How to figure out the PC component compatibility

I think I asked this question once, but it seemed that only one person or nobody was willing to answer this question. I am the first time builder, I would like to know how I could figure out what model and brand of the PC component is compatible with one another? How can I know that? Well most of the people out there online would suggest going to the computer forum and ask for advice about which part or component is compatible, and other might suggest talking to and asking questions of the vendor or the staff who works there, and even some might say, what's your budget, I would do that for ya. However, I just wanna do all this on my own. And I really need a detailed guide about how to figure out the component compatibility. It would be a hassle to return the parts if they are not compatible and that would waste time and efforts. Or if possible, is there a guide online that we can buy or something?

 

Hi im not no wizz but i have built every computer i have ever owned so im sure i can be of little help here but what you are asking for is a crash test in PC hardware and that i cant provide. It takes time to absorb all that information. I would recommend lots of reading but it would be a slow process as there is no simple answer to all your questions.

However, choices are normally narrowed down by things such as , Your Budget, Your needs From your hardware, Any Parts That you may have already and are intending on using, etc etc

For instance if you already had a case that you are going to use, you would need to find out the "form factor"(Google) and buy a compatible Motherboard. If you had A sata Hard Drive already you would need to make sure your new motherboard had sata ports or you would need to add a sata Add on card, and so and so

But the most important decision you make when building a system from scratch is your choice of motherboard as this is the Main part of the system that connects everything else, so everything else would need to be compatible.

Take a look at this article about chosing a motherboard i think you may find it of some interest Its a bit out dated as it does not mention DDR3 RAM

http://ezinearticles.com/?Choosing-the-Right-Motherboard-for-You&id=154454

Note :Your choice of motherboard will highy depend on your needs so post a little more information as to what you will be using the Rig for, whether your on a budget or not and have you got any part that you intend on using and maybe will will be able to help you a little more.


Also we are not sure of your technical knowledge of PC hardware so maybe try asking more direct questions.

Bless.

 

Tell me how you get the info and how you read the info to get the parts compatible with the motherboard or other parts which have something to do with compatibility.

I would like to spend $1500 to $2000. I really need to learn this. Of course, video editing is what I want to do and application development.

 

Well...This is just what I would like to build, and not sure if the parts I assume to purchase are compatible with one another. And I still don't know which video card I should buy. I REAALLY need a UP-TO-DATE and AWESOME VIDEO CARD like SLI or something...I would like to do graphic and video editing and things that connect to HD-videos.

http://secure.newegg.com/Shopping/ShoppingCart.aspx?Submit=view

 

Say hello to the HD5870, if you really want one of the best graphics cards on the planet

Though, if you ever wanted to run two of them at once, you'd need a Crossfire compatible motherboard.

EDIT:

Oh, and we can't see your shopping cart - it comes up as empty - you have to link to the actual product page(s).

 

Any Suggestion will be welcomed. When you suggest, please let me know why, and this way really helps me to learn.

This is The PC Case I would like to buy:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16811119197

Here is my Power Supply:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16817371026

RAM:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820145235

MotherBoard:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131365

CPU: (When to overclock but have never done it and it is my first time)
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16819115211

Heatsink:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16835103055

Graphic card:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814125292

And besides, what is the requirement for CrossFire? What is it? I hear d that with this you could actually use two or dual monitors at the same time.

Do you also mean that all the video cards, RAM and stuff already have the heatsink for themselves?

 

Crossfire is just the name ATI give for using two or more of their cards together, just like nVidia calls their's SLI.

If you want a really impressive graphics card, you should either look at the HD4870X2 or the new HD5870, but if you get the HD4870X2, it's not worth pairing it up with another (as there are already two chips on that card, meaning you'd actually be running Quad Crossfire, which doesn't really offer worthwhile performance gains).

That case is pretty good, but you might want to consider the one above, the HAF 932, and even though the Corsair 750TX is more expensive, i'd say it's worth it, my Corsair PSU's never skipped a beat.

As for RAM, seen as i suggested the the Intel Core i5 750, i'd suggest either one or two sets of these, depending on how much RAM you want;

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231277

If you want to keep with the i7 then you'd only need a 3x2GB kit, not a 6x2GB kit - you really shouldn't need more than 6GB of RAM.

If you buy the Intel Core i5 750, then i'd suggest the Gigabyte GA-P55-UD4P as the motherboard, but there are plenty of other good boards you could go for.

And yes, other components already have adequate heatsinks. When you buy a CPU it will come with a cooler in the box, but it won't be good enough if you want to overclock the CPU lots - that's when so called aftermarket coolers come in.

 

That is really awesome advice, but I just don't know why no need more than 6 RAM, as far as I know, isn't it that the more RAM, the Better, and the OS or APPLICATIONS RUN MORE EFFICIENTLY?

 

Yes, in general that's true, but there comes a point when most programs just can't make use of that amount of memory, i suppose it never hurts to have as much as you can, but it's certainly not worth it from a financial viewpoint considering how small any gains would be.

 

Well...Yeah, But another question is if I install 12GB of RAM, since Newegg sells them 2GB each, which will end up with 6 of them to match up 12GB, will it eat up all the slots that there won't be a chance to install other componenents if I choose this one as my motherboard? http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131365

Is it possible for you to clear up again which slot is for RAM, and which one is for other peripherals such as sound card, graphic card and so on?

 

If this is your first computer build, start with a inexpensive one. You can build a low end amd quad that will do almost everything a i7 can do.

First, what do plan to do? gamming? video encoding? mediapc?

my video encoding pc
1. amd phenom 9750/ecs motherboard (cost 180.00 combo)
2. 2 gb ram (cost 30.00) the motherboard box/manual will say what type of memory you need. (xp=2gb, vista =4gb, but both will run on 1gb.
3. radeon 4670 pci-e video card (80.00) the motherboard manual will tell you what type of video card to get.
4.case generic cost 30.00 (but you can spend more depending on what you want)
5. power supply , "works" brand 400 watt powers my phenom and it's 3 hard drives with no problems.
6. cpu fan , get a good one. My phenom was running at 70 celcius with a cheap 15.00 cpu fan, I installed a Arctic Cooling Freezer 64 Pro (cost 30.00) and now it runs at 45 celcius. Very important to get the right one. Intel and amd cpu fans are entirely different on how you mount them.

Remember everything revolves around the motherboard, the manual will tell you everything you need, what size, what speed etc.

Alot people recommend the i7, but that is mainly a video encoding proceesor. My gamming computer is using a amd x2 4800 and has never gave me any problems. My mediapc uses an intel 2140 dual core. My video encoding pc uses a phenom 9750. When I build a computer, I don't spend more I need to.

Get alot of plastic spotties to keep your wires from rubbing against the fans.
Make sure your hard drives have air flowing over it.

 

Right, some basic stuff:

Cases: come in various sizes - miniITX are very tiny and solely designed for miniature PCs. microATX are small size and can be very capable but are trickier to find parts for and are still designed with portability in mind. ATX is the norm, either in mid tower or full tower form - neither have any compatibility issues, they're just two different sizes (effectively medium and large).
The case you've chosen is good, it has reasonably good cooling (with scope to upgrade), lots of space and some good design features.

Motherboards: a mini ITX board will only fit in a miniITX case, a microATX board will fit anything microATX or bigger, a normal ATX board will fit in anything ATX or bigger - EATX boards are rare, but only fit into cases that fit EATX boards.

Power supplies: A PSU only draws as much power as it needs to provide, not ALWAYS what it says on the label, that figure is a maximum. There are tonnes of bad PSU brands out there so it's a bit of a minefield. Antec are quite good, but you can do better. What's more, 750W is a lot of power, the sort you need to run 4 graphics cards and an overclocked quad core processor. You can get away with far less wattage than that for a sensible PC.

RAM: That's a lot of RAM, but it's good RAM. With the almost-comlete demise of DDR1, DDR2 and DDR3 are left. Core 2 Systems and AM2/AM2+ (the 2 is to signify DDR2) but not AM3 (the 3 is to signify DDR3) support DDR2 RAM. AM3 and Core i5/i7 systems support DDR3 RAM.
Core 2, all AMD systems and Core i5 systems take DUAL channel RAM, i.e. 2 or 4 sticks. Core i7 systems exclusively take TRIPLE channel RAM such as you have chosen there, i.e. 3 or 6 sticks.

Motherboard sockets: AM2/AM2+/AM3 sockets are just that (though they all look the same and some work with each other), LGA775, LGA1156 and LGA1366 are Intel's offerings, and support Core 2, Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs respectively. Asus are a rather controversial manufacturer however who have very variable build quality in their motherboards, many people on the site, myself included, will recommend you pick a brand other than Asus to avoid potential problems.

All the components you've chosen are compatible, and reasonably good, though I might suggest you choose a Gigabyte motherboard like the EX58-UD5 rather than the Asus.
HOWEVER, using an i7 system is typically for those who want to edit videos and do production work, not your average person who plays games and watches movies. For that, I would recommend a Core i5 or core i7 800 series - much cheaper.

This requires an LGA1156 motherboard like the Gigabyte P55-UD4, the CPU (either an i5 750 or i7 860 are good buys), and 4 or 8GB of RAM in two or 4 sticks.

RAM uses entirely separate slots to anything else on the board. You can always use all your RAM slots and not worry about fitting other components, EXCEPT with CPU coolers - some CPU coolers can be so large they will overhang the memory slots so you may not be able to fill them all, this is really a 'case by case' scenario that we can't predict perfectly without looking up to see if anyone else had problems (or not).

 

Awesome! What I know is that right now most of the mo/bo are made in foreign countries according to what I am now learning. There are actually only two brands do really belong to the USA, and not really remember which two. ASUS is the company in Taiwan were most of the mo/bo are made. So I think I might go for Gigabyte since you guys suggested.

 

The majority of all pc components, not just motherboards, are made in china, by companies based in Taiwan.

 

Question again: Sorry to bother you guys. But I am still in doubt abou the CPU. I know that core or whatever or hyperthreading means that you could do multiple applications or work on several things at the same time without interfering with one another. They are all efficient. But what I wanna know is speed. If both dual core and i7 have the same frequency such as 2.9hz or whatever, does it means they both run at the same speed?

 

It means that each core runs at the same speed, yes, so in a Core 2 Duo there'll be two cores running at 2.9GHz each, and in a Core i5 / i7 there'll be four cores running at 2.9GHz each.

This means that if an application or game is single threaded, for example, it will only use one core and therefore, all other things being equal, it would perform exactly the same on the dual core as the quad core, but the Core i5s and i7s are a newer architecture and therefore perform slightly better per clock cycle than the Core 2 Duos anyway.

Multithreaded applications and games will obviously show much more improvement running on a quad core as opposed to a dual core running at the same speed (as long as they can make use of over two cores).

 

Well...I just wanna know more about caches and the northbridge and southbridge. I pretty much know about the cache and what it does. But how are you gonna determine the speed or the newer term(Cache L2) of it?

Code:

	  CPU Type:  	Desktop
	
	  Processor Class:  	Core i7
	
	  Processor Interface:  	LGA1366
	
	  Cores:  	Quad
	
	  Cache Size:  	256KB L2 per Core
	
	  L2 Cache:  	1MB
	
	  L3 Cache:  	8MB
	
	  Bus Speed:  	6.4 GT/s
	
	  Processor Speed:  	Ci7 975 / 3.33GHz
	
	  Additional Technologies:  	Hyper-Threading
	  	MMX
	  	32/64-bit
	
	  Instruction Set:  	SSE
	  	SSE2
	  	SSE3
	  	SSE4.1
	  	SSE4.2
	
	  Unlocked Multiplier:  	Yes
	
	  Fan:  	Included

As you could see, and I am now taking the latest and newest i-core 7 extreme for example, and there are L3, L2 caches and Cache Size: 256KB L2 per Core. How fast are they and what do they really mean?


The second question is the FSB, the front side bus...How can you determine how fast it is and how do you match that with the RAM you buy and what mother is compatible with the speed of the FSB? Is it possible to overclock it?

 

The cache isn't a direct measure of speed. Doubling the cache on a CPU doesn't necessarily make it any faster, but it's more like having extra RAM. The more RAM (a few GB/s) you have, the less stuff runs off the hard disk (0.05-0.1GB/s). In much the same way, the more cache on the CPU you have (20+GB/s), the less stuff comes out of RAM (a few GB/s). If a program would fit in the CPU with more cache, but not with the current amount, then that program will run faster with more cache on the CPU.
This was much more a problem in the old days when CPUs only had 128KB of cache - nowadays it's 2-12MB.

The front side bus (not applicable for core i7s - different technology) is the bus that connects the CPU to the rest of the system. The speed it runs is determined by the CPU you use, or you, the user (overclocking). Motherboards need to be capable of running a front side bus speed high enough to support a processor for it to work. For example, in desktop PCs, the Core 2 Duo and Pentium Dual-core ranges span primarily three different front side bus speeds. The basic Pentium dual cores use a front side bus speed of 200mhz. The CPUs you buy are a multiplier of this front side bus to reach their full speed - a 2.5Ghz E5200 CPU has a 12.5x multiplier, since 12.5x200 = 2.5Ghz, the 2.6Ghz model will have a 13x multiplier, and so on. The front-side bus itself actually has its own multiplier of 4x, rather confusingly, and thus, a 200mhz front side bus is referred to either as 200mhz (the base frequency), or 800mhz (the actual running frequency). The Core 2 Duo chips (older ones only) used a 266mhz, or 1066mhz front side bus. Thus, a 2.4Ghz E6600 had a multiplier of 9, since 9x266 = 2.4Ghz. In the same way, the newer chips use a 333mhz (or 1.33Ghz) bus speed, and here the E8400 3.0Ghz chip also has a multiplier of 9, to get 9x333 = 3Ghz. There were a few extreme edition CPUs with a stock front side bus of 400mhz (1.6Ghz) but these are rare.
What happens when you overclock is you increase the speed of the front side bus - for example, if you had the 12.5x E5200 that was 2.5Ghz at a 200mhz FSB and then changed the FSB to 300mhz, you'd get a 3.75Ghz CPU instead, since 12.5x300 = 3.75Ghz.
Memory, like the CPUs with various different multipliers, and the front side bus with its 4x multiplier, has it's own multiplier, usually between 2 and 4. This is either set automatically, or by you (again, overclocking, but for different reasons). Say you have a 200mhz front side bus. At a memory multiplier of 2, the memory speed is 400mhz (remember - DDR memory means double data rate, so that's sometimes referred to as 200mhz DDR, commonly referred to as PC3200, as this typically gives around 3200MB/s of bandwidth). At a memory multiplier of 4, the memory speed is 800mhz, commonly known as PC6400. If you had a 266mhz front side bus speed, 2.00x multiplier would be 533mhz (PC4200), 4.00x multiplier would be 1066mhz (PC8500) - to get to 800mhz, you'd use a multiplier of 3.00.
This is all rather complicated to people who are learning about it for the first time. However, in the case of desktop components, and to a lesser extent laptops and prebuilt PCs, the manufacturer's website will state which CPUs, and what speed of memory is compatible with your system.

 

Well...Thanks for the info. But if we wanna get the fastest speed(for example) of the communication between parts of the computer, we determine how fast the FSB could handle right? But the question is what affects the speed of the FSB? Do we buy the motherboard based on the FSB or the CPU based on the FSB? Or we have to buy the CPU with certain speed of the FSB that matches the speed of FSB stated on the spec of the motherboard?

Because if you buy the fastest icore7 extreme but with slow FSB, your CPU won't go anywhere or won't get anything out of it.

BTW...Is the PCI Express slots can be used to connect all the other peripheral devices?

Besides, just wanna clear that up as I a bit confused and the instructor doesn't really explain that fully. What I am gonna ask is the APU slot. So is it possible to use the latest or not the latest or maybe the middle range of ATI 4750 or something with the APU slot?

 

FSB doesn't really apply to core i7s as it's all unified under a new bus system, but for core 2 CPUs, the bus speed is decided by the CPU you buy - you then make sure the motherboard can handle it. Due to the changes in how new CPUs are made, however, there's often more to it than this, and it's really just simpler to look up and see if your CPU is or isn't on the 'compatible CPUs' list for the board.
There are currently 1GB and 2GB DDR3 sticks - most high-end desktop motherboards have 6 slots, which allows 6 or 12GB respectively. 4GB sticks are, however, under development - by supporting 24GB of RAM these boards are ready for the future RAM (or at least some versions of it) - it's all a bit meaningless though, by the time 4GB DDR3 sticks are sensibly priced and the time you need more than 12GB of RAM the i7 will be an aging dinosaur.