Just finished watching NewEggs's "build your own PC" tutorial. It was a really good refresher but more importantly it showed me what I need to bone up on.

Cases are still cheap but they no longer come with power supplies. Hidden inflation I suppose.

750w pwr supplies are not uncommon. 250w was the standard when I was into it. Not sure which components these days are using that much . Probably the video cards and CPU's. I hope to find a guide that tells you how to add up your system's requirements.

Video cards us a PCI"e" (Peripheral Component Interconnect Express
) slot nowadays. No more AGP. The cards use one or two dedicated power supplies. They aren't just powered by the MOBO.

Kind of a kick getting back into the acronyms. I actually remember some.

Ram is still DDR but now is two and three channel. Maybe it was always 2 but I think the last time I contemplated adding more, 4 GB was the limit. I think it’s 8 now but that’s probably off by a factor of 2.

Drives. No more IDE (“integrated drive electronics” - remembered that one, woo hoo!) it’s all serial ATA- SATA. Different cabling . No more “Molex” pwr connectors. But what takes their place is new cabling and modular pwr connections. You only plug in the cables you need so you don’t have a bunch of extra hanging from the main pws.

Central Processing Unit’s? Don’t ask me. They’re going to take some research just like MOBO’s, busses and chipsets. Only have a vague idea what a “Core” is.

In the NewEgg video they use one solid state hard drive for the OS and a mechanical drive your data. Sounds like a great idea separating the two but it also begs the question of which is more reliable these days.

Fun Stuff...