[ SECRET POST #3685 ]

[case]

⌈ Secret Post #3685 ⌋

Warning: Some secrets are NOT worksafe and may contain SPOILERS.

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Notes:

Secrets Left to Post: 02 pages, 42 secrets from Secret Submission Post #527.
Secrets Not Posted: [ 0 - broken links ], [ 0 - not!secrets ], [ 0 - not!fandom ], [ 0 - too big ], [ 0 - repeat ].
Current Secret Submissions Post: here.
Suggestions, comments, and concerns should go here.

Comments

Re: Building a gaming computer

[(Anonymous)]

Oh oh I love building computers! I built my first one a couple years ago and it was surprisingly easy, and not particularly hard on my wallet. Since then I've upgraded several pieces for extra performance and it's great to be able to do that gradually if you choose. pcpartpicker.com is a great resource, you can put together a build and it will help show you what parts are compatible and how much it will cost. They also have premade guides that are a good starting point. Another good guide is tomshardware.com - they have build guides, and lists of their highest-rated components at different price points.

Here's my advice for individual parts:
- If you want a mid-range, inexpensive graphics card, I'd go with AMD. They tend to run hotter and louder than Nvidia cards but they're cheaper and IME the extra cost doesn't make much of a difference until you get to the high-end cards.
- Get the latest Intel i3 or i5 processor. I think the i5's are a good balance between price and performance but an i3 is not a bad processor if you're building on a budget. Getting one that you can overclock will be slightly more expensive. Again, AMD runs cheaper but I've never used one so can't offer any advice on them, sorry!
- Once you decide on a processor, pick out a motherboard that has a compatible CPU socket. pcpartpicker will help you with that. The most important thing with mobos is compatibility with all the stuff you want to put on it, don't bother looking for high performance or extra features or stuff like that.
- For memory, 8 GB is the lowest I'd go for a gaming computer. The exact specifications will depend on what speed your motherboard supports. Normally I'd expect to pay about $50 for that much RAM.
- Speaking of things that are $50, for that price you can get either a small (~250GB) SSD (solid state drive) or a terabyte of standard hard drive. If you haven't already used one, an SSD is an amazing performance boost over a standard hard drive and will sharply reduce loading times (both of the OS and any games you put on it) but they're a lot more expensive per gigabyte than standard hard drives. My personal preference is to install the OS on a small SSD and use a hard drive for storage, but you can pare that down if you want to go cheaper - up to you whether speed or storage is more important to you.
- Don't skimp on your power supply, you want it to last. Corsair is a good brand. Absolutely buy a "modular" power supply - this means that all of the cables can be removed from it, instead of being built in, which is a lot easier to work with (and you can replace just one cable instead of the whole unit if it shorts out. yes, this has happened to me. learn from my mistakes!) pcpartpicker has a feature that will show you the estimated power use of your build, give that number some headroom and pick a power supply that can handle it. You might want to give yourself even more power than you need if you think you might upgrade your graphics card in the next five years or so.
- For the most part I wouldn't bother getting any additional cooling unless you're going to overclock stuff. Most cases and processors come with stock fans that are perfectly fine for regular use. Intel's unlocked (overclockable) processors don't come with fans though so keep that in mind.