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Help me building a PC


Zen3001

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I really need to get something better than this craptop and now with that crappy job I got I might even be able to afford it in a few months maybe.

 

Don't need any deals I can look for them myself just tell me what it is I need to buy, I know about mother boards, CPUs, graphic cards and RAMs because that's what everyone's talking about everywhere but what other components do I need to have full a working pc. Just give me a full list of things I need to buy and maybe a short description of their purpose.

 

That's all I know, buying a bunch of hardwares and putting them together, anything else I need to know?

Edited by Zen3001
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https://pcpartpicker.com/

 

This site allows you to pick a bunch of components, gives you a price based on your preferences (tries to look for the lowest prices including coupons unless you blacklist/whitelist specific retailers, etc.), and lets you know if any compatibility issues arise. In other words, do you have the correct motherboard for a specific CPU, do you have a big enough power supply unit, etc.

 

The components you will probably need are:

  • Case
  • Motherboard
  • CPU
  • Fan aka CPU cooler (new AMD CPUs tend to come bundled with these)
  • GPU aka graphics card
  • Primary storage (hard drive or solid state drive)
  • DRAM aka memory (this component is massively overpriced right now)
  • Power supply unit (PSU). These have a number and ratings that give you an idea of their efficiency. So a 500 Watt PSU with an 80+ Bronze rating can reasonably be expected to supply up to 400 Watts to the whole system (80% of 500). You'll have to look up the difference between 80+, 80+ Bronze, Silver, Gold, Platinum, Titanium, etc. but in general you want to make sure that you have a PSU that can deliver more power than your other components need, and even more if you plan to do an upgrade in the future such as upgrading from a 100 Watt GPU to a 200 Watt GPU or whatever.

You may also need a:

  • Display aka monitor. Some people even use TVs for this purpose.
  • Keyboard and mouse (for the mouse, I tend to go with the Logitech M705 which is wireless, cheap, but pretty good)
  • Networking card (for Ethernet or Wi-Fi). More desktop users are adding Wi-Fi these days because it is convenient.
  • Secondary storage or USB storage device (for example, have your operating system and most applications and games installed on an SSD, and other stuff on an HDD).

In general, if your purpose is gaming, you want to spend more money on the GPU than the CPU.

 

Solid state drives seem very cheap this Black Friday.

Edited by jaxa
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My advice is: if you have to ask on a forum what components to buy for a home-built PC, you are better off not home-building at all. Home-building is a great option for experts who know exactly what components they want, and don't want to pay a vendor to put them all together, but for non-experts there is a high risk of producing a badly-designed machine that doesn't actually work out any cheaper than getting a pre-built machine from a custom vendor (not Dell or HP, but vendors that provide a high level of customisability for their gaming machines, like Cyberpower or PCSpecialist).

 

I certainly include myself in the category of "non-experts", as I did try to build my own PC once, and it just resulted in a hot, noisy, unreliable mess. By all means do it if you particularly enjoy the learning experience, but don't automatically assume that it is the best way of getting a good value PC just because it's what hardcore overclockers on Tom's Hardware do.

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My advice is: if you have to ask on a forum what components to buy for a home-built PC, you are better off not home-building at all. Home-building is a great option for experts who know exactly what components they want, and don't want to pay a vendor to put them all together, but for non-experts there is a high risk of producing a badly-designed machine that doesn't actually work out any cheaper than getting a pre-built machine from a custom vendor (not Dell or HP, but vendors that provide a high level of customisability for their gaming machines, like Cyberpower or PCSpecialist).

 

I certainly include myself in the category of "non-experts", as I did try to build my own PC once, and it just resulted in a hot, noisy, unreliable mess. By all means do it if you particularly enjoy the learning experience, but don't automatically assume that it is the best way of getting a good value PC just because it's what hardcore overclockers on Tom's Hardware do.

 

I disagree. Sites like PC Part Picker that I linked above make it dead easy, and help to avoid rookie compatibility mistakes. Moreover, the actual building of the system has become an easier and more streamlined process than it was 10 or 20 years ago, and there's always YouTube if you get stuck on how to assemble the thing.

 

As for the price, you may be right but I'm not sure. You may be able to pick up a refurb deal for far cheaper, and upgrade specific components later.

 

W.R.T. the hot noisy mess, this could be alleviated by not attempting to overclock anything, and having sane components (e.g. an AMD Ryzen CPU, and a lower-powered GPU such as the GTX 1050 Ti or 1060 instead of a 1080).

Edited by jaxa
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The reasons I'm looking forward to build it my self is to be able to upgrade it in the future without having to buy a whole new pc and I'm pretty sure it gets a little cheaper that way, besides I know a few ameteur kids that did and had no problems

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The reasons I'm looking forward to build it my self is to be able to upgrade it in the future without having to buy a whole new pc and I'm pretty sure it gets a little cheaper that way, besides I know a few ameteur kids that did and had no problems

 

You don't need to home-build in order to have an upgradable PC, any professionally-built custom gaming PC is perfectly upgradeable (essentially it is a home-build PC, just with someone else rather than you doing the building).

 

I don't have any specific data on the price though; if Jaxa says it has become easier and cheaper in the last few years he is probably right, since the last time I tried it was in 2001 or so. In theory if everything goes well and you don't make any mistakes with components etc, it should work out cheaper because of simple economics (you're not paying for any labour costs, just raw components), although on the other hand the companies might be able to get better prices on the components because they are buying in bulk.

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If you want platform for upgrades, get the best CPU you can afford, and pair it with proper mobo and fast RAM, as big amount of it as you can. Don't buy the cheapest mobo around, as you want it to last for like 6-9 years. Get a good dedicated CPU heatsink + silent fan (stock coolers are usually rubbish), and properly ventilated PC case (possibly with silent fans as well). This way you'll only need to worry about GPU and not much else, which means upgrading only one component every 3 years or so.

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I was looking to get that ryzen cpu and apperently according jaxa it allready has a fan on it, do you still recommend another fan on it?

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I was looking to get that ryzen cpu and apperently according jaxa it allready has a fan on it, do you still recommend another fan on it?

 

I stick to Intel / Nvidia combo, and Intel has pretty loud CPU fans with heatsinks that look like this:

978218_5_f.jpg

 

 

Which is nothing in comparison to something like this:

625558_0_f.jpg

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or get an old PCI or PCIe based Xfi card.. like I have in my PC.

But not the new ones above them, as the signal to noise ration is actually worse.

 

On the subject of old creative cards, I have all my old ones still, AWE32, SB-LIVE 5.1, Audigy, Audigy 2, XFI and the SoundBlasterZ, but I went back to the Xfi as it has better SN ratio.

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or get an old PCI or PCIe based Xfi card.. like I have in my PC.

 

Nope, the motherboard and all other components generate noise and interference. If you want better sound quality, you need to have your audio interface outside the PC case. And again, don't buy Creative stuff. Even when they have decent hardware on paper, in practice it's still shitty e.g. because of drivers. They don't make too much effort, as they cater to gamers (mostly). If you want to invest in your sound a little, look for audio interfaces for musicians or home recording studios. Even the basic models will sound better than anything Creative spouts, and they're not expensive (e.g. Focusrite).

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  • 3 months later...

Man I feel slow, anyways if you guys haven't forgotten this either what do you say about this build?

https://de.pcpartpicker.com/list/h6tK9J

 

will look into a monitor later, anything else missing here? Any problems with it that pcbuilder doesn't mention?

 

 

You don't need to home-build in order to have an upgradable PC, any professionally-built custom gaming PC is perfectly upgradeable (essentially it is a home-build PC, just with someone else rather than you doing the building).

if that's the case, I might look into it, where can I find some good deals?

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almost forgot, I was wondering if it's a bad idea to buy used parts

Edited by Zen3001
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almos forgot, I was wondering if it's a bad idea to buy used parts

 

For what it's worth I can't remember the last time I purchased a piece of hardware new. If you're in the US (just not sure about other countries), eBay is a great place to find good deals and there are people with too much money that just dump their hardware for cheap from time to time. I don't bother with auctions unless the item isn't in high demand--people get emotional about it and bid the item up higher than the market price. Also, if you buy Gigabyte, MSI, or EVGA you can often take advantage of transferable warranties. If you don't break the conditions of the "eBay Money Back Guarantee", they are really good about "Item Not As Described" claims. Just thoroughly check the condition of items, the item description, and the seller profile.

 

The only thing that I would be careful about buying used is the PSU.

 

I ran an experiment over the span of 12 months to see how cheaply I could build a high end VR gaming rig for my grandfather (for flight sims). I was able to get him a GTX 1070, i7 6700, Gigabyte GA-Z270XP-SLI mobo, 16GB RAM, 450W PSU, and a 500GB SSD for $400--all sourced from ebay. A few of ebay's random 10% off coupons did help.

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