If you have an external CD-ROM drive you will likely need to also purchase a USB cable. Most of today's external drives are connected in this way; some connect using firewire.

A sound card . To exploit a CD-ROM drive's capabilities, you'll need high-quality sound. Computers are variably sold with a full-blown sound card, lesser sound provisions or no sound capability at all. If you don't have one, consider purchasing a sound card for the best quality. How a CD-ROM title is produced also makes a difference in sound quality.

Speakers. To get the full effect of your sound card and many CD-ROM titles, you will need speakers that can reproduce the sound that the disks and drives were designed to offer. Full-blown-5-point surround-sound speakers are now available to the computer enthusiast, but you can still find very good quality paired-desktop speakers as well. How fancy they are and how good the sound quality is depends on how deep your pockets are.

A monitor. Video clips look much better when viewed on a high-quality monitor. If you're planning on consistently running CD-ROM titles that feature many video clips, you'll want a color monitor featuring a dot pitch of .28 or less with minimum1024 x 768 resolution, True colors resolution and a high refresh rate, around 75 Hz. A video card that can keep up with the heavy stream of data flowing from CD-ROM video clips is also recommended.