Knowledge about Computer Parts

Computer Case.
Power Supply.
Motherboard.
Hard Drive.
Processor (CPU)
Memory (RAM)
Sound Card.
Video Card.
CD/DVD RW Drives.
Network Card.
Keyboard and Mouse
Monitor.

About a Computer Case

The first process in the parts selection is choosing the right computer case for the desktop. There are various matters and things to take into consideration when choosing the right computer case.

There are many functional areas and many other non-functioning areas that need to be examined before making a decision. In the functional means, the size and the shape of the case are considered while in the non-functional, the aesthetic and the colour selection are taken into account.

Other names for the computer case are housing, cabinet box, tower, computer chassis, enclosure, system unit or a simple case. It is basically a closet that has all the components of the computer, but it doesn’t have main part of the computer like mouse, keyboard and display. Many people have this misconception that the CPU, and the hard drive are the main components to be added in the computer case, however this is not true. Mainly steel is used in the manufacturing process of the cases, while wood and some logs are also used in other types of cases.

Size of the Computer Case Does Matter

The major determinant of the computer case is the motherboard, which is the main largest part of the computer components. The various sizes of the computer are called "factors". Many blade servers and rack mounted cases also includes some external dimensions to it. Because these cases have to get fixed with specific enclosures too.

Configuration of a Computer Case

In the configuration department, there are two major styles, the tower and the desktop.

Tower Computer Case - The Computer Case is the most common used case and is mainly found in the three main sizes. Full tower, mid tower or a mini tower. The larger or full tower has a greater capability to store more hard drives and components and also allows for more room for component maintenance. This also makes installations easier when compared with the other two towers. At the same time there are always some space constraints as they take more space either in the home or in office. However for average usage of a person, the mid tower is considered to be the best among all others. When using the mini tower, its compatibility with the motherboard must be checked. Apart from this the box has to be expandable in order to meet all the requirements.

Desktop Computer Case - When selecting a desktop case for the business, home, and for the purpose of games it is important to select the right one. The best desktop can be found by searching online for all the available options. All the best manufacturers of computer case can also be searched on the web. Many of them are Antic, Power Up and Thermal take. In the component sections of the computer cases, PC lighting, bezels, fans and supplies are also included. One can even look for the lowest price availability on the web for these components.

Computer Casing Towers

No matter what the size of a configuration of the computer tower is, they all have many easy options like:

Microphone Jack and Headphone Jack that is installed on the front side of the case
USB port
Firewire Port

The location varies for each case. Some are located on the middle of the case while others are found on the bottom of the case. The location also depends upon the placement of the CPU storage.

Computer Casing Decor

In the aesthetic section, the outer covering or casing of the computer is worked upon. Now there are many customized computer cases in the market that allows users to make the one they want for their computer. At the same time when planning to get customized casing, some points have to be considered, mainly:

Chrome plating
Light displays
The case colour itself
Select the window through case or complete opaque one

There are various LED light displays that come in many colour designs and options. Normally in red, blue, green and even purple colours are available.

The one mostly chooses from the normal commonly found colours. Black is the most preferred or adopted colour by default. Many cases themselves come in the black colour. Secondly black colour goes well with all the colours and décor designs.

Choosing the Computer Case

When choosing a personal computer case, following things has to keep in mind

Space
Motherboard
Power supply
Cooling
Noise
Case material
Design

Each one of them is important in its own way and they overall determine the making and maintenance of the computer casing. Space has to be designed accurate, then compatibility with the motherboard is essential. The power supply and the cooling system have to be well established and then finally the material used for the making of computer case must be full proof.

Computer Power Supply

A computer power supply is a compulsory unit to a computer. Without the power supply a computer is useless as it is just a case full of metal and plastic. Explaining the different power cables and connectors and how they work inside your computer. A power cable connects from the power point to the power supply where it supply's the motherboard and other components with power. Often there is a power switch on the back which can be switched off to stop the power.

The most common power supply that we have in our computers today are the ATX Power Supply. The AT Power Supply was found in many computers a few years ago but this has become less common.

The picture below shows each power cable and its name. To find out more about each cable and where it goes in the computer click on the links at the end of the page.

The computer power supply is placed inside the computer case generally near the top of the case. It is sometimes necessary to buy a mini power supply for some cases are so small that they need one. Most computer cases when bought come with a power supply that is suited to its case. There are usually power ports on the motherboard for the fans in the case but if not it is possible to buy an adapter that will convert power from the 4-pin power cable to a fan power cable.

Computer Motherboard

Definition of a motherboard: Computer Motherboards are an important part of the computer. A motherboard is the mother to all the other parts. In other words, everything in a computer connects to the motherboard. A motherboard is the primary circuit board in a computer and motherboard is a complicated and compulsory component of a computer. Everything in a computer connects to the motherboard.

Motherboard

A typical motherboard has attachment points for all the common components in a computer. These are the Power Supply, CPU (Central Processing Unit), hard drive, RAM (Random Access Memory), graphics card, CD drive and other peripheral devices such as sound cards, network cards etc.

CPU's and Motherboards

Now every CPU (Central Processing Unit) does not go into every motherboard. This means that if you buy an Intel Core 2 Duo CPU then you will need to buy a motherboard that supports that CPU. Check with the manufacturer before buying the motherboard to make sure that the CPU suits the motherboard.

Different Motherboard Components

There are many different components on a motherboard. To find out about each different component click on the list below. I will briefly describe each component and then explain what that component does in a motherboard.

CPU Socket
CMOS
BIOS
Memory Slots
Power Connectors
IDE Connectors
SATA Connectors
CMOS Battery
AGP Graphics Slot
PCI-Express Graphics Slot
Buying a Motherboard
PCI Slots
Chipset

Computer Hard Drive

A computer hard drive is the place where computer data is stored. A HDD (Hard Disk Drive) is generally referred to as the secondary computer storage device, as the RAM (Random Access Memory) is the primary. Data that is stored on the RAM is volatile meaning when the computer is shut down then the information will be lost.

Information about Hard Drive

When you turn on your computer it starts the Boot Process which tells the computer to go to the hard drive for the Operating System.
A hard drive is a permanent storage device, so even when the computer is turned off the information will still be there. The operating system, program files, and all data files are stored on the hard drive. A computer can function without a hard drive but there would be no operating system or programs so it would be of very little use.
A hard drive uses circular platters to store data. These are kept in pristine condition and are very good mirrors. If you open a hard drive case, the air will contaminate the platters and it is unlikely that it would work again. The actuator arm runs between the platters reading the information in 1's and 0's. The head of this arm reads data even when the disk is running at 7200rpms (a common hard drive speed).
This means that the platter is doing 7200 rounds per minute. More recent computer hard drives can now do up to 15,000rpms. As the platters go round and round the head reads it and processes the information which then proceeds to the connector which connects to the computer.

External and Internal

All the hard drives that are inside a computer are called internal hard drives. All the pictures on this page show internal hard drives. External hard drives sit outside the computer in a case and they connect to the computer through USB.
External drives are very useful for backing up your computer and for transferring files to two locations. External drives are also very portable and there are even smaller portable drives that use a computer hard drive that is very similar like laptop hard drive.

Hard Drive Connectors

There are currently three connector cables in a common hard drive. These are the: IDE Ribbon Cable, SCSI Cable and the more recent SATA Cable.

Hard Drive Capacity

A computer hard drive is measured in Gigabytes. For example, a computer may have an 500 GB (Gigabyte) hard drive. Different files take more space. Video files and pictures take up a lot of room, but simple text files take next to nothing. The operating system and program files take up space as well. Hard drive capacities vary between 1 GB and less to 2Tb maybe even bigger.

Hard Drive Manufacturers

There are a number of hard drive manufacturers that build hard drives and then distribute them to different shops and online stores to sell them. I plan on reviewing all of them, but in my opinion, Western Digital and Seagate are the best.

Western Digital
Seagate
Samsung
Iomega
Hitachi

Processor (CPU)

The Processor/CPU (Central Processing Unit) is the "Brains of the Organization," so to speak. It is designed to do very few things, but to do them extremely quickly. The processor performs a limited set of calculations based on requests from the operation system and controls access to system memory. Processor speed is measured in several different ways, including clock cycles or megahertz (MHz), and millions of instruction per second (MIPS). Any of these measures gives you an estimate of the Processor's speed/power.

The speed of early processors ranged from 4MHz to 8MHz, but today's processors have broken the multigigahertz (GHz) mark. With the advent of multiple core processors, the processors speed is usually represented as a :per core" value.

Processor Speed

Processor speed is hoe fast a processor executes its instructions or commands. This speed was originally measured in millions of hertz, or mega hertz (MHz) per second. Hertz is also known as a clock cycle and a processor can execute code at every cycle. Thus, a processor operating as measly 1 MHz per second can execute ine million tasks every second. Processor today now measure their speed in gigahertz (GHz) per second. A gigahertz is one billion clock cycle per second, so the CPU can execute tasks a billion times per second.

Orginal cpus had a speed of 4.77 MHz and systems at the time of this writing are running over 3.0 GHz. Although processor speed is not the onlyfactor affecting performance, in general, the faster the processor, the faster the system.

The processor accesses information that resides in system memory, which is a slower process then if the information is stored in the processor's own speacial

high-speed memory, that call cache memory.Cache memory are two type Leel1 (L1) cache and Leel2 (L2) cache. L1 cache is built into the processer, whereas L2 cache resides out side the processor. In the past L2 cache resided in the motherboard, but never processors have a bit of L1 and L2 cache in the chip package. If you upgrade the cache memory on your computer, you are adding L2 cache to the motherboard, you wouldn't be able to upgread the L1 cache in the processor. Because L1 cache is built into the chip, you can't upgrade it with out replacing the entire processor.

The integration of cache memory into processor chips didn't come to market until the 80486 chips were developed in 1989. Normaly 80486 chips had 8k of L1 and the Pentium chip increased that amount to 16k. Many newer processor hae increased the L1 cache to over 16k and hae also included large amounts of L2 cache. The more cache memory processor has the qulcker the system will be. For a system to truly be able to take advantage of multithreaded application, you normally need a system that has multiple processors, one processor to run one thread at a time.

The core feature also include each core having its own L1 cache memory. Multicore processors also hae a block of shared L2 cache between the two processors in the multicore chip. A huge benefit of being only one chip on the motherboard is that the one multicore chip sraws less power then two separate processors would. Figure 2-3 shows the logical view of a dual-core processor.

A number of different flavors of multicore processor are available today, such as dual-core, triple-core and quad-core processor. Here are the differences between the three.

Dual Core: Has two core in one chip package, with each core typically having 128k of L1 cache and 512k of shared L2 cache.
Triple Core: Has three cores in one chip package with each core typlcally having 128k of L1 cache. Most triple-core processor also hae 512k of L2 cache per core and share a block of cache memory, known as L3 cache.
Quad Core : Has four cores in one chip package with each core typically having 128k of L1 cache. Most quad-core processors also havev 512k of L2 cache per core and share a block of L3 cache (2MB-6MB).

RAM (Random Access Memory)

We have looked at the relationship between CPU speed and overall PC speed. Basically the faster the CPU the faster the PC will run applications. Think of your CPU like a car engine. The bigger the engine, the more power the car will have. When the PC isn't working very hard, you might not notice this extra CPU power. If CPU power is analogous to the size of an engine in a car, then RAM is comparable to the overall size of a vehicle. In much the same way that you can get more people into a big car, of you have more RAM you can run more programs simultaneouly. We are going to be looking at RAM, different RAM types, and how much RAM you should install into your PC.

RAM (Random Access Memory) is a working memory space that PCs use to load data and programs that are regulary accessed. The data stored in RAM can be accessed in any order as opposed tosay, data stored on magnetic tapes, which has to be read sequentially. The "Random" in the name is a historical throwback much like the terms "hard" drive and "Floppy" drive.

The main reason for loading data into ram as opposed to accessing data directly off the hard drive is that its much faster to access data from RAM than it is from a hard drive. Just give you an idea how different the access speed are, data access from a hard drive are measured in millinano second.

While there's no doubt that RAM is much faster then hard drive, hard drives have the upper hand when it come to capacity. While hard drive can now be measured in handreds of gigabytes, RAM modules are at mostly around 1 GB. Commonly used RAM modules sizes range from 128 MB to 512 MB. RAM comes in the from of memory modules or chips mounted on circuit boards. These cricuit boards are fitted into the motherboard via the RAM module slots on the board, known as banks.

It used to be taht RAM modules had to be installed in pairs of similar modules, so if you wanted a PC that had 64 MB of RAM you have to install two 32 MB modules. three draw backs of this system. Techonology has progressed and now modules can be installed singly, which is both cheaper and less hassle overall. However, be aware that you might get better performance from having RAM in both banks because the motherboard makes use of a teachnology known as "dual-channel."

Types of RAM

A number of different types of RAM are available. These different types come about from advances in teachnology as older types are replaced by newer, faster technologies. Here you will take a tour of the RAM types supported by current motherboards. This means that is you are using this book to help you upgrade a current system, the RAM you hae may not be mentioned here.

DDR

Currently, the most popular type of RAM in use is called DDR RAM. DDR stands for "Double Data Rate" and the "Double" comes from the face that it utilizes technology taht makes it twice as fast as regular SDRAM (Sybchronous Dynamic Random Access Memory) upon which it was based.

DDR does this amazing trick of being able to transfer data at twice the standerd operating speed of the RAM by transferring data on every rising edge and falling edge of the clock pulse. This is a huge advantage compared to SDRAM. Keeping every thing else equal, this doubling of the transfer rate alone represents a huge gain in performance. However, as with most things, more was demanded from RAM.

DDR2/DDR3

Improvement to DDR memory have already started with DDR2 memory. DDR2 memory runs at speed 400 MHz and higher, which is where DDR memory left off. DDR2 memory uses 240-ping memiry modules and runs at 1.8 volts (V), as opposed to 2.5V for DDR memory. this result in less power consumption for more memory, which is great for laptop users.

Popular modules of DDR2 memory are PC3200 (400MHz), PC 4200 (533MHz), PC5300 (666 MHz) nad PC 6400 (*00MHz).

The newer from of DDR memory is DDR3, which offer twice the data rate of DDR2 memory. One of the goals of DDR3 memory is to reduce power consumption: reportedly, DDR3 memory reduces power consumption by about 30%. DDR meory modules are 240-ping DImms for desktop PCs and 204-ping SODIMMs for laprop systems.Like DDR2 and DDR3 memory is advertised by the speed and transfer rate.

Sound Card

Vedio Card (VGA)

CD/DVD RW Drives

Network Card

KeyBoard and Mouse

Monitor

About Computer

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Computer Parts