Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
componentsfortheirownboards.Althoughsalesarehighfortheseindividual companies,
a large segment of the market is what those in the industry call the
white-box systems
.
White-box
isthetermusedbytheindustrytorefertowhatwouldotherwisebecalled
gen-
eric
PCs—that is, PCs assembled from a collection of industry-standard, commercially
available components. The white-box designation comes from the fact that historically
most of the chassis used by this type of system have been white (or ivory or beige).
The great thing about white-box systems is that they use industry-standard components
that are interchangeable. This interchangeability is the key to future upgrades and repairs
because it ensures that a plethora of replacement parts will be available to choose from
and will be interchangeable. For many years, I have recommended avoiding proprietary
systems and recommended more industry-standard white-box systems instead.
Companies selling white-box systems do not usually manufacture the systems; they as-
semble them. That is, they purchase commercially available motherboards, cases, power
supplies, disk drives, peripherals, and so on and assemble and market everything together
as complete systems. Some companies such as HP and Dell manufacture some of their
own systems as well as assemble some from industry-standard parts. In particular, the
HP Pavilion and Dell Dimension lines are composed largely of mainstream systems made
with mostly industry-standard parts. PC makers using mostly industry-standard parts also
include high-end game system builders such as Alienware (owned by Dell). Other ex-
amples include Gateway and eMachines (owned by Acer), whose PCs are also construc-
ted using primarily industry-standard components. Note that there can be exceptions for
all these systems; for example, I know that some of the Dell Dimension XPS systems use
proprietary parts such as power supplies. I recommend avoiding such systems, due to fu-
ture upgrade and repair hassles.
Others using industry-standard components include Acer, CyberPower, Micro Express,
and Systemax, but hundreds more could be listed. In overall total volume, this ends up
being the largest segment of the PC marketplace today. What is interesting about white-
box systems is that, with few exceptions, you and I can purchase the same motherboards
and other components that any of the white-box manufacturers can (although we would
probably pay more than they do because of the volume discounts they receive). We can
assemble a virtually identical white-box system from scratch ourselves, but that is a story
for
Chapter 19
,
“
Building or Upgrading Systems
.”
PC Design Guides
For several years Intel and Microsoft released a series of documents called the “PC
XX
DesignGuides”(where
XX
designatestheyear)asasetofstandardspecificationstoguide
both hardware and software developers creating products that work with Windows. The
