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I would absolutely use “PC Part Picker” because as you assemble the various components, that site will tell you if there are incompatibilities. For instance whether a power supply will fit in the case.
And if you don’t have someone to bounce ideas off of, this is a pretty good site that was recommended to me to help narrow your choices.
I second Logical Increments, it's great.
I've used Logical Increments for a couple builds and liked it a lot. I didn't copy their recipe verbatim, but you get some good starting points both on compatibility and cost.
Save everything that comes in your motherboard box. Don't be the fool (me) who needs to buy m.2 screws on Amazon.
I end up saving everything from every box, haha. I still have all the cords from my modular PSUs sitting in my basement, still in their little bags
Don't skimp on the power supply brand. Buy a reputable one. Buy one with headroom if you plan on upgrading your GPU at a later time.
Watch some build videos from tech YouTubers and watch the steps they go through.
For gaming start with the GPU and build around it. Pick a CPU with a reasonable price that will not bottleneck it. YouTube reviews are your friend here. Watch a few with your CPU and GPU pairing and get an idea of the average and one percent low marks.
For your first PC, stick to air cooling. Pick a reputable brand.
I personally like gamersnexus reviews for all the parts you can. They are very methodical with benchmarks. Ask questions here as you will have many.
You may be building a PC for a use case other than gaming. If that's the case you may want to pick another part to start your build around. For instance, developers have a different workload compiling code and would focus more on CPU and threaded workloads.
Basically know your use case, budget, and ask specific questions as you learn from videos and the community will help you produce a great result.
Slightly different advice from what others have said, but while building it, I've always used an anti static wristband, grounded to either ground or the pc case. Maybe I'm overly paranoid, but that's what I was taught, and haven't had any issues with ESD so far
Lota of great advice here but my must have is a tray to put all the screws and other small bits. Far too easy to lose stuff. iFixit do a good one but you can find an equivalent lying around im sure.
Don't forget to buy thermal paste!
Also don't forget to remove the plastic film(s) they put on the CPU/Cooler and everywhere else!
There's not too places you can damage things when installing, but I think the most understated one is the USB 3.0 header that you connect from the case to the motherboard. The plug is super tight and very difficult to remove once you put it in, so I recommend only plugging it in once you're ready to start using your machine. I know too many stories of people breaking it and not being able to plug in USB devices to the front of their PC case because of this.
I highly recommend PC Partpicker for compiling all your components (although I don't typically follow the listed purchase links). The comparability checker it has can save some real headaches!
Otherwise, some general advice:
Remember the motherboard standoff screws. Most cases these days have them pre-installed, but my first rig did not. And I bent the mobo a little bit before realizing my mistake. It still worked in the end, but it's now my #1 cautionary tale about PC Building.
Do yourself a favor, and make an attempt at proper cable management. It'll make replacing components so much easier down the line.
Get a fully modular PSU (if in your budget). This will help with #2 above immensely.
Read the manual that comes with your motherboard. It usually has a lot of guidance for assembling the computer, especially if this is your first time.
Have fun! PC Building/Gaming is one of my favorite hobbies, and I'm always glad to see new people getting interested in it!
Good luck, and don't be afraid to ask questions!
This is all spot on advice. The motherboard and case manual should be open and nearby as you build the pc.
You really can’t go wrong with https://pcpartpicker.com/. Obviously double check things like GPU size mentioned below, and up size your PSU if you ever intend to upgrade GPU in same case. 850 Watts is a solid choice regardless of what your current picks need.
Buy more than you need, is the lesson I've learnt. Especially power, I have an 850 as well, but I sort of wish I bought a 1000W, the way things are going.
5950x with 7900xtx runs fine on my 850 watt.
For sure, I run an 5800x3d and a 4070ti on a 850, but I had to replace the 650 that I built with in 2020 to do that. Two power supplies in three years could have been averted if I had just bought a bit more than I needed the first time. It sucks having to completely rewire an already built computer too.
Start the build outside of the case, use the box the motherboard came in as a table. Install the cpu, ram, hook up the psu (fully modular if your budget allows), power on and make sure all works. Easier to troubleshoot this way.
Before mounting your motherboard, double-check the number of screws/standoffs you need, then make sure all the standoffs match up with the holes in the motherboard.
I misaligned one once and shorted out a motherboard.
For the love of GOD the first thing you should install is the motherboard back plate.
Spoken from traumatic experience.
This is why building outside of the case first is a good idea 😂
There’s usually no need to buy the top end motherboards, they have a whole lot of bells and whistles you won’t ever miss.
If you can, just pick the parts but don’t build it yourself, ask a friend who knows what he’s doing and watch or pay for it. You really really don’t want to screw it up with these GPU and CPU prices.
I would, but unfortunately I don't know anyone with experience in this area. But I won't be doing it by myself, and I've done quite a bit of research, so I at least think I won't mess up to the point of breaking anything
The site from which you buy your components doesn't offer you to pay for assembly ?
It's fairly safe to just do it yourself. Simply be aware you don't have to force anything too much. Pushing the ram into the slots is likely the most force you need. Even if you get something wrong as long as you didn't apply to much force and break some pins you can just reseat it and try again.
CPU is the one you're most likely to mess up but that takes virtually no force at all. If you're using basically any force, stop and turn it because you clearly don't have it lined up correctly. They should drop in and then lock into place.
If building it is of interest to someone I think anyone can do it. If you don't know, just stop a check a youtube video but these days it's fairly easy to do and virtually impossible to plug anything into the wrong spot.
Depending on your use case (gaming, productivity, media creation, etc), RAM speed can have a big impact on performance. For higher end CPU's and GPU's, good cooling and airflow are paramount to get the best performance.
I've found that the motherboard is often the make or break item with PC builds. Pay attention to how many 1 star reviews there are on Amazon or wherever, I think they tend to suffer from poor quality control.
If you plan on doing anything with linux fuck nvidia. It's such a PITA. Biggest regret of my build.
Trust me, I know (I tried running Linux on my current NVDIA PC... Never again). While I plan on running Windows (mainly due to how much support it has for like. Everything) I do plan on running Linux on a laptop in the future and possibly dual booting
I love dual booting. If I need to quickly check mails or search the web linux launches in an instant. If I need to game I dont care about longer boot time anyhow.
Yeah, that's why I wanna dual boot myself, except there's some software I need on Windows that isn't available on Linux along with games. Also, what distro(s) do you use? I've already picked out a few candidates for what I'll use, but it's nice hearing firsthand experiences
I've been using Debian because it's easy to use basically. But it's no good for tinkering. It takes ages for packages to get moved into the stable channel and testing is exactly that and causes headaches. But if you want a stable and easy to use OS Debian is great. Set it up once and you're set for a long time.
But I like to tinker so there is a clutter of packages I've installed but don't use and I've lost track of them and the configs. It runs but needs cleaning up (again).
Which is why I'm going to switch to Guix. I'm hoping to replicate the same basic set up on my laptop and desktop with only minor differences. Guix allows the declaration of the entire system and if you use the same file it will always be set up exactly the same way. Plus the fact that I can roll back the entire system to a previous state sounds really appealing for someone who likes to break stuff. That said the declaration files and anything to do with Guix itself uses Lisp and as a lisp noob I'm expecting a lot of headaches and tabbing to the manual. Also package installation and so on seems rather unintuitive but the manual is well written and exhaustive. It's more of an adventure for sure but the OS is stable and ready to use out of the box.
Ooo never heard of Guix, just did a little research on it. I am looking to switch to a declarative distro as well. I seem to have the same tendency of breaking shit when playing around with different packages and running different projects locally. I have been looking at NixOS, have you heard of it and if so, why did you choose GUIX over it?
To echo everyone else, make sure to use PCpartpicker. It's actually a fairly simple thing to do, I was surprised by how few problems I had my first time. Watch lots of youtube first, like how do I install the processor into the motherboard, how do I wire everything up. Definitely watch a few assemblies before attempting your own. If you do your homework, it's like a 2 beer activity honestly. I started about 4pm and was eating supper with the family while Windows updated.
https://pcpartpicker.com/ or https://pcpartpicker.ca if you're Canadian is very helpful for drafting up a build or shopping for parts, specially if you're a newbie. You can even find recommended builds on there.
Also in this day in age, triple check that your GPU will fit in your case!
Putting everything together is basically just expensive legos.
As others have mentioned, definitely make sure you are using the motherboard stand-off screws, or that it comes with them pre-attached.
For RAM, it can really only go in one way but it’s a little terrifying when it audibly snaps into place.
If you get everything set up and it doesn’t turn on, first thing I always check is that the RAM is seated properly (motherboard may have recommended configuration depending on the number of RAM sticks).
Make sure you plug your monitor into your GPU, not your integrated graphics from the motherboard.
If you get stuck at any point or have questions, feel free to reach out :)
I’ve put together ~4 computers, 3 in small form factor cases and 1 in a normal sized case. Definitely recommend a modular PSU, and also using cable ties (the Velcro ones that are easy to remove) of some kind for cable management.
It's difficult to know what advice might be helpful for you without more context, but the one mistake I made with my last PC build was choosing a small form factor case. I thought it looked really clean not to have all that wasted space inside the case, but it makes any system changes much more arduous trying to squeeze my hands into tight spots.
Also when I needed to upgrade my gpu a few months ago and filtered to ones that would fit in the case there was literally only 1 option, it wasn't my first choice but it was close enough I went with it instead of dealing with the hassle of buying a new case and rebuilding everything. I know for sure I will need a new case the next time I need a new gpu though.
The other thing I'll mention is to make sure all your bios settings are configured correctly: resizable bar, XMP, etc.
Similarly small mobos also increase the difficulty of the build.
Thanks! Choosing a case that's small enough to be easy to transport but not hard to build in is a concern, but I believe my current case will do well! Setting up the bios is what I'm more concerned with, but I'm sure I'll manage. And sorry but the vagueness of the post, I'm generally looking for any advice instead of specific advice
Bios can be difficult because some of the settings are named differently if you have an amd or intel cpu. Additionally the interface and where the settings are located seems to be dependent on the motherboard manufacturer.
But in general the important things that are required to install windows 11 are uefi boot and the tpm being enabled, and these will almost certainly be set to the correct values by default.
For gaming performance resizable bar/smart access memory improves gpu performance, and xmp/expo improves ram performance, these is a decent chance these will not be enable in the bios by default.
For programming, I also wanted to use the windows subsystem for linux, and I had to go to my bios and enable cpu virtualization for that. Not sure what other workflows might rely on virtualization.
I'll also just mention that at one point I had some instability related to restarting. If I tried to restart it would post but fail to boot into windows, but doing shut-down and then turning the computer on again worked fine. And I think I resolved that by disabling fast-boot in the bios. Note that I wouldn't expect you to get that restart issue, I think it was related to me being on the insider-preview build of windows at the time. But fast-boot-off is something I made a note of as a good troubleshooting step.
Damn I just messed around and got to $2k in zero time lol stupid bougie taste.
I found PCPartPicker really useful when I last built a PC:
It helps you pick compatible parts, and links to sites you can buy them from. I'd still shop around for the best price after building your list(s), but it's a great place to start.
I used relied on this for my last 3 builds. In the most recent one, photos of certain board, cooler, and case configurations were fantastic because it visually showed me if things would actually fit together.
Ah, thank you! I've already been using PCPartPicker, but it has been an AMAZING help. I don't think I could handle the stress of making a parts list without it