How I Went About Building My Own PC

How Many Parts Are There to a PC?

What will follow is how I built my own computer from scratch and what tools I used to do this. You will want to plan this out because there are quite a few parts that you will need. What I did is go out to several websites and local computer stores and find out prices for the parts I needed.

The first part is the case (in my case it was an ATX tower case) which will house most if not all of the parts and a power supply about 450 amps or 550 amps. Most cases will come with one but request it anyway. The power supply is where you plug the PC to the wall and where every other part gets its power. The power supply is a metal square box with various plugs coming out of it which will soon be plugged into components within the PC case. I used four screws to attach the power supply to the back of the PC case at the upper top where there is a space for it.

The next part that I needed was the motherboard. There are a lot of motherboards out there. Some of the sites I used were TigerDirect.com and NewEgg.com to find out what motherboards were out there and what case can be used for each one. In my case I bought a Micro-ATX motherboard that will fit into my ATX case. ATX is the size and form of case. I screwed the motherboard onto the side of the case. I then attached the power supply to the motherboard via an electrical plug that fits snugly into the motherboard. Onto this motherboard I have the choice of what kind of processor chip will fit onto the motherboard.

The processor chip I selected to put onto my motherboard was an AMD Athlon XP processor chip at 2500+ processing speed. There is a slot on the motherboard where this fits. You have to be careful because the processor chip fits only one way and when it fits there is a rod that tightens the chip to the motherboard. For the processor chip there is a fan and heat sink that comes with the chip and this has to be attached with a substance that will transfer the heat from the chip to the heat sink so the chip will not become overheated. The fan will have an electrical wire that will attach to the appropriate spot on the motherboard.