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The time has arrived. My PC needs an upgrade, but what does that involve? Well stick around and I'll share what it means to me. I realised the other day that all the PC's we have ever had at home have been home built. The first was built by a friend, the second by me, now this needs an upgrade and I still feel it's the way to go for

The reason for this is in a nutshell is choice. It used to be cost as well, but these days thanks to Dell and others, the PC business is so efficient that the major vendors can provide very good PC's for not a lot of money, and it's impossible to buy the components cheaper than they can. So what choice am I talking about ? It's down to being able to specify exactly what you need in your PC for your needs. Let me explain. I use my PC for e-mail, web browsing, photo editing, home theatre and that's about it. That means I don't need a high end graphics card, but I do need a speedy processor and a good chuck of memory and here's where the choice comes in. If I go onto one of the PC vendors and choose one of my components - a processor say - then it will come bundled with a set of other components that don't suit my needs and that I'll probably pay extra for.

Objective

So you know a bit about what I use my PC for, what else ? My current PC isn't as quiet as I'd like it to be (remember it has to be a home theatre too), and it needs to be power efficient. I'll summarise the objectives:

• As future proof as possible. (usually means spending more on a newer design of motherboard)
• Quiet.
• Graphics card suitable for Photo editing and a home theatre.
• On board surround sound capable.
• Fast processor and at least 2 Gig of Ram.
• Good value.
• Fit in with the home office that we have.

Here's what I'm considering:

Motherboard

One of the advantages of building your own PC is that you know how it goes together so future upgrades are easy. However the upgrade path can come to a halt if your motherboard is made obsolete by some new technology (e.g. the type of socket the processors use). So in the past, I have tried to pick a motherboard built around more modern components. I also want to be able to overclock the processor (more on this later), so top of my list is the ASUS P5KC AiLifestyle Series iP35 Socket 775.

Processor

There is a huge choice here, and at the moment one of the Intel core 2 processors seem a good bet. Whilst doing my research I came upon a number of articles praising the overclocking ability of the E21xx series of processors. (see Legion Hardware) The results seem to indicate that clockspeeds close to the current extreme processors should be achievable at a fraction of the price. This will help with the "good value" objective.

Memory

2 Gb of fast memory should do it. Not sure which brand yet.

Disk

The IDE disk on my current system seems to be one of the performance bottlenecks. The new motherboard supports SATA II so I'll be looking for a disk of about 250Gb with SATA II support. Samsung Spinpoint seem to be quiet and reccomended by others, or perhaps my old favourite, Seagate.

Graphics card

This has been one of the hardest areas to research. Most of the sites that review graphics cards what to know how well they run the latest set of games, and that is one feature I'm not looking for. From the reading I have done in this area, it seems like ATI cards still hold the edge when graphics processing is considered. Some of the newer chipsets can assist with MPEG decoding and DVD playback. So it looks like a a ATI 3450 based card might be a good bet. They use less power too!

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