Customer Reviews

The AnandTech Guide to PC Gaming Hardware

5 star:		(6)
4 star:		(1)
3 star:		(1)
2 star:		(1)
1 star:		(2)

 

 

This is a book for beginners. Every disgruntled reviewer here is a techie who reads hardware websites and UNDERSTANDS them! They didn't like the book because they didn't find anything new in it that they didn't already know. Despite the fact that Anand has very plainly said on his website that this is a book for beginners and isn't for his regular readers (unless they were lost). Of course they didn't listen and went out and bought the book anyway.
If you have trouble understanding computer specs, if the idea of removing your computer's case makes you uncomfortable, if you've never put together your own pc - this book is for you. Honestly you'll be very hard pressed to find a more comprehensive guide to computer hardware that's written in PLAIN ENGLISH.

I hold a much more moderate view of this book than many of the reviewers who have written here.

PC hardware evolves at an amazing rate. The web provides an up-to-date view of the details, but, it's hard to build a context from web reviews if you don't already have one. Books like this offer context, but are already behind the technical times when they come to press. If you're like me, wanting context and current facts both so you can put together a killer machine when you've never built a PC before, you're going to have to build your understanding from the web and books at the same time. Sad but true....

I think Shimpi's book is the best book out there at providing context. It's deep, thorough, and clearly-thought-through. If you want to watch over someone's shoulder while they build a couple of PCs, then Rosenthal's _Build Your Own PC_ is your book. The thing is, it's just a couple of old designs. The devil's in the details, you know? If your grannie wants context, she should read Chambers' _Building a PC for Dummies_: Shimpi's book goes orders of magnitude deeper (which I crave). If you imagine you'll be upgrading hundreds or thousands of PCs of all ages, you'll want Mueller's _Upgrading and Repairing PCs_: Shimpi's book cuts through the detail to the ideas. The other books I've looked at go downhill from these.

If you want to learn enough to build yourself a killer PC, I recommend this book and the web (other reviewers have done a great job listing the best sites). Still, I give the book three stars because the prose is horrible. The majority of paragraphs here contain a sentence or two that don't parse. Laughably unintelligable sentences come by way too often. I hold technical books to a different standard than bestsellers, granted, but this book is bad among technical books. I want the currency of the web, but not the bad writing!

Anand, I hope you keep this up to date. I also hope you find a copy editor before you publish V2. Your readers will thank you for it.

THis book will help most people understand the in's and out's of a computer. From everything from the FSB to Monitors, this book tells about them. With the plethora of different terms and jargon out there, this book will help the average reader learn what it is and how it works.

This book was great, it explained the workings of a computer more in depth but was easy to understand. It helped me learn many things about a computer that i wouldn't have known otherwise.

Very in depth, covers all you need to understand about the very technical way hardware works and skips the things you don't need (or care) to know. This book should hold its value even as hardware technology progresses.

This book is perfect for bringing moderate PC users up to speed with the more detailed and complex issues of PC hardware.
While advanced PC types will most likely already understand all the material presented in this book, nowhere have I seen it explained more simply.
All-in-all it is the perfect companion to AnandTech.com. Anyone who has read this book will be able to understand all the issues discussed on the website with ease.

I find Shiraz Yusef's opinion ludicrous. Sure if I had 1,000's of dollars lying around and could buy the hardware for myself then obviously what Anand was saying would be obvious and redundant. But unfortunately I do not. Anandtech has helped me with several hardware purchases over the years. Had I not known about anandtech I probably would have been buying intel all these years. And intel ... An AMD 1.4Ghz XP outperforms an Intel 2.0Ghz in like 5 different games. In my opinion Shiraz Yusef uses intel and probably uses Fujitsu harddrives... consequently he should be drawn and quartered. Nuff Said.

I haven't read the book, but I'm a consistent reader of the website. The articles are thorough, relative, and always well-written.

Shiraz, I'm a fledgling IT guy with a relatively small client base of about 75 users and 3 companies. I've assembled over 200 custom systems. I can a PC together in my sleep that will run without a hitch. Yet, I still learn a lot from Anand's website consistently. I'm not arrogant enough to assume I know anything about PC hardware, let alone enough to dismiss a site like Anandtech. It doesn't hurt to repeat the fundamentals.

Keep your attitude to yourself. Nobody cares.

Absolute

More or less useless, anyone who knows how to use the internet should point themselves to his website. Stick to benchmarking and making pretty graphs because the articles are rather full of boring facts and useless information that is going to be outdated by the time you get to the next chapter

Anyone can write a book like this. I thought i would learn more about hardware. Wrong, just go to his website and you'll learn just as much. I don't know why i even bought this book!