Problem Building my first gaming PC

[beastie]

Hi Guys,

I'm building my very first gaming pc and It was harder than I thought.

I'm following this guide, It's pretty straightforward and perfect for a newbie like me. But is it reliable? Because their domain seems new. Am I on the right track?

Any comments or opinions are appreciated

Thanks

 

[Hambeau]

I wouldn't follow that site too literally if you want a Gaming system... They look too generic and seem to be intended for first time PC users. A sub $300 system should probably never be used for gaming.

Take a look at YouTube videos on channels like "Jayz2cents" and "Paul's Hardware". You might get more info than you want at first, particularly with water cooling, Solid State Drives and overclocking, but they both seem to be impartial as far as components go and that is info that you may want to use when you perform an upgrade later.

Being an AMD user since forever I prefer cost over performance but do not try to dissuade those who wish to spend more Both of the above channels have recently posted videos of sub-$1000 builds using Ryzen and compared them to similar Intel builds so you can make your own decisions.

 

[Drbretto]

https://pcpartpicker.com/

Look here. They will have different builds for different budgets, links to the best deals for each part and a video guide for putting them together. This is about as good as it's going to get.

Edit: As an AMD user, if this PC is primarily for Minecraft, then I would recommend Nvidia for your graphics card. AMD is great power for the buck and I love my r9 390, but AMD doesn't play very nice with OpenGL sometimes, and Nvidia cards will almost always be more stable. It's not a huge difference, mind you, and if you're not going to use shaders or anything then it's really not a big deal at all. But if you want a beast with the best compatibility all around, go with Nvidia.

 

[Reddis]

My opinion as an every day user with average or maybe a little more experience is to educate yourself about the technologies and prices and then make a purchase based on that. Last time I built a pc I made an Excel spreadsheet that had a column for cpu, gpu, and ram. Then I started looking at what I considered to be reliable 3rd party sites, like PC Mag for example, to see what the newest, greatest thing was. I noted the specs in each column, then looked at several sites to see what the price for that piece was. I started working backwards in price point from there. "If I had to sacrifice tech in the name of price, the next step down would be..." concept. Once I had my spreadsheet, I would grab a bare bones pc from someone like Tiger Direct and start plugging in pieces until my budget was consumed.

I usually built a very powerful system for around $800 - without getting into frills like a $500 graphic card that renders 2D into 3D or liquid cooled, or some other crazy thing like that. Using the same process, I bought an MSI laptop for my gaming (yes, I said laptop for gaming) that has a core i7 2.7ghz, 12g ram, and 2g gpu. It run EVERYTHING put out today - the only bottleneck is the fact it is a laptop means cooling tends to be an issue - and spent $900 when i7's were brand new.

 

[KingTriaxx]

AMD processor all the way, but Nvidia cards are just better for MC. If you're going Linux at all, which I wouldn't recommend, Nvidia has native drivers while AMD doesn't.

Combine those two channels with pcpartpicker, which will usually flag an incompatibilities before you spend money on the parts. I will say that pre-fitted CPU/Mobo combos are a useful thing, since most places will usually perform any of the necessary BIOS updating the boards need, and check compatibility before shipping so you don't have to worry about them showing up and being incorrect. (I had a great processor and mobo, and then found out the version I'd bought was one short of the minimum compatibility for the processor.)