FSB), Hyperthreading Technology (HT)
• Optical drives: CD, DVD, CD-RW, DVD Writers and Graphic Cards
• Hard disks: RAID Arrays and Striping
• RAM, Motherboards
• Windows Operating Systems: Comparison Tables
• Most common PC applications: Anti-virus, MS Office Suite