1. Introduction

I remember the first time I put together my own PC. It was back during my first few days at Intel Corporation as a newbie software engineer. I hopped over to my manager's cube and asked when my PC was coming in and he promptly told me to go ahead and put one together as a test machine while the new one was coming. I looked at him rather confounded since I had never really put together a PC before. However being the new recruit and wanting to prove myself, I set out to find parts lying around the labs and people's cubes. Within a few hours I had all the pieces necessary to put together a PC except for the case. Alas my first PC built was one sitting on a platform on top of my desk with everything wide open. It was a Katmai based system and everything booted on the first try (or was it 5th try?). Ever since then, I found myself drawn to the fascination of building my own systems in much the same way that car enthusiasts love to soup up their new wheels. So where am I going with this you might ask? Well given the last machine built in our household was the gBOX P4 setup, I thought I'd take the opportunity to briefly go over the steps that I took to put together this machine. Now granted - this wasn't like putting together a machine fully from scratch since the gBOX is a barebones system that comes with a motherboard installed. However, putting that aside, it does come close to the actual steps needed to put together a personal computer. So with that said, I present to you here an article that goes over the steps necessary to build the gBOX CF-S868 system along with an overview of some basic computer building procedures.

2. Goals and Parts

I won't spend any time here talking about monetary issues. With any good guide to building a computer system comes a discussion about how to set a budget etc. I'll save that discussion for a later time where I can go over the parts needed to build a computer without any emphasis on any specific system. Suffice it to say that if you have a budget - do try and stick to it. Remember that whatever component you buy, you will find it outdated in a matter of months if not days sometimes.

Now ask yourself what you want this PC to be used for. Are you a gamer or a business user. Depending on what your needs are, they will affect what components you may want to spend extra money on and what components you can skimp on. Once that is settled, make your parts list. For the gBOX Barebones system, the parts list is pretty simple since you're limited to what the system can actually house in the small form factor.

First off, this system that I was constructing would be used for both gaming purposes as well as business purposes. Thus I would find myself definitely upgrading the onboard video with something decent in graphics performance. However since this system will not need the very latest in 3D graphics, I'll stick to something fairly inexpensive. The onboard sound was good enough for me thus negating the need to get a PCI Sound Card. These were the components I chose that would be used for the gBOX P4 CF-S868 Barebones system.

Component List:

• 1 AMS gBOX P4 CF-S868 Case with Motherboard installed
• 1 Intel Pentium 4 1.6A GHz Processor
• 2 Sticks of Crucial 256 MB PC2100 DDR memory
• 1 40GB Maxtor 7200rpm Hard Drive
• 1 3.5 inch Floppy Disk Drive
• 1 Toshiba SD-M1612 DVD-ROM drive
• 1 Gainward GeForce4 MX440 AGP Graphics Card

NOTES:

I already own a monitor, keyboard and mouse but of course if you do not have these components, you will need to add those to your list. In case you did not already know, the motherboard used within the gBOX case has a good deal of onboard functionality installed. These include USB 2.0, on board AC 97 sound, on board video, and an on board Network Interface Card. (Where's the 1394 interface??) Given this level of integration, we did not need to purchase any other expansion cards thereby saving us some more cash. These are definitely things to consider when building a PC. How much integration is there on a specific motherboard and how good are those on board components vs stand alone components?

[Next Page]