631

Yep. My (older) brother used to build them for me all the time, but he’s not available so this is my second solo build.

It’s not THAT hard to be sure you’ve got the right pieces (thanks, in part, to NewEgg’s very useful search engine). It just takes knowing where to start, a lot of comparison shopping, and double-checking with the motherboard for just about everything.

First, you buy your processor. That usually comes with a moderately functional cooling fan (stock cooling fans have a pretty bad rap, but if you aren’t overclocking it and you buy a decent case it’s PROBABLY okay. If you’re overclocking it, or you anticipate your computer having to travel a lot (the biggest issue with the stock fans is the mounting system, IMO; if you jolt it too much, the fan can get loose), you might need a non-stock cooling fan. If you do need a non-stock cooling fan, you’ll need to know how much room you have in your case and what socket of motherboard you’ve got… and then good luck, because I’ve never been happy with any cooling system, stock, non-stock, watercooled, or whatever else). My stock cooling fan came with some thermal paste pre-added to the device, but you might want to get some more (it’s messy but it’s cheap, and can improve the quality of those stock fans tremendously. Make sure it’s non-conductive, so you can more easily remove it later if necessary. Arctic Silver and DeepCool both have decent non-conductive thermal paste; Arctic Silver is probably the top-of-the-line brand, right now).

Your processor will determine what socket of motherboard you can buy (for example, my i7 Processor was compatible with any LGA-115X motherboard), which will tell you most of the other things you can get (things that fit, in this example, an LGA-1150 socket motherboard — this is important because it tells you where the screws go, where the plugs are, etc.).

For example, the MSI B85-G43 PC Mate motherboard I bought, which was compatible with my i7 processor, says on the NewEgg site that it requires a 24-pin connector ATX power supply. ATX also refers to where the screw holes and such go, so that’s why it tells you what kind of case you can get. The website also mentions that the motherboard supports up to 32GB of 240-pin DDR3 memory, and has four memory card slots, so that tells you what kind of RAM you can get. (I only got 16GB of ram because, well, budget) Many motherboards are good brands. The best brands for RAM are probably Corsair and G.Skill; G.Skill is usually a little cheaper but sometimes has minor (correctable in BIOS) compatibility issues with certain motherboards. Corsair has been the top dog in memory for over a decade.

Your motherboard determines what case you can buy. Some cases are better than others, but it’s hard to tell by brand, or even by reputation. I bought a case (Enermax’s COENUS line) which is designed to be inexpensive, but cosmetically pleasant and extremely good at circulating air; it’s not as good working with a water-cooled set-up, however. I also made sure it had a bottom-mount power supply mounting, which is preferable to top-mount (the PSU needs an air intake; that’s usually on the bottom of the unit. A top-mount PSU takes in the hot air produced by your CPU and GPU, whereas a bottom-mount PSU takes in cool air from the floor. Just be sure, if you buy a bottom mount power supply, you don’t put your computer in one of those desk slots that “keep it out of the way,” which might cut off its air intake supply)

You need to figure out what connectors your motherboard has available for your hard drive. Most use SATA-III unless you’re buying a SSD; just check to be sure that’s what you’re getting, and not some sort of old-fashioned SCSI connector or something like that. SSDs are more complicated, because they may connects through SATA-III, mSata, PCI Card slot, or some other more obscure connector; stick with SATA-III or PCI Cards and most modern motherboards will likely support it.

PCI Card SSDs have significantly faster data transfer than SATA-III, but are a little more complicated to deal with and are more expensive. SATA-III can be mounted in the drive bay area of your case, and (obviously) don’t take up a PCI slot.

In this day and age, there is no point in buying a slower-than-7200 RPM HDD. The most common way of handling HDDs is to buy a few of them and connect them all into some form of RAID Array (done using your Bios), but it forces your computer to use the slowest speed of all of your harddrives. It can also be riskier for some of your data (depending on configuration, if one HDD fails you’ve lost all of your data on both drives)… although sometimes (depending on configuration) it can be safer for your data, too (because the data is made redundant, though you lose some HDD capacity). If you have an SSD and a HDD, you probably DON’T want to configure them in a RAID array.

SSDs are very nice due to their speed, low power consumption, and more. They are more expensive, however, and older models might have some durability issues. A lot of the durability issues are being worked out in any of the more recent designs (anything you’re likely to buy, really), but it’s probably best to pair the SSD (for speed in booting your computer and running resource-intense software) with a standard HDD (for bulk storage of data). Kingston, Mushkin, and OCZ have good reputations for the best entry-level SSDs, but if you’re willing to throw a lot of money into it Intel has some very, very good SSDs that mount into PCI slots; some of the fastest SSDs on the market. (I went with a Kingston SSD because of budget issues, but if I had the money I’d have gone Intel)

Optical drives (DVD, Bluray, etc) are fairly easy to deal with — look for a SATA-III type, unless your motherboard doesn’t have any SATA-III connectors open after setting up your hard drive. If that’s the case, you might as well use a USB-connected drive (and if you’re doing that, you might as well use an externally connected DVD drive). Anything else probably won’t work with a modern motherboard. This is a bit of a “who cares?” with the brands, since the DVD players are all very tried-and-true tech (you can get a good one for $20) and the BluRay players are all mediocre no matter what brand you buy (usually, they don’t come with the software needed to support themselves, even if they work. Ugh)

And then there’s graphics cards. *sigh* These can get pretty complex. They can have “crossfire architecture” (i.e., if you have two of them, you can use a “bridge” board to connect them together and increase their processing power) and the like, which always adds to the difficulty. You can also go easy on yourself, and just buy one single card to make things work. I was looking for something that supported multiple monitors and came away with a nice little budget gamer that I later found on a lot of lists as a “best buy” among budget gaming cards — a ZOTAC GeForce GT730 (1GB 64-Bit DDR3 ram; they sell other GT730s that all SEEM to have better stats, but apparently the 1 GB 64-Bit has a better reputation for actually performing up to spec than the 2GB or the 128-Bit models)

Then you need to determine how much wattage you’re using so you can buy your power supply. This can be a bit tricky, because sometimes a device won’t list how many watts it uses, but… well, I cheated by plugging in all my parts onto https://pcpartpicker.com/ to see how much wattage it says I needed (it also will help remind you if you’ve forgotten anything, and double-checks for compatibiliy of your components. It isn’t flawless, though, and it will ALWAYS give you warnings about how it can’t determine if your graphics card or cooling fan will fit in your case, which can be disturbing if you aren’t familiar with the site).

Graphics cards are usually the big power saps, sometimes asking for 300-400w each, though in my case I found a “budget gamer” card designed with smaller power supplies in mind that only requires about 30-40w. (That was coincidental, it turns out; I was working on a budget, and this was the best card I could find in my budget). My system needed 251w, supposedly (though I bought a significantly larger wattage PSU, and recommend it for all builders; power supplies degrade by as much as 20% over their lifespan, and it’s always a good idea to have a little room for expansion in your system).

You’ll also know, by this point, how many of which type of power connections you need, but usually — if you get the motherboard connector right — you’ll have more than you could possibly use for any but the most complex of builds; I didn’t need anything close to the nine SATA power cable connectors I had. Corsair, EVGA, and Antec are the biggest GOOD names. Avoid RAIDMAX like the plague (I’ve seen a lot of accusations that their PSUs don’t provide even half the power they claim). I bought one from an outfit called Silverstone, which is a smaller name but still has a good reputation.

Put it all together (most of it just snaps together, and your motherboard and case should have pretty clear instructions as to how everything is supposed to be assembled; remember to wear anti-static gear or rubber gloves when you do, but MOST of the parts aren’t as delicate as some people make them out to be, so no, you don’t need a “clean room” to work with it), toss in your preferred operating system (okay, THIS can be a headache. Especially when it takes FIVE BLOODY HOURS to format your brand new 2TB harddrive; you don’t want to quick-format a new build, but…), and you’ve got a fully functioning computer! (well, assuming you have the keyboard, monitor, mouse, and similar peripherals from your old system to use; also, sometimes you’ll need an extra SATA-III cable or something like that, so if you don’t have a large reservoir of unused cables from previous builds, like I do, you might need to pick one or two up (though you might not, too).

See? Easy! (But, uh, be prepared to lose a week or so as you get it all put together and installed)

…okay, I know I just talked your head off. I’m excited about this, though — I know what I’m doing a lot better than the first time I built a computer, and I just learned a lot more besides.

First Genchu’s hat gets cut in half, and then Ricardo’s hat gets the Nataku treatment. It just seems like a lousy day to be a hat, really.

Especially the ones who eat fish for breakfast.

Dunno whether or not that’s actually preferable to Red Dead Redemption’s aiming being based on how much moonshine you drink…