peak debt posted:

COMMON QUESTIONS AND GUIDELINES - READ THESE
Updated November 11, 2019

1. Should I upgrade or buy a new system?
2. Are there any good prebuilt systems?
3. How can I future-proof my system?
4. I should get a big tower for a gaming system, right?
5. How many cores does my CPU need?
6. Intel or AMD CPU?
7. Does/will my CPU bottleneck my graphics card?
8. Help me understand Intel chipsets and CPUs!
9. Should I overclock? Do I need to overclock?
10. AMD or Nvidia graphics card? What brand?
11. What do ACX, DC2, SC+, FTW, and all that poo poo mean?
12. Should I run two graphics cards in Crossfire or SLI?
13. Can I get away with onboard graphics?
14. How much RAM do I need? How fast should it be?
15. What should I look for in a motherboard?
16. Should I buy a bunch of fans? How should I arrange them?
17. How much wattage does my PSU need to have? I found this one for $20…
18. Do I need a sound card?
19. Do I need aftermarket cooling for my CPU?
20. Should I get a solid state hard drive (SSD)?
21. Should I get an M.2 SSD?
22. What’s the cheapest way to get Windows, and what version should I get?
23. What gamepad should I get?
24. Should I get an optical drive? If so, should I get a Blu-Ray drive?
25. Can I re-use my old parts to keep costs down?
26. I am tempted to DIY, but I'm really not sure I can build this system myself. Can I pay someone to do it for me?
27. But Logical Increments/CPU Boss/Passmark/this other building guide says…
28. I need a monitor, speaker, headset, etc. …

1. Should I wait, upgrade, or buy a new system?

There are two rules of thumb:

• Wait until you are unhappy with your current system.
  
• Buy it when you need it.
  

There is always something new coming in the next six months, so you’ll never get out ahead of the game waiting for the next release date. But on the other hand, each new release brings new hardware and discounts on older kit. If it’s no more than a month or so and your need isn’t urgent, wait to see what comes plus a couple weeks after for the market response on older gear.

Upgrading or buying a new system depends on how old your system is. Anything pre Ryzen or Skylake will likely be better off getting replaced entirely. The change to DDR4 RAM means newer components aren't at all compatible, and high end processors for old motherboards cost well in excess of their worth. AMD has committed to the AM4 socket through 2020; you might need to update your bios but newer processors are otherwise drop-in compatible. On Intel's side, if you have a Skylake (6XXX) or Kaby Lake (7XXX) processor, you'll need a new motherboard, 8 and 9 series chips aren't compatible with 1XX and 2XX motherboards. If getting a 9 series chip you really should get a Z390 motherboard for updated io and guaranteed compatibility.

Not sure what you have? Speccy will give you all the fancy part numbers in one place. Copy the info or post a screenshot.

There are also some computer parts with natural lifespans. Hard drives start to fail at increased rates at around five years old, and PSU should be replaced if out of warranty. Inexpensive fans will start wearing out, too, if they haven’t already. All told, if all you could carry over is the case and the DVD drive, and the case isn’t even that good, it might be better to sell or donate the old system as a complete setup.


2. Are there any good prebuilt systems?

First off: Most people who say they don’t have time to build are wrong. It generally only takes an hour or two to get a pile of parts into the same condition as a prebuilt system fresh out of the box.

If you'll only be using office apps and web browsing, you're probably getting a laptop; the laptop thread is the other stickied one. If you really want a desktop your best bet is to find something used, anything Sandy Lake (2XXX) or newer will be fine for home office use, just put an SSD in it. A word of caution, Rzyen processors that don't end in G and Intel processors than end in F don't have integrated graphics, so if you wind up with one of those for home office use you'll still need a GPU for it to be usable at all, though even the cheapest available will suffice.

For gaming PCs, not really. Microcenter's house brand (PowerSpec) offers decent value for money, though you only get a 1 year warranty vs. the often substantially longer ones on individual parts. In almost all other cases you're paying hundreds of dollars to save 1-2 hours of effort.

3. How can I future-proof my system?

You can’t, don’t try.

Recent shake-ups in the CPU space have tossed out a decades worth of conventional wisdom, and Nvidia has presented the possibility of ray tracing being a major component of GPUs going forward, but it's future is still unknown.

Certain trends regarding things such as VRAM (4gb isn't cutting it, 6gb may be an issue sooner rather than later) and CPU thread counts (some games have performance issues with only 6 threads to work with), but future requirements and hardware capabilities aren't predictable. The thread will help you avoid known pitfalls but no one can guarantee performance levels years from now.


4. ATX? Micro-TX? Mini-ITX? What are these things?

From largest to smallest, ATX, microATX (mATX) and mini-ITX (mITX) are motherboard sizes, which determines both the size of case you can fit them in and the number of things you can attach to them. The mounting holes are in the same places, so you can always use a smaller board in a larger case, but no vis-versa.

Mini-ITX, or ITX is the smallest being a ~7" (17cm) square. They only have 1 PCIe slot and 2 DIMM slots, which is enough for many builds does limit options. Mini ITX cases are hard to build in and often require special small form factor power supplies (SFX PSUs) and low profile CPU coolers. ITX boards and specialized components tend to carry a price premium relative to full size parts but if you want as small as possible a PC with all the horsepower there's no alternative.

microATX is a ~9.6" (244mm) square, permitting up to 4 PCIe slots and 4 DIMM slots (though with all modern consumer chips only having dual channel memory, this only permits more total memory than ITX, not a performance boost). Presently, only entry-level and mid-range boards are being manufactured in the mATX form factor. For most builds this isn't an issue, but if you're looking for a high core count system, or to OC an Intel system as much as possible you'll need to go full ATX.

ATX is the biggest at 12"x9.6" (305x244mm), allowing even more expansion slots than mATX, though most computers only need 1 or 2. Currently all enthusiast class motherboards are ATX, so if you want the highest quality components you're stuck with them. For most systems this won't translate into notably improved performance but may bring piece of mind or offer features not available in other form factors.

5. How many cores/threads does my CPU need?

At this point you should at least be getting a 6 core with hyperthreading / SMT (6C/12T). Intel's 8C/8T CPU, the 9700k doesn't seem to be suffering any issues yet either, but 6C/6T CPUs are causing hitching in some newer games, a trend that's expected to continue (all AMD CPUs have SMT so there's no direct comparison there).

6. Intel or AMD CPU?

For almost all systems an AMD Ryzen 5 3600 is the correct choice currently, offering excellent price/performance and excellent performance over. For budget or very high end systems there are other choices, but expect to get a 3600 until the 4600 comes out or Intel makes serious changes to their product stack / gets 10nm sorted out.


7. Does/will my [component] bottleneck my [component]?

CPU and GPU bottlenecks are mostly independent. Building a balanced machine is just good practice, not mystical synergy between a CPU and an “appropriate” GPU.

The CPU will be a bottleneck only in titles that need more CPU power than the chip can provide. So either your CPU can hack it or it can’t, generally regardless of your video card, screen resolution, and graphics settings. The big exception is using two or more GPUs in SLI or CrossFire, which adds some CPU overhead on top of what the game needs.

That said, I guess it’s possible to stick a $700 graphics card in a system with an Intel Atom CPU, in which case yeah, good job creating a bottleneck, loser. But this is an extreme performance disparity that you have to go out of your way to construct. It’s rare that a game’s CPU bounds and graphics bounds are so close together that a graphics-bounded game won’t see significant benefit from a graphics card upgrade, even if the CPU is slower than optimal.

Off the top of my head, games that can be CPU-bottlenecked include StarCraft 2, Planetside 2, WoW, ARMA, Kerbal Space Program, and unoptimized crap-piles like Watch_Dogs and Dwarf Fortress. MMOs and open-world, generally. If you play a lot of these, you may need to look at CPU performance come upgrade time.


8. Help me understand Intel chipsets and CPUs!

Intel just released their new 8th generation (Coffee Lake) CPUs and the matching Z370 series motherboards. However, they again delivered a rather small upgrade over the 6th and 7th generation so you can still very well go with an older CPU and not miss out on much. The one exception to this is if your system doesn't have a dedicated graphics card, and you will want to play 4K movies. Kaby Lake improved the video decoder by a lot and is basically required for playing 4k videos. If you do have a dedicated graphics card, the CPU doesn't matter though.

Sockets have different numbers of and configurations of contact pins. It’s not possible to mix a CPU with a motherboard that uses a different socket. Also, Intel has recently taken to making their chipsets incompatible with older and newer CPUs even if they have the same socket. The current socket is LGA 1151 (a land grid array with 1,151 contacts) and has been for three years. But, each generation of CPU on that socket is only compatible to their own generation of motherboards. PC Part Picker will keep track of sockets for you once you’ve picked a motherboard or processor.

Two important things about current CPUs:
- Coffee Lake CPUs only support Windows 10. Windows 7 in modern computers is gone.
- Even though they still use LGA 1151 sockets (the same as for the 7th and 6th generation processor), you cannot put a 8th generation CPU in anything but a 370 series motherboard. Neither do 370 series motherboards support anything but 8th generation processors.

The CPUs to pair with Z370 for overclocking are the i5-8600K and the i7-8700K. If you do not want to overclock, use a i5-8400 or an i3-8100.

There are additional chipsets for workstations and servers.

9. Should I overclock? Do I need to overclock?

Overclocking is always optional, and doing so requires a desire to tweak and a tolerance for odd crashes, since you’ll be causing a lot of them. Overclocking a graphics card can get a very healthy performance boost for free. Overclocking a CPU costs a bit more money because you need a slightly more CPU (e.g. i5-8600K instead of i5-8400 for an additional $80), as well as a good cooling fan, but overclocking can extend the useful life of your CPU by a year or two, or give you better performance now in Dwarf Fortress. Never overclock a machine for professional use.

As far as reliability goes, overclocking should not unduly age your processor as long as you don't put too much voltage into it.

I go into this in great detail in the overclocking thread.


10. AMD or Nvidia graphics card? What brand?

First off, if you aren’t gaming and just need one or two monitors, integrated graphics work great with no muss or fuss. A graphics card is not a required piece of equipment.

In the last few years, NVidia has had a pretty big technical lead over AMD, that AMD does not seem to be able to match. If you are able to spend more than $250 on a graphics card, you should therefore go for a GeForce.

AMD has a small niche for itself in the super-low-cost cards. If you cannot afford an NVidia graphics card, but want better performance than the integrated graphics provide, you can go for one of the $150 RX 460 cards. You will however have significantly worse performance than if you saved up some more money and bought an NVidia card.

For brands, nobody’s perfect. Asus and MSI are good all-around, and MSI tends to have the better cooling. Sapphire is good for AMD cards. On the Nvidia side, Gigabyte delivers constantly solid products. Zotac makes great graphics cards too but have a rather spotty customer support record. Asus and EVGA have poor custom coolers this generation. Because of Nvidia’s Greenlight system, you have the option of just getting whatever Nvidia card and at least it won’t be crap. XFX consistently gets horror stories for their customer service, so don’t buy their video cards.

If you want to get the very quietest cooler or the best stock overclock, read some reviews, try and find roundups that compare the same card across multiple brands, or read multiple reviews from the same site.

We have a GPU megathread for discussion, but remember that buying advice goes here.


11. What do Ti, ACX, DC2, TF, SC+, FTW, and all that poo poo mean?

Marketing. It all means stuff, but the most important thing is the card’s model number, and only the “Ti” (for “Titanium”) bit can be important there. A GeForce 780 will have a GK110 GPU regardless of all the other word salad attached, and a GeForce 780 Ti will have more of its GK110’s cores enabled. Ti versions of cards are the exception rather than the rule – there are usually only one or two per generation, and they’re just used instead of saying e.g. “GeForce 785.”

All the other initialisms are vendor-specific and generally refer to just two things: whether the card has an overclock from the factory, and whether the card uses that vendor’s custom heatsink or not. Custom heatsinks (MSI Twin Frozr, Asus DirectCU, EVGA ACX, Gigabyte Windforce, Sapphire Dual-X/Vapor-X, etc. etc.) provide great performance and low noise in single card configurations. The reference heatsink is usually better for multi-card setups and crappy cases with no airflow.


12. Should I run two graphics cards in Crossfire or SLI?

Probably not. Dual-card setups require more power supply and more cooling in the case, create more noise, and can suffer weird driver issues and performance problems, especially in new-launch games. Get the performance you want out of a single card before you consider two. A single $200 card will handle 1080p extremely well, anyway. A single $500 card will handle all ultra-widescreen resolutions and dual screens.

Don’t look at multi-card setups until you’re doing triple-screen gaming or 4K resolution. VR (Oculus Rift, HTC Vive) has turned out to be nowhere near as hardware hungry or popular as it was expected to be, and SLI is not needed for that either.

Some people buy one card thinking they’ll do a second later as an upgrade. Better to sell the old card to subsidize the cost of the new one and let someone else do that.


13. Can I get away with onboard graphics?

Do you want to do some 3D gaming? If you don't want to go higher than 1080p resolutions, and are ok with medium quality graphics, the AMD Ryzen 2400G has decent integrated graphics that will do just fine for your purposes.

You can't do that with an Intel CPU though. The performance of the integrated Intel GPU is simply too weak to deliver anything but very choppy graphics that make for an unenjoyable experience.

If you don't plan on doing any gaming at all, the onboard graphics of any modern system will be just fine.


14. How much RAM do I need? How fast should it be?

8 GB of RAM is the current sweet spot for a performance desktop or someone with a bad open-browser-tabs habit. It’s hard to make a case for less than 4 GB, though an HTPC could really get away with just 2 GB. Some tasks, especially video editing, virtualization, and workstation stuff, can take as much RAM as you can give them. But remember: Adding more RAM only speeds you up if you didn’t have enough in the first place, so extra RAM beyond what you need is just wasted money.

With rare exception, your system will want you to install RAM in pairs for best performance. That means that if you want 8 GB of RAM, get a kit of two 4 GB modules. There is no performance difference between two modules and four, with rare exceptions, but filling up all of your RAM slots at once means it’s more expensive to upgrade later if you need it.

Memory speed is now getting more and more important for overall computer performance. You should probably go for at least DDR4-3200, it's not much more expensive than the budget DDR4-2133 stuff and will have a noticeable performance increase on new motherboards. You might also want to go higher to 3400 RAM, but anything faster than that usually comes at a big price increase that will probably not be worth it.

With DDR3 RAM you used to have to also look at CAS latency (often listed as CLx with x being a number, usually 9). With DDR4, CL is less important because they're all within a few percent of each other now.

Note: RAM speeds faster than DDR4-2133 are technically overclocking. Only motherboards with an overclocking-capable chipset allow them to run at full speed. Motherboards with an H series chipset are still compatible with them, but run at 2133 MHz.

Oh, and don’t get RAM with Big Dumb Heatsinks. They’re useless and get in the way of CPU coolers.


15. What should I look for in a motherboard?

Besides obvious things like having the right socket for your processor, supporting overclocking or not (as well as overbuilding to support higher overclocks), and having a good selection of ports and plugs, there are only a few critical spots of differentiation in motherboards. In general, every motherboard will have a PCI Express expansion slot for a graphics card, bunch of USB ports, a bunch of SATA ports for hard drives and SSDs, decent-to-pretty-good built-in sound, and wired Ethernet networking.

Beyond that, there are a few common options:

• Extra expansion slots and whether those slots support SLI and CrossFire or not. Mini-ITX has no extra slots beyond the one. Micro ATX has up to four slots/support for two graphics cards. ATX supports seven slots and three or four graphics cards. There are even larger boards for servers or niche uses.
  
• Built-in WiFi, usually only on mini-ITX boards and high-end mATX and ATX boards.
  
• RAM slots: ITX boards and cheap mATX boards have two slots for a maximum of 32 GB of RAM. Midrange and higher mATX and ATX boards have four slots for up to 64 GB. If you need more RAM than 64 GB, you will need to look at X99 or workstation boards.
  
• Upgrades to the integrated sound. For example, using a Realtek ALC1150 codec instead of ALC892, or including a headphone amplifier output.
  
• A top-notch Intel gigabit Ethernet controller rather than another company’s.
  
• Additional USB 3.0 and SATA ports.
  
• SATA Express or an M.2 slot for PCIe SSDs.
  

For most people, these options are “that’s nice” rather than must-haves.

Avoid boards that use Qualcomm Atheros’s Killer Ethernet controllers. The bundled software is terrible and has caused a lot of instability for users. Also avoid Gigabyte boards that do not have the –UD or –UP suffixes, because Gigabyte has a history of loving with power delivery on motherboards. Avoid EVGA, ECS, and other second-tier vendors – the hardware may be fine, but they don’t have a lot of resources to program the BIOS/UEFI well, and that’s just as important.

So whose board should you buy? Asus does great hardware and truly excellent fan control on its boards, but you often pay a premium over similar boards from other companies. ASRock makes great no-bullshit boards at good prices. MSI is a company that I want to love, but they use those Killer NICs in drat near everything.


16. Should I buy a bunch of fans? How should I arrange them?

Most cases have a good-enough setup of fans for a non-overclocked build. It may only be one or two, but a few big fans running at low RPM in a well-designed case are far better than jamming a dozen small fans into a mesh box for the sake of “airflow.” Too many fans can be counterproductive.

If you want to mess with your case’s fans, I direct you to the second post of the Overclocking thread where I’ve already written a ton of words (with pictures!).


17. How much wattage does my PSU need to have? I found this one for $20…

DO NOT BUY CHEAP-rear end POWER SUPPLIES. Not only are you risking every component in the system, but you are risking starting an electrical fire. Power supplies are one of the most critical components, yet the temptation of many builders is to ignore quality and blindly buy whatever gives out a lot of Watts.

A properly-sized power supply has a capacity between 20% and 100% greater than the actual load to be placed on it. We give some appropriate choices based on your graphics card (the highest-power-draw component in most systems) in the Quick Picks later on. PC Part Picker will also tally up as you add parts and keep track of a minimum PSU size. Newegg also has a calculator, but it will give you numbers on the high side of sane. Buy something in between.

If you want to estimate it yourself, most single GPU systems that come by us can be estimated by the CPU’s TDP (Thermal Design Power) plus the graphic’s card’s TDP (Nvidia) or board power (AMD) plus 50W, then multiply that by 1.2 for your minimum PSU size and by 2.0 for your reasonable upper limit. The TDP and board power can be found by a Google search.

For example, an i5-6600 and a GeForce 970 is (95W + 145W + 50W) * 1.2 = 350W to 580W, so you would use a 350W to 600W power supply.


18. Do I need a sound card?

Probably not. You need about $500 worth of analog speakers before you can hear the difference between good-but-unimpressive onboard audio and the best add-in sound card.

Headphones may be a different story – if you have nice cans (at least $100) with impedance above 32 Ohms, a headphone amplifier can greatly increase sound quality. Some high-end motherboards have them, or you can add one inexpensively with an Asus Xonar DG or DGX sound card. If you move your headphones between computers, a USB-attached headphone amplifier might be preferable, like a Fiio E10K.

If you are doing sound over HDMI, TOSlink, or S/PDIF, the sound card completely doesn’t matter as long as you have the hookup you need. Audio remains bit-perfect digital until it reaches your receiver.

If you are doing audio production, ask in Creative Convention. Most likely you’ll be ending up with a USB-attached audio interface of some kind.


19. Do I need aftermarket cooling for my CPU?

If you are not overclocking, you don't absolutely need to. The CPU will come with an adequate cooler with pre-applied thermal interface material. You may opt to purchase aftermarket cooling if you want a quieter system, however – the stock cooler can be noisy, especially with quad-core CPUs.

If you are overclocking a newer CPU, you will need aftermarket cooling, yes. Heatpipe tower air coolers are quiet and effective. Self-contained, closed-loop liquid coolers (CLCs) are generally more expensive and a bit louder than heatpipe towers, but they have two advantages: large ones (240mm and 280mm) can perform better than even the best air coolers, and small ones (120mm and 140mm) can pack good cooling into spaces too small for heatpipe towers. This makes CLCs great for high-end builds both in large systems that can take large radiators and in small mini-ITX systems without room for a large air cooler.

Thermal paste… doesn’t really matter much at all. Most aftermarket coolers will come with paste that’s good enough. It’s far more important to apply paste properly than to min-max the paste itself. Watch, learn, apply your paste right.


20. Should I get a solid state hard drive (SSD)?

Short answer: Yes. Long answer: Yeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeees.

SSDs are the biggest thing to happen to using your computer since dual-core processors and broadband Internet.

Hard drives are slow. If they’re reading data all in a row, they’re pretty speedy, but as soon as the drive starts to skip around randomly (which happens ALL THE TIME), even the fastest hard drive in the world is not going to read more than 2 MB per second. A standard consumer drive is slower than standard consumer broadband at random reads and writes. Slow random read and write speeds are why your system turns into cold molasses when it runs out of memory and starts using the hard drive as scratch space. Starting your system, shutting down, web browser caching, starting programs, resource loading in open-world games and MMOs, and virtual memory – all of these things depend on random reads and writes, all of these things are when your computer is slowest, and all of these things would probably be faster if they loaded from your internet connection rather than from your hard drive!

SSDs are fast. They are faster than hard drives at reading data that’s all in a row, but that’s not what’s impressive. What’s impressive is that while a hard drive can manage about 200 random reads per second, a decent and cheap SSD will do 20,000.



You can’t even see the hard drives on that scale, and that graph is from 2009. Since then, SSDs have gotten significantly faster while hard drives have pretty much stayed the same. SSDs are so much better at what hard drives are worst at.

Stop wasting your life ten seconds at a time waiting for programs to load and get an SSD.

A 120 GB drive should be considered the minimum, and 250 GB the sweet spot. If you are willing to spend a bit more and need lots of SSD space, drives up to 1 TB are available. Most people pair their SSDs with a hard drive as well. The hard drive is used for bulk storage – downloads, music, movies, and non-open-world games. For these types of files, hard drives work perfectly well.

For more reading and detailed buying and setup advice, see the SSD megathread.


21. Should I get an M.2 SSD?

Probably.

Their prices have been dropping very quickly and are now only slightly above those of old fashioned 2.5" SSDs. Their real-world benefits are never as amazing as you'd expect from benchmarks, but they do load the OS or applications 20% to 40% faster under normal conditions which is a nice thing to have. Getting your OS to boot off them used to be pretty complicated in the past, but if you have a post 2016 motherboard with Windows 10 it'll work right away.

22. What’s the cheapest way to get Windows, and what version should I get?

With a new system, you will probably want to buy Windows 10 Home 64-bit - OEM or System Builder version - which costs about $80. Note that even though Microsoft has stopped advertising free upgrades to Windows 10, they are still available if you download the installer from the Microsoft website and start the setup from inside an activated Windows Vista or 7.

If you still can’t stand the new Start Screen after the first week, there are a half dozen $5 or cheaper programs (including free) which will bring back the old Start Menu. ClassicShell is free, Start8 and StartIsBack are the most polished ones for $5.

Windows 10 Pro offers specialty features that most home users don’t need, like Bitlocker, Domain joining, Hyper-V host, and Remote Desktop Protocol host. Never use 32-bit versions of Windows, because they don’t support more than 4 GB of RAM and some programs won’t run at all.

If you are a student, your school probably has a free licensing deal, or you might even be eligible for MSDN.


23. What gamepad should I get?

The Microsoft Xbox 360 controller. It has driver support built in to Windows, and most games come with a same-as-console default layout that Just Works. If you get the wireless version, get the official Microsoft wireless adapter, no knock-offs.

If you want to get fancy, any controller with XInput support will be just as easy to use in games. You might look at the Logitech F310 and F710, or you could use an Xbone controller. With a little effort and some community-written drivers, you could use a Dualshock 2, 3 or 4. Leave Wiimotes for Wii emulation, though.


24. Should I get an optical drive? If so, should I get a Blu-Ray drive?

Probably not. You can install an OS with a USB memory stick; you don’t need the actual CD except for convenience. There isn’t much use for optical media these days. If you do believe you need a DVD drive because "why not" you should probably get a USB-attached drive so you can have it and not need it for your laptop, too.

Blu-Ray is niche. A Blu-Ray drive has two uses: watching Blu-Ray movies and burning discs. Most people don’t even burn DVDs. And Blu-Ray movies on PC... Who uses anything but downloadable movie / streaming services nowadays. Note that even if you buy a Blu-Ray drive for watching movies it'll probably not have a bundled movie player application. You will need to spend another $50 on that because Blu-Rays' copy protection scheme doesn't allow freeware players.


25. Can I re-use my old parts to keep costs down?

Some parts yes, but usually it works out better to just get new parts and either sell the old ones, recycle them, or donate the old machine as a whole to a kid or to Goodwill. Most sales will be parted out, but if you want to donate the system or re-use it as a server or something, weigh the value of cannibalizing it vs. no longer having a complete system.

Graphics cards are easiest. If your card isn’t *that* old and you want to wait for a new launch or a good deal, go ahead and carry it over. PCI Express is totally backwards and forwards compatible, so there won’t be any funny problems trying to slot it in.

Replace hard drives after five years. Hard drives are primarily failing machines; data storage is just a side-effect. After five years, they get really good at failing. Generally, if your drive is out of warranty, do a cost/benefit on keeping it and the pain of replacing it during the life of your new system vs. just getting a new drive. If it fails, you’d have to replace it anyway, and you have all the added headache of having to recover your data.

For power supplies, the rule of thumb for a well-used power supply is to replace it after five years or once its warranty has expired, whichever is longer. Power supply components can degrade with use and can lower the ability of the unit to deliver power. A lightly used unit (well cooled, excess capacity, few power-on hours, and high quality to begin with) will have suffered less wear and tear and could be used longer if you want, but watch for fan failures. If you’re an expert with lots of experience with high-voltage electronics, you could just replace all the electrolytic caps every hemidecade, but everyone else? Buy a new unit.

Old memory, as long as it’s compatible – sure. Memory fails, but it doesn’t fail any more or less with age.

Cases (and monitors) can last a long time. If you bought really good ones, sure, keep using them! But with the advances in technology, you might find that today’s decently-priced cases and monitors work like the ultra-high-end stuff from when you last bought. If your stuff was just okay then, you might find that new kit is significantly better and worth an upgrade.

Your DVD drive has probably seen zero wear-and-tear. But let's be honest, it'll likely remain unused in the new system too.

CPU coolers and fans depend – technology has definitely improved for coolers, and fans do wear out. If you have high-end cooler that can mount to LGA 1156/1155/1150 then it's also compatible to the new LGA 1151 boards, so you can carry it over. Fans tend to become noisier with age so you might want to replace them if the noise becomes annoying.


26. I am tempted to DIY, but I'm really not sure I can build this system myself. Can I pay someone to do it for me?

PC stores like Micro Center or a local shop will build a PC from your own parts for a modest fee. Go in and ask. You can probably order the parts through them, as well, but beware sales pressure. If you have a geeky friend, they might be willing, too (but remember, you are asking them to do work for you, be respectful about it). Don’t ask your company IT guy unless you want to contribute to a drinking problem.

Some web shops will also do assembly or in-house prebuilts for a modest fee, like NCIX (US and Canada) and PCCaseGear (Australia - prebuilts but no longer offers assembly).


27. But Logical Increments/CPU Boss/Passmark/this other building guide says…

Aaargh, I hate Logical Increments.

While it’s true that there’s a computer part for every extra $10 you want to spend, there are also very definite price/performance sweet spots for many components. I told you above why you want an Intel CPU over AMD. Can’t afford the extra $100 right now? Save more money and buy it later. Don’t seriously hamstring your investment, because while it’s true you’ll save $100 now with AMD, you’ll want to upgrade far sooner because it just doesn’t work as well, and you’ll have to spend more money. Plus over two years of gaming, the extra power consumption can totally erase those savings in the first place.

The “bad to good” ranking is also nonsense for many of those categories. Graphics card, storage, power supply, motherboard, case – all of these can be “bad” or “good” in some ways, but in others, which is best for you highly depends on what you want and need. Yet e.g. cases are ranked as “bigger is better,” like a 40 lbs., $300 Cosmos II is somehow $200 better at being a case than a $110 Enthoo Pro.

In short, the guide is wrong and it invites cargo-culting of expensive parts.

CPU Boss and Passmark totally fail at making meaningful comparisons. Passmark tries to reduce the incredibly complex machinery of CPUs into a single number, measuring only a tiny facet of performance, full multi-threaded performance, which is far from common in home use. CPU Boss uses naïve feature-to-feature comparison, a poor selection of benchmarks (hello, Passmark), and a poor “out of 10” ranking system that overwhelms you with information without helping you understand what it means or how the chips will perform. Yet more cargo-culting.

When it comes down to it, this guide is just, like, my opinion, man. This question even more so than the rest. You wanna do your own thing or you like another guide more than this one, go for it. But I wouldn’t have written all this if I didn’t think I had a good handle on these things.


28. I need a monitor, speaker, headset, etc. …

We deal more with the computer side of things rather than the peripheral side. Let me link you to a few other threads where you can ask for recommendations:

Peripherals
Monitor/Display Megathread
Should I buy a $100 mouse? (not a megathread, )
Keyboard Megathread
Home Networking Megathread
Hardware Short Questions
Let’s Talk Headphones (IYG)
PC Speakers (IYG)

Common Specialty System Focus Threads
HTPC Thread (IYG)
Overclocking Megathread (sorry I don’t keep the guides more updated, but the first two posts are great)
Consumer NAS/Storage Megathread