Help Building a New Computer

[JEMC]

snakenobi said:

what do dual and tripple channel ram motherboards mean?

In simple words, it's the nº of channels the CPU use to "talk" with your RAM. More channels = better speeds but also more latency. More: wikipedia

Most CPUs use dual channel, the "old" Intel's i7 (the likes of 920/930, 950 etc.) use triple channel while the new i7 (3930K) go with quad channel. When buying the RAM the difference is that dual channel kits comes in packs of 2 modules, triple channel comes in packs of 3 and quads in packs of 4.

the same for pci-e slots,what do channels mean 

The combo CPU-chipset (like those of X79, Z68, P67, 990FX, etc) talk to the devices that you install in the motherboard via a series of lanes. This number of lanes are finite (X79 gives you 40 PCIe 2.0 lanes while the 990FX has 42) and are spreaded into the different PCI slots that comes with your mobo. Simply put, the more the better. But be careful with the names, a PCIe 2.0 is different from a PCIe. To learn more: wikipedia

and speed mean liek 16x or 8x?

This multiplier tells you the number of lanes the PCIe uses (16x = 16 lanes, 4x = 4 lanes). Every motherboard has at least 1 PCIe 2.0 x16, and this is where the graphics card goes. If you go with SLI/Xfire you must look at the other PCIe slots. When using 2 Gfx cards some boards will split those 16 lanes into the 2 cards (8 for each one). The difference in performance is usually negligible. See more examples here: http://www.hardocp.com/article/2010/08/23/gtx_480_sli_pcie_bandwidth_perf_x16x16_vs_x8x8/

I hope it helps.