Help wid hardware

[umer007]

What characteristics are important and wat wud u look at when u buy the following things:

Motherboard, CPU Fan, Keyboard and sound, video, network cards.

 

[samcheetah]

well umer007 its all a matter of choice. your question is very hard to answer. anyway here is how it goes

Motherboard:

the first and foremost thing to look is future compatibility and believe me thats a very difficult taks. in the computer industry u never know what the future has in stock for u. at least one should consider this aspect to be on the safe side. most of the components that go into that box (computer) are dependent on each other. e.g if u buy a intel processor u will have to buy a compatible board. so first decide how much u want to spend on the computer. then look for the best combination of components that u can buy for that money. there are 100s of motherboard manufacturers which have 5-10 variations of motherboards for a single platform. ASUS, GIGABYTE, INTEL, MSI are a few to name. all of them have different products for different kinds of people. and that is just the beginning. there are about 3 to 4 chipsets for the same processor. so motherboard companies will have different lines of products for each of those chipsets. using probability u can calculate the resulting number of boards. but there are some products that are very good and everyone knows about them. so most of us just know about those products that are good. now its your choice that determines which one u want to buy. and i should say "choose wisely"
about the future compatibility i want to tell u that buy a motherboard which has Serial-ATA. in some months motherboards will come out featuring PCI-Express and DDR-II so a little wait might be worthwhile.

CPU & Fan:

the fan is not much of an important component. if u buy a retail boxed processor the fan comes in with the processor. for most cases it is ok to use the fan that comes with the CPU. altho if u plan to overclock your system u should use water-cooling products. i even saw overclocked processors being cooled with a compressor and once (only once) with a liquid nitrogen tank.
there are many variations of CPUs available. but at least there are only two major companies i.e Intel and AMD (altho there are others). Note: NEVER BUY A FLAGSHIP PROCESSOR (THE LATEST ONE). because its simply tooooooooo expensive. for example dont buy the 3.2 GHz intel processor. go for something like 2.8GHz unless u r one of those enthusiats that want to have the fastest processor on the planet no matter what !!!!!!!!!
Intel has a new technology out i.e hyper threading (HT) and sooner HT2 will be out with the new Prescott core processors. u should wait for that to happen. AMD has a new line of products i.e AMD ATHLON64 which are 64-bit processors. they are dual mode processors i.e. they can run both 64-bit and 32-bit applications. thats is a nice processor to consider too. AMD rates its processors with the PR-rating method i.e if an AMD processor is equivalent to the 3.2GHz intel CPU they name it the Athlon 3200+ altho it might be working at a slower clock rate.
the choice is up to u. u can board the Intel bandwagon or the AMD one.

Keyboard:

any brand of keyboard will do. just check that the keboard feels comfortable on your fingertips.

sound card:

creative has some nice sound cards. go for the 5.1 cards. 5.1 is now a standard!!! dont buy the 6.1 and 7.1 channel cards because they are too expensive and the 7.1 speakers are very expensive too.

Video card:

after the introduction of PCI-Express the current interface for video cards (AGP 8x) will become obsolete. but anyway buy a AGP 8x card because most motherboard manufacturers might not leave the standard too soon. ATI and Nvidia are the two competeting companies in this domain. both companies have a huge variety of video cards. most of the cards do many other things that just the usual video card does. and do buy a DirectX 9 compatible card because all the new games are directX 9 compatible.

Network Cards:

Intel manufactures very fine network cards. buying a network card doesnt take much decision taking. just take the one with the highest speed. 100 Mbps is good. and there are also 1Gbps cards available