[Build Advice]Finally taking the plunge and building a gaming PC. What do I need to know before I start?

[IronAlpha]

With the announcement of Fallout 4, I think it's high time I upgrade from the aging laptop I've been gaming on for the past few years.

 

Unfortunately I've never built a PC before, so I'm reading a lot so that I don't mess it up after I buy my parts. I have a few questions about it, and this is the primary PC gaming community I spend my time around, so I figured I would ask here.

 

1. How much should I expect to spend for a PC that can run modern games well? I'm used to playing games at < 25fps on medium-low settings at a resolution of 1366x768 and I'd love to do better than that, even if it's a bit pricy (And I'm well aware it will be.).

 

2. Where is the best place to buy PC components? I've heard it's better to shop around and see where you can get the best prices.

 

3. I've heard it's smarter to buy everything at once, rather than incrementally. Do you agree?

 

4. Should I invest in an SSD? I've heard they're way faster than an HDD.

 

5. Is a liquid cooling system worth the money? If it makes any difference, I'm not planning on overclocking.

 

4. Any other advice you'd like to impart on someone who's still new to the scene?

 

Thanks so much for your responses. I'm really nervous about somehow screwing this all up, and any help would make all the difference in the world to me.

[obobski]

Before you go any further, my first piece of advice would be that if Fallout 4 is your main target, wait until its requirements/specs are announced and then build to that. It will probably have higher requirements than many games older than it (e.g. Skyrim), so backwards compatibility should be good too. It may mean waiting a month or two longer, but you can always use that time to learn more about PCs and hardware, and it should minimize the risk of the system not being up to the task later this year when FO4 launches (or having to do an upgrade 2 months after you just built your new toy). Waiting for this is also a good idea because Intel is set to launch a new CPU platform this fall (Skylake), which may yield higher performance over the current Haswell/Broadwell platform, or at the very least should mean discounted prices on Haswell/Broadwell components as retailers try to unload them.

 

To answer your questions:

 

1) Assuming you're in the US, around $1000 USD is a good place to start. If you have parts that you can re-use (e.g. monitors, keyboards, mice, speakers, hard-drives, etc) you can probably save some money (or get higher performing parts without blowing your budget up). You can of course go nuts and spend $10,000 or more, but in fairness there's going to be a "break" somewhere in the $3000-4000 range where any additional money is probably going into aesthetic or non-performance hardware. For example if you want a 20TB RAID storage array, that will cost more, but it won't have any bearing on how well the machine runs Fallout. Or as another example, if you want a whiz-bang modified case, that can get very expensive very quickly, and have no impact on anything other than how the system looks. There's also entire "genres" of peripherals that you can end up spending exorbitant sums of money on (e.g. audio, displays, keyboard/mouse).

 

2) Shopping around is fine, as long as the stores you're shopping at are good places to shop in general (e.g. have good return policies, good customer service, won't disappear in 3 months, won't bait-and-switch, etc). Again, assuming you're in the US, I would suggest starting with Newegg, Best Buy, Amazon, and perhaps Wal-mart (they actually do sell some PC hardware online). I would suggest checking any retailer against ResellerRatings before making a purchase, and you may use something like PC Part Picker to try comparison shopping on a specific item, but in the era of price-matching and online shopping, I wouldn't expect dramatic differences. A perhaps more useful tool would be camelcamelcamel.com, which tracks pricing trends on Amazon (they also have subsidiary sites camelbuy.com (for Best Buy) and camelegg.com (for Newegg), however IME both of those stores have more stable pricing (e.g. Best Buy doesn't adjust the price on an item in-store 3-4 times a day, like Amazon sometimes does)).

 

3) Doesn't really matter either way. The only risk with incremental purchases is if you're intending to spread everything out over like a one-two year period (e.g. you don't have a lot of money every week/month to throw at this), because by the time you finish you may have parts that've gone outdated or become incompatible (e.g. you buy a CPU and then in a year go to buy it a motherboard, and can't easily find a motherboard that will support that CPU). The other problem if you end up dragging your feet on incremental purchases is you may not be able to test if all of your parts work within the 30-day (or howeverlong) return period from the retailer. That said, if you were to build the "basic guts" of the machine (e.g. CPU, MB, RAM, case, PSU, etc) and then plan to add extra parts (like a high end discrete graphics card, or a second graphics card for SLI/CF, or more hard-drives, or more RAM, or a high end sound card, etc) that can work perfectly well.

 

4) This is kind of a contentious question, believe it or not. If you want "just the facts" - they are capable of higher read/write speeds at lower latencies (read: data moves faster) than mechanical hard-drives (they are, however, still hard-drives). However, whether or not this will help your situation any is where things get somewhat contentious. SSDs can only improve read/write speeds and access latencies, which means if you have some task that is disk-bound (that is, it would run faster if the disk were faster), an SSD can improve performance (if, and only if, the data for that task is stored on the SSD). An example where this helps is loading times in many games (with a fast enough disk, even Half-Life 2 can feel mostly seamless). However, they have no influence on tasks that are computationally-bound (that is, it would run faster if the computer itself were faster). An example where this is true is the actual 3D rendering of a game. The SSD isn't going to improve how fast the GPU works. SSDs also cost a lot more per-GB (per unit of storage) than mechanical drives. Generally I don't think an SSD is worth it if you're on a tight budget and need a lot of storage capacity. However if your budget can support it (or you don't need much storage capacity), fast storage (which doesn't have to mean SSD - there are quality mechanical drives that are still fairly robust) can be a nice "extra" as it usually means games will load and start faster, which is always nice imho (who really wants to sit on a loading screen anyways?).

 

5) Relative to what? It's extra complexity and another maintenance item at a higher price to (potentially) yield a quieter or cooler-running system. That said, there are a lot of options for really good air coolers that will give you quiet and cool-running performance as well, and they will probably cost less to do it. I would say it probably depends on your budget and how much time you want to invest in the construction and maintenance of the machine more than anything else.

 

6) Compared to how things were [many] years ago when I got into PC building, there's *tons* of video and pictoral guides that you can find for free online (as opposed to paying for books or hoping to heck that your buddy knows what he's doing), and I'd encourage you to read/view as much of that content as you can stand. In many cases you can probably find videos showing the specific products you're looking at, so you have a very good idea of what to expect before you're hands-on with your new toys.

 

Some other advice that I think would've helped me out back in the day:

 

- Expect to spend the good part of a Saturday afternoon, if not a good part of your entire weekend, on your first build. Just because seasoned builders can throw a machine together in 45 minutes like it's nothing doesn't mean you should expect to do the same your first time. Don't cut corners; take your time and do it right. Starting things at 3 AM when you have to be at work/school/wherever tomorrow morning at 7 is probably a bad idea. That's when mistakes happen and small problems become big deals.

 

- Have a decent selection of tools at-hand before you start. Generally you'll want a screw-driver or three, needle nose pliers, and a flash light at the bare minimum. Better to have it available than to get side-tracked digging through the garage for 3 hours looking for a screw-driver.

 

- Have a big and sturdy/stable enough workspace to let everything sprawl out. The floor is usually a great place for this, if you have that option. A big table can also work well.

 

- Leave any sort of whiz-bang peripheral stuff (e.g. your crazy surround sound system) for day 2. Just focus on getting the machine itself built at first, and then integrate all of the "extra" stuff with it after that's accomplished, just as you would integrate that stuff with your current laptop (or whatever).

 

- Don't be surprised/discouraged if your get DOA parts. It happens to everyone. Even if you've done your homework and picked quality manufacturers, good parts, and so forth. This is why you bought all your parts from good retailers that will exchange them painlessly for you. The corrolary to this one is, all parts have a given failure-rate, and you can probably always find some enraged person unloading in the "user reviews" section for whatever component you're looking at. I'm not saying ignore those 1-star reviews, but take them with a grain of salt unless they're the majority of reviews for a given product.

 

- The importance of standoffs cannot be overstated.

 

- The importance of a quality power supply cannot be overstated.