How to Compooter: A Pro's guide on how to select, purchase, build, and set up your own computer Part 1: Choose your parts

So it turns out that Blogger isn't the best text editor out there. The laptop I was editing this post on lagged for a bit, selected all the text, deleted it, then reloaded the page. I was through part 4 (about 5 pages in, maybe more) and it all went away. The point there is I learned a few very important lessons: 1. Don't use Blogger as a text editor, use it to post your text, 2. Don't run Chrome with 35 tabs open, and 3. upload smaller posts more often rather than trying to fit 15 pages in one post. No one wants to read something that long anyway.

But now for the actual blog post.

Hello! My name is Clang and I'll be learning you how to build a computer today! In the past, I've usually had pretty good luck with store-bought computers, but the prices they charged for the hardware I got always left a little to be desired (Also I usually only bought laptops). Being the cheap bastard that I am, I decided in college to build my own desktop from spare parts. Since then, I've built several desktops for friends and myself, usually utilizing used or secondhand parts to cut the overall price. And normally my computers are about as good as what you'd be able to get from a large retailer like Best Buy or something for around two thirds to three quarters of the price (plus a few bottles of Mountain Dew if it was a commission. I work cheap).





When I first started out, I couldn't have done it without some help. And so, to pay that back, here's a guide on how to do it yourself. The point of this guide is going to be to build a gaming computer that can run most games on high for as little money as possible. I'm not going to teach you how to build something that puts supercomputers to shame, I'm not going to teach you how to build something that could run on potato power. I'm going to teach you how to build a computer that will work for at least two, hopefully three years without needing to upgrade any of the internals (with the exception of RAM and Hard Disks). Eventually I might also get around to telling you how to install and maintain an operating system (a real one, not that Windows crap), do updates and upgrades for your hardware, KVM passthrough with IOMMU extensions, etc. You know, the essentials. In this first post, we're going to learn how to select the two most important parts of a gaming computer: The CPU and the GPU.

A little word of warning before we start: Until you get this process down, it might be a good idea to get someone (friend in the know, professional custom computer builder, etc.) to look over your part list before you commit to buying anything (Your entire parts list, not just the stuff in this post). This'll save you the pain of returning parts and me the pain of listening to irate comments on this blog.

HOW TO SELECT PARTS: PART 1: PUT THE COMPUTE IN COMPUTER

Building a computer is a complex-ish process mostly because of all the dependencies that the hardware has. For example: The graphics card depends on the motherboard, which depends on the CPU, which needs a certain type of RAM, which depends on the motherboard. It's honestly not that bad once you get used to looking everything up, but it took me about a month to assemble all of the parts for my first build.

Anyway, definitions: 

Since we're choosing the CPU first, let's tell you what that is, eh?

-CPU: the CPU, central processing unit, processor, or Dorito chip as yours is probably called online (ooohhh buuurrrnnnn), is the "brain" of the computer. Only that's not quite true as the CPU only calculates things. It has no real storage to it, only what's needed to remember what it's calculating. It's less the brain of the computer and more the part of the brain that calculates out 1+1 when you tell it to. And it does that really fast.The memory parts of a computer (the parts that remember what you did an hour ago and last weekend) are the RAM and Hard Drive. We'll get there in the next post and after that.

-Clock Speed: A processor's speed is determined by its clock rate, usually measured in GHz (gigahertz), or billions of cycles per second. You can think of a processor as a giant clock in some ways: Things only move in the processor on each "tick" of the clock, meaning that however fast that clock "ticks" is however fast the CPU will think about things.

-Cores: Processors these days aren't just single processors anymore though. Usually, a modern processor will have anywhere from 2 to 8 physical processors on it. We call these guys the "cores" of the processor. They're all little processors that can think and act independently of each other, but share some resources like access to peripherals and the clock. How many cores your processor has is how many things it can think about at once. Usually more cores is better, as most large programs these days have multiple threads that need to run at once (one to display graphics, one to think about cats, one to actually do the processing, etc.). So a processor that runs at 6GHz but only has one core could potentially be beaten out by a processor that has 8 cores but runs at 2GHz per core.

-Threads: Threads are a processor's train of thought. As I stated earlier, most programs will have multiple threads to handle different things. This is important for gaming because lots of things are happening all over at the same time and your processor needs to keep up. Usually each processor core can only run one thread at a time, but some processors can handle two or more simultaneously. With Intel CPUs, this is called hyper-threading. Some processors bill it as having several "software" cores instead of having some smaller number of physical cores.

There are two major CPU companies: AMD and Intel. Both have their strengths and weaknesses, so make sure you do a little research before you go buying one so you can find the one you need. Unless you have something specific in mind that demands something specific from a processor, the things you'll need to care the most about for a gaming computer are age, clock speed, number of cores, and price. As far as that goes, AMD is usually cheaper than Intel, but Intel chips perform much better. A high-end AMD chip will usually compete with a mid-range Intel chip in speed and computing capabilities. That being said, you certainly don't need a high-end Intel chip to play most games these days, as most of the processing for most games will be done on the graphics. AMD chips have far better integrated graphics than Intel, but we're not going to be using those, so it doesn't matter.

---Do your research!! I once bought a chip that stated it had 4 cores, but in actuality only had 2 cores with 2 software cores each. That being said, it was still many times faster than my previous CPU, so I didn't mind too much. Just kinda felt miffed I'd fallen for that.---

On to actually picking out a CPU. The first thing I usually look at when choosing a new CPU is a list of the latest consumer models from both AMD and Intel (either look at their respective sites or Wikipedia). These companies tend to launch their chips in waves, with each chip in each series having more or less the same internals, but ranging in power and capability from something that would last maybe a year in the gaming world to something that would last five. The most powerful chips in a wave are usually overkill for anything you'd want to play tomorrow, but we're trying to build a computer that will last you for 3-5 years, so if you can afford the extra $200, overkill now is OK. Now we need to compare the performance and prices of this wave to the previous year's wave. There's a really good CPU performance comparison graph at cpubenchmark.net. This site compares the performance of CPUs along with price points for the easily available ones. Here you can usually find what you're currently using and some basic price points for chips that are more powerful than yours. We can also find performance stats for the latest models within a week or three of their release.

This next part is going to be as important as it is subjective. You now need to compare what kind of stats you want with what you're willing to pay for them. A good way to figure out what kind of stats are going to be needed for a computer that'll last 3 years is to look at the newest big budget game to come out on Steam and to look at its Recommended (i.e. not Minimum) CPU specs. For instance, at the time of this writing, Total War: Warhammer has just come out. It recommends an Intel i5-4570. This chip is about midway up the cpubenchmark.net site with a score of 7,016. This is a good chip. Kinda. It came out in 2013, so 3 years ago as of this writing. Will it last for 3 more years? Probably. Would I recommend it? Probably. It's only one or two series behind the current latest Intel chips. If you can find it for significantly cheaper than a more recent chip, go for it. If it's only like $20 less than something newer that performs just as well as it does, go for the newer chip.

Another thing you should do is make sure your processor is more powerful than the minimum recommended CPU for any new game. If you get something only slightly more powerful than the minimum recommended CPU for a new game, you're going to end up needing an upgrade in the next year, and that's something I prefer to avoid. Another good benchmark for CPU performance is how well it handles VR games/headsets. VR is pretty heavy on both the CPU and GPU, so any CPU better than the minimum specs or close to the recommended specs for new VR games will last you a while if you don't care about actually running VR games on high graphics settings. The problem there is that VR is only going to get harder to run, so a VR rig will need to be top of the line to stay usable for any duration of time.

tl;dr: It's OK to be kinda cheap with your CPU, but don't be too cheap or you'll have to buy another CPU (and possibly another motherboard/RAM) in a year.

cpuboss.com is a good research resource if you're wanting more fine-grained comparisons between chips. Also it's good to have a site that actually sells the chips open so you can see the actual prices and some customer reviews. I use newegg.com, but there are others out there that sometimes have lower prices (tigerdirect.com, ebay.com, amazoon.com, local computer parts/custom computer stores, etc.). There are also aggregate sites that will let you input in your parts and find the lowest price on the net for you.

---If you decide to get a professional CPU (like an Intel Xeon), make sure your motherboard supports it!! If the motherboard doesn't explicitly say it supports xeons/opterons, don't get it!!!---

Things to write down about your CPU that are important for other parts: Socket type (Motherboard), power consumption (Power Supply), supported memory speeds (RAM), overclocking capability (Motherboard).

HOW TO SELECT PARTS: PART 2: THE MOST EXPENSIVE GRAPHING CALCULATOR YOU'VE BOUGHT SINCE HIGH SCHOOL CALCULUS

So you've picked out your CPU. That's all well and good, but you aren't going to be playing Minecraft at 4,000 FPS (frames per second, or how fast the graphics card can render the image on the screen) with just a CPU. The graphics card handles that most important part of modern gaming: the graphics. It's been either the most or the second most important part of a gaming rig since gaming became more graphically advanced than Zork. A graphics card consists of two main parts: The GPU, which is basically a second CPU, only dumber and much, much better at adding numbers like 1.55 and 1.84, and the card itself, which houses GPU, the graphics memory, the video outs, and the PCI bus connection. If we continue on with the brain metaphor, the graphics card is that part of the brain that controls vision and the display of memories or something? Maybe it's the creative side of your brain rather than the math side? The brain metaphor doesn't 100% work with every part of the computer. The graphics card renders and puts the images on the screen.

Definitions:

-GPU: The brains of a graphics card. Takes stuff stored int he graphics memory, renders it, and outputs it to the screen. Not very good at the kind of calculations a CPU does, but many times faster than a CPU at simple floating point operations (like 4.2053 times 6.0098, the stuff graphics is made from).

-Graphics Card: The thing that connects your GPU, graphics memory, CPU, and monitors. Basically a motherboard, but pre-built and a lot smaller and less complex.

-Video Out: The output that you plug a video cable in. Connects the graphics card to your monitor.

-Graphics Memory: The place where all of those maps and textures are stored when you're playing a game. The GPU needs this to render and display stuff.

-PCI: The connector that connects your GPU to your CPU. It's the big long connector thing at the bottom of the graphics card and the corresponding plug on the motherboard. There are a couple of different speeds and sizes that these guys come in. Most modern graphics cards will use PCIe v3 x16 (Peripheral Component Interconnect express version 3 with 16 lanes). Unless PCIev4 is out when you read this, pick a PCIe v3 card. PCIe v2 cards are too slow. In general, it's best to get the latest standard (PCIe 3 vs 2, DDR4 vs 3 (RAM)) so you can upgrade if you need to later.


There are again two main developers of GPUs, AMD (formerly ATI, bought out a few years back by AMD, who has slowly been changing the name to their own)(yes, the same AMD as the CPU maker) and Nvidia. Again, both have their ups and downs. AMD cards are better at some things while Nvidia cards are better at others, AMD cards are generally cheaper and Nvidia cards generally perform better in games, etc. That being said, if you're gonna be mining bitcoins, I've always heard that AMD is much, much better. Both offer consumer and professional graphics. NEVER GO FOR THE PROFESSIONAL GRAPHICS CARDS UNLESS YOU KNOW YOU NEED THEM. Professional graphics cards are either meant for computing or driving ridiculously over sized displays at moderate speeds. THEY WILL SUCK AT RENDERING GAMES. Also they'll usually cost many hundreds of dollars more.

For those of you who want VR now: Find and buy the biggest and most expensive consumer-grade card you can find. Go for an Nvidia GTX980 ti or AMD Radeon R9 Fury X (or newer if you're reading this after the Nvidia GTX 10xx/AMD R9 4XX series has come out). These'll all set you back quite a bit, but they're probably the only current cards that'll be able to play the VR games that come out in 3 years. Remember, we're going for a rig that'll last. Your wallet will thank you in two years when you can still play games on the same graphics card.

For the rest of you: Again, start with the most recent batch of GPUs and card from both companies and basically follow the same procedure as with CPUs (There's even a gpubenchmark.net site by the same people who do the CPU one!). Go look at the current recommended GPU specs for a graphically intense game and go from there. If you're looking for a better card, compare cards listed as minimum recommendations for VR games, etc. There are a few differences to consider when going through the GPU selection process as opposed to the CPU selection process though:

Difference 1. Different GPUs also have different card manufacturers. Nvidia makes their own cards for their GPUs, but they also sell them to companies like ASUS and MSI who make their own graphics cards with the same Nvidia GPUs. So you'll end up seeing the same GPU from different companies with slightly different graphics card specs.

Difference 2: Different graphics cards will have different clock speeds and graphics memory amounts for the same GPU, take this into account! More is usually better for both, but don't go overboard.

Difference 3: This one isn't as important, but make sure that the card you buy is within the last series or two of cards instead of within the last 3 or 4 as with CPUs (So only the Radeon R9 290 or R9 390 as opposed to the R9 290, R9 390, HD 9XXX, and HD8XXX or only an Nvidia GTX 9XX or 10XX instead of whatever came before that). This is due to the quickly changing nature of the graphics card ecosystem, especially in terms of drivers and capabilities. The recent popularity increase of 4K and VR is really driving up the performance of newer cards and leaving old cards in the dust.

---ALWAYS READ THE REVIEWS, DON'T BASE YOUR PURCHASE SOLELY ON PRICE OR SPECS!! The same GPU on one card may be MUCH more reliable than one from another manufacturer!!---

Things to write down about your GPU/Graphics Card that are important for other parts: Power Requirement (Power Supply), Required Power Connectors (Power Supply), Physical Length (Case), PCI version (Motherboard, again, you should find one that's PCIe v3 or greater, get the newest version you can).

And with that, I'm signing off for now. I'll be back shortly (read: in a month or two) with a guide on how to procure a Motherboard, some RAM, and a Power Supply. After that will be the case and peripherals, and after that will be assembly.