Hey everyone, Daniel here from TwinBytes with another tech-tutorial for you.
This time, a video that is continuing a video series on my book Tech-knowledgy, from back
in 2009. But not to worry, the content on the video is going to be more up-to-date
as well. So if you've been following me here and you find my videos helpful
please do give it a thumbs up, show your love, and hit that subscribe button if
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a new video. Also note that even though the video is a lot newer than when the
book came out, we do have more new information added to this video than
what might be in the book. So it's not going to be identical if you look at the
book; and if you would like to get a copy either of the physical book or of a PDF
version of it, I will have a link in the description below.
So we'll start off with talking about the cases or the box.
Now, it's also called the tower, and
you can see in this picture here, that it kind of looks like a tower; but you can
get computers in all shapes and sizes. Such as a desktop version of it or its
small form factor. So this kind of looks a little bit more like a case or a box.
It's definitely not a tower style. But there's other odd shapes such as this
one here, that is a little more boxy looking, and it can be used for video
gaming console, or some kind of a network attached storage device, or a NAS server;
different things like that, that you can use as a maybe creating your own media
center at home to store movies and videos on, that you can attach to your
television and play from there. So it's a lot more compact. You can also get some
pretty fancy looking things if you want something that looks more alienware
type looking stuff that's from outer space.
But these here are very plain-looking simple versions.
The motherboard is the first component
that you're going to install into the case, and we're going to cover
all the components here that you might install into your case and make it
actually a bootable working computer.
So the motherboard here is an ASUS or a
ASUS. Let me know how you might pronounce that? I've heard it two
different ways, and even talking to employees at the company, depending who
you talk to, they even pronounce it differently. Anyway this is kind of the
brains of the computer. So everything plugs into this. You'll see in the middle
here, we've got a spot for the CPU. So you got to make sure you get the right type
that fits in here correctly. The memory, there's four slots for it to go in there.
We've got a connection here for the power supply, as well as over here. We've
got slots on this side over here that can be used for video cards, network
cards, all kinds of different things that if they're not already built into the
system, you can install cards there or just to expand them. The hard drives will
be connected through SATA connections as well which would be into these things
down here, which are on the side so you can't see from this view. All the
components would plug in to the side. Which when you're looking at the side of
the case, you can see it from here. You've got the different sound audio ports,
Wi-Fi is built in on this case, USBs, HDMI, there is no VGA or DVI connectors in
this particular model, because everything is kind of taken over by HDMI.
The processor is what really drives the brains of the computer. Without this it's
just a dead brain or you could almost say a brain-dead computer. So the brains
are there but nothing to drive it. This is what processes all the information
that you do on the computer, and that's why it's called
the central processing unit. When you're purchasing this, you've got to make sure
you get the correct one for your machine. In this picture we are showing Intel.
You could also have an AMD. Those are basically the two brands of processors
you would install on a computer, whether it's an apple or a Windows computer.
But there are also the type that you get, you have to make sure it's correct. Even the
generation they've been a bit picky, because in the last nine years we're
still seeing i3, i5 and i7, but they're just going through up to the
9th generation now as of the making of this video.
Previously when they came out were single core to moving on to dual core,
quad core, and they got into multi-threading and all kinds of options
just to make it even more complicated to choose the correct processor. But we're
not going to go into that level of detail on this video. We'll save that for
other videos we can go into each component and a lot more detail to
understand each component a little better. This is more of an overview and
now with the memory, this allows you to have many programs open at the same time,
depending on how much memory you have. It can really affect the speed of your computer.
But you do have to get the supported memory. Not every computer can
take the same amount of memory, and they don't take the same type and they
physically will not fit in the computer into the motherboard either if you don't
get the right one. In this case the one on the left is DDR4, it's a newer type
memory; and on the left is DDR3 which is a little bit older, and they look pretty
much the same, but if you notice on the left they have a lot more pins along the
bottom slot of the computer, and also the slot, there's always a little slot
connection on these that will make sure that you can't
physically install the memory if it's not the right type. It just will not go
in there because that slot doesn't line up with where the marker is on the
computer or I'm sorry on the motherboard. If it doesn't match up with what the
motherboard has, it will not allow you to install it.
So that would be kind of a fail-safe to make sure you don't install the wrong type.
The hard drive allows you
to install all your programs from the operating system to programs and all
your data, pictures, music, movies, and so on.
We've got standard regular hard disk drives that have existed for ever and
then on the right is the solid state drive which is where everyone is
starting to move to, and I know every computer I've owned for a while now
including every new computer that I sell to somebody, we're almost always putting
a solid-state drive because the prices have come down so much from when they
first came out, but they are so much faster and make the biggest difference
in speed. Because the hard drive has always been the biggest bottleneck in
any computer system. So at more than twice the price, you're getting a lot
more than three times the speed, depending on what you're doing, you may
even notice ten times the speed difference.
The video cards, although not required in most machines now,
they had the video adapter slot built into the
motherboard. Like the previous motherboard we looked at had HDMI
connections on it, but if he needed a VGA or a DVI you would have to install a
video card for that to work; or also if you wanted to have multiple screens on
your computer, then you would have to install the other video cards that will
expand the number of connections you can have. The prices, they range so great
that I had to show this one in particular, because I've heard so many
times over years, when they find out how much it
cost to repair a computer, they say I can get a new computer for that price.
I know darn well that you can't, because new computers really start from $700 up
and even to get something at $500 would be a refurbished unit
usually, which is a half-decent machine but it's still not that great. So the
components to a computer, you gotta imagine how much each component cost if
you're getting a computer for only $500. Guess how much this video card cost.
This is almost a $5,000 video card. So when you want to think that you could get a
new computer for the cost of a repair. It depends what is it you're repairing.
If we're having to replace a $5,000 video card, it's gonna cost another $5,000 to
get a replacement video card, plus the technicians labor to do that. So the cost
of the repairs is all relevant to the cost of the parts as well.
Network cards are something else
that are not required anymore, because they're all built into
the computer, whether it's a desktop or a laptop computer, but if you wanted to add
additional network cards for some very special functionality that you required
a second or third network port,
then you could install a network card still today and expand that.
CDs, DVDs, and Blu-ray. CD's are pretty much gone away now.
DVDs can hold everything a CD does, a lot more than a CD, and then it's actually cheaper
to buy DVDs than it is CDs. Blu-rays are really with the movies. They can store
even more than a DVD, but the price is still a little up there, and because the
majority of what we're doing only requires a DVD, and especially with the
Internet and everything being online, you almost don't need a disc of any sort in
the computer at all. The Blu-ray is pretty much, say for your
television. But even then, with Netflix and all those things,
we don't need Blu-ray anymore either.
Now going way back in time, I had this in the book
so we're talking 10 years, 11 years. Floppy disk drives, there was actually
such thing as that, it would only hold 1.5 Megabytes of data.
Your pictures on your computer are that big or larger now. So you could barely fit
one picture on one of those discs at this time, and it would take a really
long time to just copy that one picture. Zip drives came out not long after that
allowing you to install, in this picture, 250 megabytes. They had various sizes.
They were also internal in the computer, but this picture shows an external one.
So if you did have something that you needed to read a drive from a long time ago,
you could purchase still to this day, an external zip drive.
Now your computer, it generates heat;
So it needs to be cooled properly, and there's various
cooling devices you can install. The power supplies have their own fan, but
you also got the CPU which comes with a standard fan or you can buy a little
more a higher grade fan such as this one, that has copper going through it to
conduct the heat better, and a bigger fan, and you can get fancy colored lights as well.
When you install the fans, whether it's a CPU fan or even a case
fan in this picture, you got to install it the right way, because the air flows
in one direction. So you want to make sure that you install it in a way that
the heat is being pulled away from the device that's generating the heat, and
blowing it out away from it, which usually is out of the case. So if you're
installing it on a case, as a case fan, you would want to install it in a way
the hot air is blowing out of the case. For the CPU fan, you would want to
also make sure that it's blowing the heat away from the CPU. The power supply
you can actually see on the top, the fan is showing there because it's got the
fan built into the power supply unit. Now these are to give power to the
motherboard as well as to various components such as the hard drive or the
DVD drive, even a lot of the more powerful video cards require direct
power from the power supply in order to run them, because they also have fans.
You got to make sure you get the correct size power supply unit, because they, on a
standard tower, you can install one of those ATX ones on the left, but there are
smaller form factor cases where you'd need to get some kind of a fancy small
weird design shape power supply that may be difficult to find. Even if you're
searching online, you'd have to do a special order for some of these things.
So in summary, you've got your case that everything goes in. The motherboard sits
on the bottom of the case, and then all the rest of the stuff piles on top of that.
With the exception of the hard drive or DVD drive, they go into a bay
in the front where you can access it; and the power supply, depending on the
type of case you have, may go at the top or the bottom of the case. Not really on
top of the motherboard. Otherwise everything plugs into board. So that's it
for this tech-torial. I hope you guys found this helpful. If you did, give it a thumbs up,
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If you want to be able to see the next video in this series or
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series or start from the beginning. Alright, that's it for this video and
we'll see you guys in the next one. Thanks bye for now.