I’m planning on building a PC soon and, while I have done plenty of research, I’d like to hear advice from people who have experience in the area personally. It’s also just nice talking to other people in general, lol
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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.
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.
My only advice is know yourself well. Know what you’ll use this computer for. I knew that I was going to use my PC as a glorified Stardrew machine so I skimped on the graphics card. I knew my real goal was digital art so I got a good CPU and tons of RAM.
Love my PC and use it every day.
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.
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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!
Most coolers come with it preapplied these days, but it’s still good to have in case you need to reseat your cooler.
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.
Save everything that comes in your motherboard box. Don’t be the fool (me) who needs to buy m.2 screws on Amazon.
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
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.
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
But don’t forget your local microcenter! (If it exists, of course.
I didn’t know micro center existed, thank you! I believe I do have one in driving distance as well
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.
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.
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.
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?
I’m looking into getting into lisp as I switched to Emacs as well. Lisp declaration files make more sense to me as it might be that I want to declare my setup programmatically. Also it’s very radical about the software it offers being free. Like extremely so, you might have some issues with drivers if the official ones have binary blobs. So definitely take that under advisement as well. It does work with nvidia graphics well enough though I haven’t stress tested it really.
I’ve never heard of Guix before! From what the official page tells me it seems like a pretty in-depth os, and I wish u luck with it!
