Hardware Reference
In-Depth Information
Hardware Design Criteria
With the functional requirements determined, the next step was to establish
design criteria for the budget PC hardware. Here are the relative priorities we
assigned for our budget PC. Your priorities may, of course, differ.
Price
★★★★✩
Reliability ★★★★✩
Size ★✩✩✩✩
As you can see, this is a well-balanced system. Price and reliability are our top
concerns, with everything else secondary. Here's the breakdown:
Noise level ★★✩✩✩
Expandability ★✩✩✩✩
Price
Price is the 900-pound gorilla for a budget system. We set our target cost
for this system at $350 excluding external peripherals and software ($500
with the keyboard, mouse, speakers, and display), and we'll try very hard
to stay within that budget. That's the same budget figure we used in the
previous editions, but this time we'll get a lot more computer for our
money. With a $350 budget, we plan to spend roughly 50%—split about
equally—on the motherboard, processor, and memory, 25% on the case
and power supply, and 25% on the optical and hard drives.
Processor performance ★★★✩✩
Video performance ★★✩✩✩
Disk capacity/performance ★★★✩✩
Reliability
Reliability is as important as price. An unreliable system is not worth
having. To get that reliability, we'll use good brand-name components
throughout.
Size
Size is unimportant, so we'll pay it no mind. As it turns out, the best case
for our purposes is a standard mid-tower unit.
Noise level
We'd like a quiet system, but we don't have any extra money to spend to
reduce noise. We'll do what we can to choose the quietest possible in-
expensive components, but otherwise we'll let the chips fall where they
may.
Expandability
Expandability is unimportant. If we do upgrade this system, say three
years down the road, chances are we'll be swapping components out
rather than adding them.
Processor performance
Processor performance is moderately important for our budget PC, both
initially and to ensure that the system will have enough horsepower to
run new software versions without requiring a processor upgrade. We'd
have loved to use a quad-core processor in this system, but there's simply
no room in the budget. We can only afford to spend perhaps $60 on the
processor, which limits our choices to AMD or Intel single- or dual-core
budget processors.
