May 9th, 2016 
Mark 
For the uninitiated, building a computer might souond as daunting as building a rocket ship, but assembling a PC is not rocket science. As a matter of fact, if you’ve ever put together a Lego set, then you’ve got the chops to build a basic PC. The more challenging part of the process is simply educating yourself on what parts to buy, but planning out your build is also arguably the most fun part. To help you enjoy this process, we’ve written this PC component shopping starter guide, and by the end of it, you’ll be ready to hit the ground running to start building your own custom PC!
First things first:
Building a PC doesn’t have to be expensive. If you plan to do most of your gaming at a resolution of 1080p (which is by far the most common gaming resolution today) and you only want to play less-demanding games like League of Legends, DOTA 2, or Hearthstone, you could spend as little as $400 on your PC. If you want to jump into the deep end to play games like The Witcher 3 at pupil-splitting 4K, then yes, that’s where the multi-thousand dollar PCs can come into play. Of course, there’s also a middle ground if you want to play demanding games, but aren’t concerned with turning up all of the graphical bells and whistles. As we mentioned, there’s a ton of flexibility here.
Generally speaking, you want to get the most bang for your buck. If you spend more money on a component, chances are you will get slightly better performance, but you’ll be paying a high premium for it. Conversely, if you spend too little, you might end up making some compromises down the road, and might be better off with spending a few dollars more for a better long-term experience. Deciphering all of that may seem difficult, but we’re here to walk you through it component-by-component.
Table of contents:
CPU
Unless all you’re planning on playing are non-graphically demanding indie games, we’d recommend a quad-core central processing unit (CPU). While the graphics processing unit (GPU) is often seen as the most important component of one’s gaming rig, it is important to not overlook the value of having a good CPU. After all, the CPU is the brains of the operation, and if you go with a poor one, it will only serve to bottleneck your GPU. This means it will hinder your graphics card from going full speed, so to speak.
At the moment, Intel is ahead of the CPU performance curve against AMD. Intel’s $350 quad-core Skylake 6700K CPU is arguably the best (non-enthusiast) consumer quad-core CPU right now, and the company’s $200 quad-core i5-6500 is a great bang for your buck gaming CPU. Don’t take this to mean that there aren’t good offerings from AMD, however. The company has some good affordable options and AMD’s FX-8350 8-core Vishera chip is currently a good mid-tier CPU for around 150 bucks.
Wait, if AMD’s CPU has 8 cores, why is it inferior to Intel’s quad-core offerings? In short, core count only really matters when you’re comparing CPUs in the same family. A quad-core Intel CPU will most likely be better than a dual-core Intel CPU, but an octo-core AMD CPU won’t necessarily be better than a quad-core Intel CPU, for instance. Perhaps to muddle things up a little more, an octo-core Intel CPU might not be better than a quad-core Intel CPU for gaming, considering most games aren’t optimized for anything above four cores. In some cases, opting for a CPU with more than four cores is not only a waste of money for gaming, but can result in poorer performance. Take for instance Intel’s $1,000 5960X CPU. This is a great processor for gaming and a dream chip for productivity tasks. The CPU might have eight cores, but it carries a base frequency (speed) of 3GHz, which is slower than the base frequency of the 4GHz quad-core i7-6700K, which retails for $350. Why does the exuberantly more expensive octo-core CPU run at a lower frequency than the cheaper part? When you have to squeeze twice as many cores into the CPU die, you essentially have to make some compromises when it comes to power and heat.
If you can’t decide between two CPUs, a good online resource is CPUboss.com. The website allows you to compare the specs of any two processors and will provide a score for each CPU. The site also provides comparison benchmarks.
Another thing you may want to pay attention to is if the CPU is “unlocked.” Unlocked CPUs allow you to overclock them for “free” performance. While pretty much all AMD CPUs made today are unlocked and overclockable, in the Intel world, generally only the more expensive “K” SKUs can be overclocked. While CPU overclocking is very common, every CPU is going to have its own overclocking limit (even with CPUs in the same SKU!). While overclocking isn’t necessary, if you did want to overclock your CPU, you’ll want to get an “aftermarket” cooler so that you can crank up the heat a little more. We’ll talk more about coolers later.
Graphics Card
Provided you have a good enough CPU, your graphics card is going to be the single biggest component affecting your gaming performance. Essentially, the GPU should be the most expensive component of your gaming build.
This isn’t to say that you should break the bank to get a graphics card. We also want to dispel a myth that you’ll need to upgrade your GPU every year or every other year, just because new graphics cards come out at that cadence. A video card that you buy today will not magically get slower in the future (if anything, it may even slightly improve with driver updates). As a matter of fact, the GeForce 8800 GTX, which came out a decade ago, can still play the overwhelming majority of modern games out today with playable frame rates. You just won’t be able to crank up the graphical bells and whistles as high as you might like.
What GPU should you get, though? That really depends on your budget and desires. As of today, we’d recommend holding off until AMD and Nvidia release their new GPUs, as the company’s respective Polaris and Pascal cards should be coming out soon. Nvidia’s recently revealed GeForce GTX 1080 and 1070 GPUs look like super powerful graphics cards that are killer deals on paper. Even if you weren’t interested in getting a brand new top-tier card, it could lower the price on existing cards. If you absolutely can’t wait for whatever reason (and seriously, you should wait), here’s what’s good today…
If you want to max out most of your games on 1080p (the most common gaming resolution) with consistent frame rates above 30fps, get the GeForce GTX 970 if you want to go with Nvidia or the R9 390 if you want to go with AMD. They’re also good cards if you wanted to get into virtual reality, which is very graphically-demanding. If you don’t need to game with your settings maxed out, a GTX 960 or a R9 380 are great bang for the buck cards for your medium-to-high settings fix. If all you want to play are non-graphically demanding games like League of Legends, DOTA 2, and CS:GO (which are among the most popular-played PC games today), more affordable options like the GTX 950 or R7 370 will do fine. If you wanted to jump into the deeper end of the pool and game at 1440p, you’ll probably want a GTX 980 or an R9 Fury. If you wanted to go all in and try your hand at 4K, we’d recommend at least a GTX 980Ti or an R9 Fury X, but to be honest, 4K is extremely taxing on hardware at this point in time, especially on one card. That could change with the aforementioned, upcoming GTX 1080 and 1070 cards, however, but we’ll have to wait to test it out ourselves. If you simply want the best graphics card today, the Nvidia GeForce Titan X is the performance king, but it’s generally only slightly faster than a 980Ti and costs several hundreds of dollars more. Nvidia also claims that its upcoming 1080 graphics card will outperform the Titan X for considerably less. If you wanted the most powerful card per-square-inch, which is great for when you want to build a tiny, but powerful gaming PC, AMD’s Nano is currently your best bet.
AMD vs Nvidia: Once you’ve figured out your GPU price range, the next logical question to ask yourself is, “Do I go with Nvidia or AMD?” As it stands right now, each vendor has their strengths and weaknesses, but the hardware community generally gives Nvidia the nod over AMD for better and more consistent with better driver updates. Nvidia also currently enjoys a lead in the performance-per-watt architecture category (that is to say, the company is able to deliver greater performance with less power). For you, this means that Nvidia cards are generally able to run cooler and quieter. Nvidia also offers a strong suite of features like GeForce Experience, which allows you to quickly enable optimal playable game settings, and Nvidia ShadowPlay, which allows you to easily capture in-game video. AMD is generally seen as offering a slightly better dollar-to-performance ratio, meaning, you get a pretty good bang-for-the-buck if performance is what you seek. Of course, graphics cards are always evolving and comparisons are going to vary on a situational basis. Like the iOS vs Android debate, both sides are going to have their fervent fanboys and pitchforks. Luckily for you, both companies make great graphics cards and you can’t really go too wrong either way.
But how do you recognize what makes a great graphics card? There are a couple things to look for. Both Nvidia and AMD use parallel processing cores for their GPUs. Nvidia refers to its cores as “CUDA” cores and AMD calls its cores “stream processors.” The higher amount is generally a tell-tale sign of a card’s quality. Like what we said about CPU core count, however, you can only compare numbers within the same family. This means you can’t compare CUDA cores against stream processors and vice versa. You should also look at a card’s base and boost clocks, which generally dictates the frequency, or speed, at which a card runs.
The amount of video RAM (VRAM) a card has is generally another tell-tale sign of a card’s quality. Again, the more you have, the better the card. Since VRAM, or the frame buffer (as it’s also commonly known), is responsible for loading a game’s textures, the higher the resolution you’re gaming at, the more textures it has to push. The VRAM therefore indirectly dictates what resolution each card should run at. Generally speaking, 1-2GB of VRAM is good for gaming at 1080p (HD), 3-4GB of VRAM is good for 1440p gaming (Ultra HD), and you’ll want six or more GB of VRAM to effectively game at 3840×2160 (4K).
Like CPUboss.com, if you can’t decide between two GPUs, there is a similar website for graphics cards appropriately titled, GPUboss.com. Again, the site allows you to compare the specs between both devices, gives you a score for each, and provides comparison benchmarks.
RAM
8GB is the bare minimum that we’d recommend for a respectable gaming PC and you shouldn’t feel the need to go out and buy expensive RAM sticks. If you like to open up multiple tabs using Google Chrome or would like to do video editing/production work on the side, it’s not a bad idea to opt for 16GB. In terms of RAM speed, getting 1600MHz and above is going to be fine for your gaming needs. RAM speed matters more if you’re running on your CPU’s integrated graphics, but since you’ll be using a discrete desktop GPU, this won’t concern you. We’d also advise you to get your RAM running in dual-channel mode as opposed to single channel. This means that for a total of 8GB of RAM, we recommend going with two 4GB sticks of RAM, as opposed to one 8GB stick. The reason for this is that it offers greater memory bandwidth. When you’re shopping, make sure that you get the right RAM for your motherboard. DDR4 is the newest consumer RAM standard, but if you’re getting a slightly older motherboard, chances are you might need DDR3 RAM at this point.
Motherboard
You’ll want to shop for you motherboard, or mobo, after you’ve determined which CPU you’re going with, since every single motherboard is going to support different CPU sockets. For instance, if you’re going to go with Intel’s i5-6500 CPU, which uses the LGA 1151 socket, you’ll want to get a motherboard that supports that socket. Current Intel sockets include the aforementioned LGA 1151 and LGA-2011 V3, the latter of which is more of an enthusiast mobo socket. Current AMD sockets include AM3+ and FM2, although a new AM4 socket from AMD is on its way for its upcoming Zen architecture. In case you’re concerned about socket compatibility, you can use PCPartPicker.com to put together your build online. The website will inform you of any incompatibility issues here.
We’d generally avoid getting an older motherboard that supports an outdated socket, since older boards are no longer supported, you won’t be able to slot newer, upcoming CPUs into them. You may also miss out on more modern features like USB type-C connectivity or even USB 3.0 support, if you go back far enough.
Once you’ve figured out what kind of socket your motherboard will need, the next big thing to decide is the motherboard’s size. Mobos generally come in four form factors. From smallest to largest there is: Mini-ITX, MicroATX, ATX, and Extended ATX. If you go with a small Mini-ITX board, you can get a small, portable Mini-ITX case to go along with it. If you’re going to go with a large Extended ATX motherboard, you’re probably going to need a big full tower case to house it. Going with an Extended ATX motherboard is likely going to give you the most features and ports, but it will generally be more expensive and you won’t be able to squeeze it into a small chassis. Going with Mini-ITX, however, limits you to one video card, and just two RAM slots. The other two options cater somewhere in between. So it’s up to you to decide what you want to go for.
Some things to consider when looking for a motherboard would be: Does it support Crossfire/SLI for two or more graphics cards. How many PCIe slots does it have? (This will determine how many video cards you can slot into it) Does it have the ports that I want? Does it come with WiFi? Does it offer Bluetooth? There’s a bunch of other little details about motherboards, but these are some of the big-picture things to look at.
Case
Arguably the most important thing to look for in a case is its size. It roughly follows the same size guidelines as motherboards. Meaning, Mini-ITX chassis are for Mini-ITX boards, Micro-Towers are good for Micro-ATX boards, Mid-Towers pair well with ATX boards, and full-towers are designed for Extended-ATX mobos. Another thing to look out for is, well, looks. Yes, you can get a cheap case if you’re on a budget, and it will do the job, but the case is the shell of your hot rod. It should ideally look sexy. Yes, that’s a little shallow, but it’s okay to “treat yo self” every now and then. Thankfully, you don’t need to spend a ton to get a nice looking case. Take for instance the pictured Fractal Designs R4 here. At $100, the mid-tower offers a sexy, yet minimalist design that isn’t outlandishly expensive.
Aside from the aesthetics, you’ll want to make sure the case can fit all of your components. We’re not just talking about the motherboard here. If you’re going to be getting a bulky aftermarket cooler, a giant video card, or a large power supply, for instance, you’ll want to make sure those parts will fit in that case. The case will often give you height or GPU-length info, but in case it gets too confusing, using a website like PCPartPicker, which informs you of incompatibility issues, can help you solve the problem.
Other things to look for in your case is to ask yourself: Does it have any cable management options to keep the innards of your PC tidy? Does it include any fans? Does it offer good airflow with vents at the top and back/sides? Does it include dust filters?
Cooler
Unless you’re buying an enthusiast CPU from Intel, most CPUs will come with a stock cooler. If you don’t plan to overclock, then sticking with these included coolers is fine. If you did want to overclock a little however, you’ll want to get a more efficient aftermarket cooler. If you didn’t want to spend too much for one, Cooler Master’s Hyper 212 Evo is a great bang for the buck air cooler you can get for around $30. If you wanted to be a little more aggressive with overclocking, it’s a good idea to step up to a closed-loop water cooler. These coolers use liquid to more effectively dissipate heat. The most common closed-loop coolers will come in either single-rad or double-rad forms. The most important thing you’ll want to look for here is to see if the cooler will fit your case. Another thing to look out for is the size of the cooler’s fans. Most cases will support 120mm fans, but some cases will also support 140mm fans. Generally speaking, because larger 140mm fans are able to move more air with less effort (due to their larger blades), you don’t need to crank up the rpms as high to achieve optimal cooling. Experientially, this can save your ears from any leafblower-like noises. There are plenty of good closed-loop coolers out there, but a good single rad 120mm cooler is the Corsair H80i and a good 140mm cooler is the NZXT Kraken X41.There are also great double rad versions of both (the Corsair H100i and NZXT X61, respectively). If you wanted even better cooling performance and flashier aesthetics, you’ll want to look into installing a custom-loop cooler, but these are much harder to install, and we’d only recommend them for more seasoned PC building vets.
SSD
As far as we’re concerned, an SSD for a gaming PC is a must. We’d recommend getting a 240GB SSD or greater. If that’s too much for your budget, you can opt for a 120GB SSD for at least the operating system. Having an SSD for your OS will allow you to boot up your PC super fast. We’re talking under 15 seconds here. The new hotness in super-fast storage is NVMe drives (such as Intel’s 750 PCIe SSD), which will take up one of your motherboard’s PCIe slots. While these drives are insanely fast, you will be paying a high premium for them at moment. We’re talking roughly a grand for a 1.2TB drive here. Unless you have that kind of cashola just burning a hole in your pocket, we recommend going with a traditional 2.5-inch SATA SSD for the time being.
Hard Drive
While we love SSDs, unless you’re going to shell out for something like Samsung’s 2TB 850 Pro SSD, which costs roughly a grand, chances are you’re also going to want cheaper mechanical hard drives for your mass storage needs. Depending on how many games you play, your needs are going to be different, but we’d recommend getting at least a 1TB hard disc drive (HDD). Just make sure it’s a 7,200rpm one, which is the standard HDD speed nowadays. Don’t feel the need to opt for anything faster, either, as your SSD is meant to do the heavy lifting when it comes to speed. If you’re trying to be economical, a good thing to look out for is price per GB. Also, unless you have a super tiny case, you could always add a secondary hard drive later.
Power Supply
Now that you’ve picked all your components, you’ve got to get a power supply unit (PSU) that offers enough juice to power everything. To make your life easier, there are online power supply calculators like that will tell you how much wattage you’ll need upon plugging in the components you plan to use. Generally speaking, it’s a good idea to give yourself a 100-watt power buffer, in case of a power spike or the weather goes awry. You may also want to give yourself a bigger buffer if you think you’re eventually going to want to add a second graphics card to your rig. It’s also a good idea to get a good power supply made by a reputable PSU manufacturer, since you don’t want any of your components getting damaged in the event that a shady power supply keels over. Some reputable power supply vendors include Corsair, EVGA, Seasonic, Enermax, Lepa, Silverstone, and Antec among others. If that’s too much to remember, just make sure to get a PSU that’s rated “80 PLUS” or better (This means that it’s 80 plus percent efficient on any load that is above 20 percent).
Another thing to consider with purchasing a power supply is deciding between modular or non-modular. Non-modular power supplies have all the wires and cables dangling out the back of the PSU, whereas modular power supplies allow you to pull out any unnecessary cables you don’t need for your build. If you’re a neat freak, you may want to opt for the modular PSU, as it allows you to free your PC from clutter (which in turn can slightly assist with airflow). The downside to modular power supplies is that you have to keep track of where you left all the extra cables in the event that you needed them at a later date.
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