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Tips for a first-time PC build?
Yo yo. My computer is pretty much seeing its end days lately, and I'd like to replace it before it kicks the bucket. I've always heard it's a better option to piece your PC together than to go through a company, but... I have absolutely no clue where to start. I know a couple people who can help me build it physically for a few bucks, but I have no idea what things I need to buy. I've read guide after faq after youtube video and everything just completely goes over my head.
So, how about you lot of tech-savvy folks? I'm looking to run a few particular titles on upper-end settings with more than decent FPS (WoW, Warframe, and Guild Wars 2). I'm really tired of having 40 fps in a dead area and 16 fps when people start doing things
What would you suggest to do, and do you know where a total newbie may find some solid advice?
So, how about you lot of tech-savvy folks? I'm looking to run a few particular titles on upper-end settings with more than decent FPS (WoW, Warframe, and Guild Wars 2). I'm really tired of having 40 fps in a dead area and 16 fps when people start doing things
What would you suggest to do, and do you know where a total newbie may find some solid advice? [2:41:24 AM] Kenway: I bet you smell like evergreen trees and you could wrestle boreal mammals but they'd rather just cuddle you
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I've got a thread for my build floating around on the forums somewhere. Basically what I did was choose a CPU and base my build off of that.
My biggest piece of advice is to not short yourself. I had many many people tell me 8Gb was more than enough memory, but I ended up going with 16Gb. Absolutely needed it to run modded Minecraft on great settings.
leading into this how-to video on the build itself:
And this combo deal thingy to score all the parts: http://www.newegg.com/Product/ComboBundleDetails.aspx?ItemList=Combo.2351670&nm_mc=AFC-C8Junction&cm_mmc=AFC-C8Junction-_-na-_-na-_-na&cm_sp=&AID=10446076&PID=3938566&SID=buildguideMh32FT
Like I said, I don't know crap about computers. Does that build look solid? Are there any changes you'd suggest? I wanna keep about an 800$ price point.
Choosing parts is the hardest aspect of building a computer, actually putting the parts together once you have them is easy (in my opinion), except maybe if you get a tiny/cluttered case that you can barely fit everything into so you don't have much room to work in. I would recommend trying to do it yourself, or at least watching while someone else does it. That way you know where everything is and how it fits together and you don't need to have someone help every time you want to replace or upgrade parts, or for simple maintenance/cleaning.
One thing that most guides don't mention is that cases (especially cheap ones) tend not to come with any sort of instructions or information, so there may be parts that you aren't sure of the purpose of, or there might be removable parts that don't look removable at first. There may also be parts of the case that you have to physically break off (I needed a hammer when assembling mine), such as coverings for the various ports on the back.
In terms of where to buy, you cannot go wrong with Newegg or any of the Preferred Merchants in PCPartPicker. As @Jacen said, that site is absolutely great to plan out your build as it automatically checks if your parts are compatible. Don't forget to buy an anti-static bracelet!
You absolutely only need a screwdriver - at worst, you need two sizes of screwdriver. You should also look at the video @Kuy mentioned to get a feel of how putting the stuff in works. Investing in a modular power supply is worth it, seriously (learned that the hard way). Assembly can take around four to six hours depending on your parts - I took four and a half hours to finish.
Also, never hesitate to ask for help - there are a lot of PC building communities out there, and they really help since there's a lot of stuff that you really can't be sure on. Also, PCPartPicker sometimes doesn't catch all incompatibility issues, so it's always good to have someone who knows their stuff look over your part list before you commit.
Good luck!
League of Legends: IA ROCKS (NA)
Guild Wars 2: erasariel.1532 - Devona's Rest (NA)
Final Fantasy XIV: Novi Selea - Cactuar (NA)
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/ErasarielOfAchaea/
Achaea: Erasariel (duh!)
Graphics card is king, though don't ever buy top of the range. AMD R9-270 and up are decent buys at great prices. Look for at least 2GB GDDR to help with modern textures (The main reason why games started going from 5GB to 30GB is 4K textures)
RAM is cheap, go 8GB minimum, make sure you fill your channels correctly to get the most speed out of them.
SSD is one of those thing you never knew you needed until you have it. Can pick up a 256GB one for pretty decent prices these days and it should be enough for OS plus a good amount of games. Then add a Magnetic drive of your choice for larger storage space. Always put your OS on its own partition, makes reinstalling that much simpler.
Power supply, do not go for multi-rail, it is a waste unless you fill each rail to the max. I would suggest an 850W that will last you 5+ years as you upgrade.
Buy a good case and it will last you a decade. Larger towers to grow into are a solid choice, good quality and not too flashy (Flashy cases tend to look tacky over time when 5 years later you realise that chrome spikes and plastic clip-on accents were just a phase you were going through). Something sleek but not boring. Something like the one below.
Agreed with all of your post except this bit. CPU can have significant impact on gaming performance, especially "console ports" or CPU-intensive games. I went from a budget dual-core to a mid-range quad and saw all my stuttering and low FPS in games like The Evil Within, Metro: Last Light, and Dragon Age Inquisition simply vanish. I have a 4GB GTX 750 StormX which is a pretty sexy GPU, so the CPU was definitely the bottleneck in that situation.
For the games OP mentioned (WoW, GW2, etc) an I3 will definitely do the job. But if you plan on playing anything more modern, especially the latest games, shoot for an I5. Or if you're on a budget, at least be picky about which I3 you go with. The I3-4170 is a good pick right now.
If OP decides to go with an AMD card like Arador mentioned the R9-270, you could also look into AMD's FX series of CPUs, which have built-in APUs that will let you "crossfire" with compatible AMD graphics cards, or just use the APU alone, which are actually decent (but not as good, obviously) as dedicated graphics cards.
On a budget I'd go with an I3-4170 and the R9-270 mentioned, but an I5 will save you headaches down the road as we approach Windows 10 and DirectX 12 gaming.
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/gaming-cpu-review-overclock,3106-3.html
That said, an i3 or i5 are both great processors and probably more than sufficient for your purposes.
Im going to hijack this thread in a day or two.
Do NOT buy a case that requires a screwdriver to open. You will be needing to clean your case once a week to make sure your parts last as long as possible. If you don't clean it frequently like I did, your $300 GPU will overheat frequently enough to destroy itself after 3 years, and then you will be pissed, buy a pre-built desktop for the same amount of money as the parts you built your PC with 3.5 years ago and end up with a slower computer and regret the $900 you spent. Not that this happened to me a few weeks ago.
Keep in mind you can always bump up the CPU later as the i5 will also work on the motherboard. The new generation high end i3 chips are good value though.
Only place where I do start feeling the strain with an i3 is stuff like Cites Skylines when the city starts getting very big.
http://http//www.nag.co.za/tag/system-builders/
In your $800 range you should look at these builds.
http://www.nag.co.za/2015/03/11/system-builders-guide-march-r4000-to-r10000/
But again @Kuy if you can shoot for an I5, do it.
Solid state drives
DDR4 or better RAM (Properly channeled)
Windows 10 (DirectX12 is nice!!!)
League of Legends: IA ROCKS (NA)
Guild Wars 2: erasariel.1532 - Devona's Rest (NA)
Final Fantasy XIV: Novi Selea - Cactuar (NA)
Steam: http://steamcommunity.com/id/ErasarielOfAchaea/
Achaea: Erasariel (duh!)
1) Putting together a computer is 99% "put the round peg in the round hole", but there are a couple of unintuitive things. If you have a friend who's done it before, have them over or even have them help via skype and it'll reduce headaches quite a bit. Of particular note are the process of attaching the cooler to the CPU (specifically of how to do the thermal paste - which is absolutely crucial (and personally I always spring a few bucks for some Arctic Silver 5 rather than using the often crappy paste they include with coolers)) and of dealing with the front-panel connectors on the motherboard (and setting any jumpers, though usually you won't need to do that anymore). It's useful to have someone to tell you "Yes, you actually do need to push the RAM that hard into the slot to get it to seat." to save time and "No, you shouldn't have to press down on the CPU at all to get it to seat." to prevent breaking things (I imagine Ellodin was talking about levering down the thing that holds the CPU in place, which is another thing that takes more force than you would think).
2) There was a period of time where CPU didn't matter much for games. Now things are more complicated. Look up the games you like to play. There are a number of recent games that are outrageously CPU-bound in a way you probably wouldn't expect. Both BF4 and GW2, for instance, are surprising CPU hogs. Definitely focus on the GPU, but consider the CPU too, depending on what games you're looking to optimize toward. Since you mention GW2, don't skimp too much.
3) I wouldn't worry too much about threading unless you really multitask while playing games - there are still too many games that aren't threaded in any real way and even two cores is likely to be mostly fine for multitasking/OS functions while playing games.
4) Be wary of assuming you can just upgrade the CPU later. The CPU is typically the least easily upgraded part since sockets change so often. You can just about always slot in a new GPU, but typically, the only time you'll be inclined to upgrade the CPU (when there's one that's better enough than your current one to justify the price), you'll need to upgrade the motherboard too because the newer one will use a different socket. If PCs move to a newer RAM standard, you might end up buying new RAM too. This doesn't mean go crazy buying a really expensive CPU, but it does bear mentioning.
5) Buy lots of RAM. You can never have too much memory and memory is stupidly cheap. When you put in new RAM, you generally want to match the sticks (as closely as possible - the ideal scenario is to get sticks from the same production batch, which is what most kits will give you). What this means is that if you buy 6GB of memory right now and, next year, you decide you want 16, you can't just go buy 10 more and slot them in (or at least you shouldn't - mixing them might work, but the problem is that it also might not, then you're out money on RAM that doesn't work and/or have to deal with RMA). Do yourself a favor and just get a bunch upfront - 16GB is only $100 anymore, and that should be enough for quite a while.
6) It's cost-prohibitive to put everything on an SSD right now, but if you can afford a smallish SSD along with a normal HDD for bulk data, you can keep windows and/or a few games on it and that can make a huge difference in how fast you feel everything is. Mechanical hard drives are orders of magnitude slower than any other component in your PC, so they're pretty frequently the bottleneck. Developers know this, so they typically load everything into RAM well before it's needed, but the loading process (and the boot process) is astoundingly faster with an SSD. Adding an SSD last year resulted in the most noticeable improvement to my PC in like a decade.