I've been wanting to build my own custom PC since high school, and I finally did it. It was always intimidating to me because it seemed so complicated and easy to mess up. I was afraid of buying incompatible parts, or putting them together in the wrong way.
I grew up playing PC games more so than console, but over the last few years, I've been mainly on PS4. I'm a huge fan of Overwatch by Blizzard, and I've been playing that a ton on console. I wanted to give it a try on PC, so that rekindled my interest in building my own machine.
Overwatch doesn't have insane system requirements, but I still wanted it to run smooth, so I tried to find the perfect balance between performance and budget. The nice thing about PC parts is that the prices seem to dramatically go down if you're willing to get slightly older parts (1-2 years old). Buying the newest and shiniest would have been overkill for me, and it would have overkilled my bank account.
After reading enough articles and watching enough tutorial videos over the course of about a week, the way things worked inside of a computer was starting to click. I was getting a better sense of what kind of performance numbers were decent for certain parts, and what prices were fair. Also, what parts would work with other parts.
View Part List on PCPartPicker
This is just from my perspective, your experience may differ, I'm a beginner
- It's good to have a usage goal in mind for your PC. Build it for the thing you want it to do. In my case, it was to play Overwatch.
- Find a balance between budget and performance, at least for your first PC. You can always upgrade parts later, and even middle range parts can run things amazingly for a lot of use cases.
- I avoided the "shiny" stuff, as in, I ignored an elaborate case and didn't pursue any RGB LED lighting. I saved a lot of a money that way.
- Use PCPartPicker to keep track of your build and check for any incompatibility issues.
- Build it slowly, consult manuals and online resources along the way. I finished 90% of the build in about 3 hours, and then debugged for about another 9 to get it all going. Be patient.
- Make sure your cables are plugged in correctly to your PSU. They sometimes split apart at points for compatibility needs, and I was missing part of my 24 pin connector when I tried to boot my system. Nothing happened. That was a few hours of debugging and thinking that I got a bad PSU there.
- Plug in your monitor to your GPU, not your motherboard port. That was another few hours of debugging. I had power and the system was running, but no visual output was happening.
- When installing Windows, either use an official Windows USB stick, or make a Windows ISO image build from a PC. Don't bother making one from a Mac computer, even though people claim it's possible and have had success. This one was about 4-5 hours of debugging.
- Don't feel too much shame about cable management, mine is far from perfect and I'm okay with that.
It was a great experience building it, and it's nice to have a computer where you know everything about every part in it. I'm excited to upgrade it down the road, and possibly build a new one. I want to experiment with a smaller case size next time. If you have any questions, leave a comment below.
Good luck!
