What you will need to build your First computer in the most basic terms!

Note: An in depth guide to building a PC suited for gaming can be found by clicking this link:
http://www.pchelpforum.com/computer-...tml#post313707

1. Case .aka. Chassis.

Full Tower or Mid tower CASE

a lot of people are going Full tower these days due to the very large Graphics Cards.

Consider in getting either a steel case or aluminum.
Steel is much more sturdy, but cost a bit more.
Make sure your case has a side fan to at least to get rid of that hot air!
Make sure it has a Power / reset button for best operations.
Make sure it is big enough for your components


2. A Power Supply Unit "PSU"

(wattage recommend by this hand dandy website http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp)

Also make sure your PSU is at least 80plus Certified, and check to see if it represents your needs for Sli Ready or Crossfire Ready. This usually means an extra 6 pin, or 8 pin cable from the PSU to provide to your Video Card. Also make sure that the PSU will have the power cable to supply your CPU

Some good manufactures are in no particular order:
thermaltake, OCZ, Silverstone, Antec

3. A Motherboard

You will need to properly select your motherboard by size and compatibility - today is usually an ATX or micro ATX but there are others out there.

INTEL is with nvida AMD is with ati

Make sure that your CASE will hold your Motherboard by meeting its corresponding standards ATX or Micro ATX or any other.

Some good manufactures are in no particular order:
Asus, Gigabyte, MSI, EVGA, DFI

4. Processor .aka. CPU (central processing unit)

Your motherboard that you purchase generally has a list of CPU's that has been tested on that particular Motherboard through the manufacture that you bought it from. Check with their support on their website or via phone, before you spend the money on a CPU that is not know to work for that motherboard.

Select your CPU according to the motherboard you buy native to INTEL or AMD. You can not crossbreed CPU's it just wont work.. INTEL Motherboards must use intel cpu(s) and AMD must use amd cpu(s).

Check to see if your processor has the correct FSB (Front side Bus) to match with the Motherboard. Today that is common you will see 1066/1333 ... this is unrelated but u may of heard this in terms of quad pumped. the front side bus will show up in bios as "333" for a fsb. quad pumped meaning its multiplied X 4.. don't worry about this when selecting your processor.

5. RAM (Random Access Memory)

Referring back to your purchased motherboard, you will see a spec that says number of memory slots, and memory standard.
The number of memory slots is generally (4) but not always... and does state the maximum amount of ram that the motherboard can handle

the memory standard is the speed of the ram that was highest tested on the motherboard, like the CPUs RAM is also tested on the motherboard you purchased, and more than likely the manufacture will have a list of that as well. Some most common tested ram manufactures are OCZ, Kingston, Corsair.

A little more on RAM and making your system stable.

If your not running a 64bit OS don't bother in getting more than 4 gigs of ram even though 4 wont show up on your system specs. 3.5 gigs are; and is generally used for the background of the system.

Don't purchase RAM that has a higher speed than what your motherboard calls for. If your motherboard states its native to DDR2 800 don't purchase DDR2 1066 your only causing your system to be unstable especially if your not planning to overclock.

Some good manufactures in no particular oder:
OCZ, Kingston, Corsair, G.Skill, Crucial

6. Video Card

Video cards are not needed for VIDEO, that of course is if your Motherboard Supplies VIDEO onboard. Some Motherboards have a decent graphics chipset, maybe not for the gaming enthusiast.

There are 2 breeds of Video cards and that being Nvidia chipset, or ATI chipshit.

The first thing to check is to see how many watts that the company recommend for that particular Video Card. Ive seen them up to 500 Watts!!! recommend.

The 2nd thing you need to check is to see its connection type, most likely it will need to be PCI Express 2.0 X 16 not to be confused with pci 2.0 these are 2 different expansion bus. PCI Express 2.0 X 16 is the upgrade from its original PCI Express 16 from the AGP and so forth.

This is not a must, but when i build a system i try to keep as UNIFORMED as possible, nvdia with nvdia, ati with ati, intel with intel, amd with amd, it just makes everything that much easier to troubleshoot and keeps things much more stable. I never heard of an Nvida chipset testing Ati graphic cards, have u??? So depend on your motherboard purchase, you need to get the chipset that matches.

Some good manufactures in no particular order:
EVGA, ASUS, BGF, XFX, MSI

7. Sound Card

Like video cards its not needed thats saying if your Motherboard provides onboard sound. I use onboard sound because today sound is just getting to the point its leveling out on technology and Most Motherboards provide a decent sound to play with.

There are many sound card manufactures out there and the biggest one would be creative labs.

Make sure you get a quality sound card and it at least is better than what you are already being provided from your motherboard.

Check its interface / connection to see if its pci or pci 2.0

Some good manufactures in no particular order:
Creative Labs

8. Hard drive(s)

This is one of the biggest technologies that hardly made any serious changes over the years, but hey you must have one in order to operate a Computer System.

So many out there and what do i choose??

Well Some good manufactures right off the bat would be Western Digital, Seagate, and Maxtor.

If your not looking to making an Enthusiast gaming rig, i would stay away with anything that has 10,000 rpm+ because they will just cost you money.

There are plenty of Hard drives out there that can match those big wigs to a degree and cost you less money.

Western digital puts out a decent Hard drive with 32mb of cache, speeding up the process and giving you a decent transfer rate

When selecting your hard drive make sure you are getting the correct connection IDE, or Sata (serial - ata). Sata g 3.0 is out today and has the fasted transfer rates for hard drive, but sata 6.0 should be out soon.

Hard drives are one of the slowest components in your system and is one of the most important on your system. Most people neglect the fact on how fast a hard drive is, and just grab anything... well that it works, its a hard drive... Slow hard drives create problems and one of them we like to call bottlenecking. in other words, bottlenecking is when your computer is working so fast, it leaves your hard drive behind , causing your system to slow down to wait for it to catch up. This is why today many people are using a RAID setup. There are many different kinds of RAID's but a common one is raid 0. 2 more hard drives connected together to act as one. This allows less time for the hard drives to access information and deliver it out.

There not a huge problem in selecting the correct manufacture hard drive as far as compatibility. Most devices have what we call an option ROM, another words it tells the BIOS what it is and sets it self up for action. Thanks god for Plug and Play technology.

Some good manufactures in no particular order:
Western Digital, Seagate, Hitachi

9. Devices

DVD burners and Cd writers has became so cheap these days, i general get both. Why i get both is because me personally like to keep stress off them as much as possible. I'm not saying they are brittle elements, but its just my thing for keeping things to last.

Get a decent DVD burner. Lite-on makes a good series of them for less than 30 dollars.

Most DVD burners also include CD burners, so purchasing a CD burner might not be a necessity.

But i do recommend buying at least a DVD reader.

Having 2 drives makes it much easier when copying CD's and it just being a DVD reader, you can copy DVDs as well..

Interface / connection there a lot of SATA devices out now and i recommend them if your motherboard has any SATA ports left available to u to use. Using SATA makes life easier when it comes to connecting things to the motherboard, and also gets gives a lot more space in that CASE of yours. plus you completely turn off the who IDE thing in bios so it never even has to check it out to find devices.

some good manufactures in no particular order:
Lite-on, Asus, Samsung, LG

10. The Monitor

Wooo scarry...

DVI vs VGA
VGA - Video Graphics Array
Its one of the oldest technologies, and is analog, like your old TV. plugged into a basic cable line.

DVI - Digital video interface
its pretty old it self, but its not analog, and is digital! has a higher transmit rating and can have a better capability of obtaining those higher resolutions

HDMI - High definition multimedia interface
Its the same thing as dvi, but with sound.. but what video card u know has sound? Its good for hooking up to LCD TV(s) instead of computer screens.

The most important thing you need to look at is, especially if your gaming, you need to make sure your monitor can handle a high refresh rate, at least 75+ . refresh rate only refreshes 75 frames a second, so if your video card is pushing out 200fps your monitor only sees 75 of them in a second, this what we call Vsync. Vsync is what it is , it syncs video to monitor for the smoothest game play.

LCDs made for the computer will have a high resolution and a good refresh rate, you also need to check its response time. 5ms and lower are good. the response time is the time it takes to receive from your video card.

LCDs made for watching TV, will generally not have a High refresh rate, most likely 60fps, which is not to say its bad, but could be better.

So what your purpose is for using the computer you should consider the screens usage.

Some good manufactures in no particular order:
Samsung, Asus, Viewsonic, LG



Some final Notes
I'm sure you have seen it, and if you haven't its nvidias ESA (enthusiast system architecture)
Nvida made a program to be ran inside your windows allowing you to monitor all your hardware that has the ESA logo. This includes CASES, Motherboards, Powersupplys, and some others. You can adjust fan speeds, and monitor whats going on as your computer is running.
The technology is cool, but its not a must...

make sure everything you have selected is compatible, has the right amount of ports for your devices. Read your motherboard specs carefully and match up products to its specs.


ya, fire up that computer!!

So we just did our first computer build and did all the steps in making sure everything is compatible and made sure the manufactures has seen and tested products that i am about to use. We should have a pretty operable and stable PC system as if the components are in good shape.

Load your OS and have fun!

Codex,

Great guide. I'm gonna pin this to the top of the forum

Plus:

An ethernet card so as you can connect to the World Wide Web

Before we actually start building a Gaming rig, we need to consider some general things. Cost, Design and Function.

Cost - I think its pretty practically that we can make a decent gaming rig from anywhere around the 1300-1600 dollar mark. We can also simply say we can build an ultimate gaming rig anywhere beyond that price into the 8000+ dollars

Design - are we going for looks, are going for performance in worst case scenarios, water cooling or ultimate air flow?

Function - Are we playing the baddest game out there, or are we looking to play todays game at a "playable state"

Now that we can determine this, I'm going to do a simple walk through on building a basic gaming rig for the small enthusiast players.

ESA

ESA what is it? its Nvidia's Enthusiast System Architecture)
It allows you to monitor any component that has the ESA function with inside your windows OS.

You can find Motherboards, Powersupplys, Cases, Liquid cool systems, and some others.

Why i Recommend ESA...

If you plan on overclocking, i dint always have time to reboot my system and go to CMOS to check my temperatures, voltages, frequencies, ect ect, especially when your in a gaming match, and your trying to get the best out of your system for that match. I can simply pop open the program NVIDIA provides and make my adjustments accordingly.. SIMPLICITY!

1. CASE

Thermaltake, Silverstone, Cooler Master put out Cases With ESA technology.

Base on your preference I would recommend a Larger full tower case for optimal air flow design, space, sturdiness, and the likeliness for water cooling. Thermaltake makes a good ESA case that has all this, and vent + fans to accommodate water cooling.

Some Cases have their hard drive bays turned toward the side panel, this because of the design of the SATA cables at the 90degree, but i have noticed lately that motherboard companies are provided cables that are straight plugged, making it even harder to plug into a hard drive that faces toward the side panels. This is totally in your preference, but i personally do not care for it and would rather have my hard drives face the same direction as my CD/DVD ROM drives.

Even if your running liquid cooled, i still recommend at least 3 fans, one in the back , one on the side, and one up front. Your front fan needs to pull in air, the rear and side fan need to expel air out of the case. Even better if u can find a case that has a top vent to expel air out for the power supply unit. You can select fans that have speed controls, or you can select fans that have silent technology, usually they are slower, or have better bearings make sure u read the specs carefully. You always want the highest CFM this is the amount of air flow that the fan turns and usually rated at different speeds. If you are going water cooled, i would choose the quietest fans as possible.

If you decide to run a liquid cooled system, you need to make that decision now when you are deciding on a case. Not all liquid cooled systems are the same design. in fact you will find many different ways to liquid cool a system. One design generally found by Thermaltake, will provide u a water bay that takes ups up spots on your standard 5.25 bays normally where your DVD/CD ROM drives would go. The downfall to this is that these systems are compact, and have a hard time expelling hot air away from the system keeping the CPU temps a bit higher than other liquid cooled systems. Another design that is common is the water tanks mounted separately from its actually pump, and is located somewhere inside the case, which still in my opinion doesn't do much good to keeping your liquid cool. Ive also seen a design where the actual radiator was mounted on the heat sink directly connected to the CPU, all in one. Go figure.. The best design in my opinion is to have your water tank outside your case, for optimal cooling, this could be mounted to a radiator fan on the back side of the case, or any other place you decide to make holes, or use existing holes. you can also have a cooling system that has a tank that is designed to be outside of your case on its on platform.

IF you decide on Going ESA with your water cooler, Coolermaster, and thermaltake put out a water cooling system that provide ESA technology. In which you can watch your water flow, make adjustments, monitor the temperatures and or the amount of liquid you have in your tank in case of refilling.

2. Motherboard

OK finding that right motherboard is seriously a hunt for the red October, but will definitely benefit you when you make a good choice.
When searching for a motherboard in gaming specs, you need to make the decision before hand are u going to run a 64bit system or a 32bit system.
this decision determines how much ram your going to run and if your planning on utilizing the 64bit technology.

32bit < 4gigs 64bit > 4gigs and making sure u select the right 64bit windows some have a different limitation on RAM amount. Generally 4gigs of ram is enough for todays gaming, but that could end quickly especially when 64bit technology becomes a better understanding to the consumer. A little more on Ram later.

You then need to make the decision on INTEL or AMD
I'm going to simply put it this way. INTEL has been around for a while, and has been putting out some good processors. AMD came along as a copy competitor, they didn't actually make their own processors until the mid 90's For a while AMD was making intel products as what we call barebone or look a likes. Also, I'm a huge fan of NVIDIA, in which makes the best chipsets in my opinion, raid drivers, ESA design, and is still pumping out great technology. And not to forget to mention that nvidia told AMD to go bleep them selves, they went over to Intel.

When being an enthusiast you will one time in your mind think about overclocking. You need to consider what company will provide u the best understanding and layout for your needs. There are 2 companies out there that write the bios for motherboards, they are AMI and Phoenix tech.

You need to make sure your motherboard has a solid north bridge, or chipset. Most companies will tell you their chipset that is on that particular motherboard, and you can google the chipset and get the specs for it. Whats important about chipsets, is how it communicates with everything and some chipsets communicate faster than others. one functions better than the other, and thats up to u to determine that. The chipset also gives you the functions for a software Raid setup.. which will be mentioned later. I wont go into deep details about chipsets.

You need to determine if your going to decide to run a SLI / Crossfire setup or a triple SLI setup.. Some motherboard manufactures have a 3 way set up but beware they all don't run at the same BUS speed.

16X8X8(3 way) 16X16X8(3 way) or 16X8(2 way) 8X8 (2 way) 16X (one way)

the best performance of course for a 3 way is to have all 16X but this is not possible due to PCI is limited to a maxmium amount of mbs rates.

A motherboard should provide you with a good amount of SATA 3.0gb ports so you can have all your devices in sata. sata 3.0 has a maximum trans rate of 480mbps but can only be up to 1 meter long in cable length then the single begins to get weak.

If your not going to use a NIC card
Find a motherboard that has onboard lan. I know of one company that provided WLAN and that would be ASUS.
I prefer to have onboard lan, because the drivers provided by the company make drivers that work exactly for their board, along with the usb ports. This keeps from windows providing a walk around driver that works, but does it work to its full potential?

Find a motherboard that has a good native ram speed. if your using a 1066 / 1333 fsb motherboard, most likely you will find your native speed to be around 800mhz.. why?? because manufactors state that the best stability is having a 1:1 ratio of ram to fsb of the cpu... since cpu's are quad pumped on dual / quad core processors, ram is doubled pumped as well, you want to take the fsb and divided basically in half to get a close 1:1 ratio there are actually calculations for this that I'm not going to get into for this document. Over clocking will get away from this 1:1 ratio allowing u to push the fsb higher creating faster ghz for the processor. I'm not acutely going into a discussion about overclocking that would a be an entirely new thread.

just know a 1:1 ratio of fsb/ram is stable and anything higher in ram is saying to the FSB to overclock me! and its pretty guaranteed that u wont be able to fully max out your over clock with a 1:1 ratio speed ram. so lets say we get 1066mhz ram thats more like it.. its not as stable as a 1:1 ratio but we can safely over clock with this ram and make it a 1:1 ratio again. Even though the motherboard states its native to 800mhz its saying its most stable at this speed of ram its not saying u cant plug in some 1066 speed ram.

Another most important thing in when considering your motherboard choice and company brand, you need to now make a decision on keeping things as uniformed as possible. If you buy an Asus motherboard generally i would buy a Asus video card, but this does not mean u have to, but hey Asus tested their Asus video card on their Asus motherboard for best results. Asus didnt test a EVGA video card on their Asus motherboard to see if it works at best.

A lot of people make the mistake in saying well I'm going to get the best motherboard on the market, the best video card on the market, the best ram on the market. in theory this sounds like a good plan, but in reality, its not. Technology is well its technology. the key to have a good performing system is to keep it uniformed.

Review: Intel vs amd. Ram speeds, cpu speeds, the bus speed for for pci express 16 X 2.0 . quality chipsets. plenty of ports. w.lan lan. and uniforming componets

You can buy a motherboard in ESA technology and i recommend ESA for everything possible, especially if your an over clocker.
ESA on a mother board will allow you to make adjustments in windows instead of CMOS, simply put, u can also adjust fan speeds on some motherboards.

3. CPU

ok we already made the decision on what company cpu we are going with considering on the motherboard we selected.

Some things to consider when purchasing a CPU, are u wanting to go quad core, or dual core. what this means is that the cpu actually has 2 or 4 cpus in one. A lot of games today are not utilizing the quad core, but in the near future they will be and will cause the quad core processors to the blow the dual core out the water. There are dual cores out there that run just as quick as quad cores for that reason.

Consider how many multipliers the CPU has, and the front side bus. A big catcher is the L1 and the L2 cache.. the more the better.

If your planning on overclocking, do some review checking on that cpu u select, generally most reviewers will give u the specs on the outcomes before and after showing speeds and temperatures. And don't be alarmed when u see two of the same processors max out at different clock speeds, it happens...

most importantly before making that purchase, check out the motherboard manufacturers website for a list of the CPUs tested on that particular motherboard, this will help wonders in making a stable system.

4. RAM

When selecting good ram, u need to determine how much of it your going to get. i would automatically recommend 4gigs. for a 32bit or a 64bit OS.. even though like mentioned a 32bit wont recoqnize 4 gigs, i still believe having 4 gigs in dual channel mode is faster than have 3.25 gigs of ram in non dual channel mode.

you need to check the speed of the ram according to the motherboard you selected, also you need to check with the manufacturing website of the motherboard on what ram they have tested with their motherboard, this for sure makes a better stability system, in stead of just throwing in your personal preferences ram.

So people are getting hyped up about parity ram! ECC ram.... this is a technology in the ram that double checks it self for bad ram data, when it checks it self it corrects it self then sends it out on the address bus to the cpu... To me this slows down the process in speed, and besides ram is so fast these days you wont even see the mistakes if u don't have ecc or parity ram. This is a feature i feel as if manufactures are trying to grab attention with. If anywhere i would use parity /ecc ram would be in a bank where it counts loads of money, i dont want any cpu messing that up...

5. Video Cards

First thing first, is Uniforming, dont forget it and keep it in mind at all times.

with this back in mind, did u purchase a Intel motherboard or an amd motherboard

simply INTEL is NVIDA BASED, and u should buy an nvida graphics card

AMD is with ATI and u should buy a ATI graphics card.

The more Stream processors the better of course
the higher clock speeds is just a cpu, its better
u will see some cards with 128 bit vs 256 bit although your computer will only display 32bits. so think of the extra as cashe, when it needs to spread across its there for use. so 128 vs 256 bit u wont even know it exist.

the real confusion is people seeing 512mb vs 1024mb ram, this some what plays a part because this stores the video before it sends it out.. but i wouldnt make this a factor in buying a video card that has the specs of

32 cores, 1000core clock 1000memory clock 1024mbs
60 corees, 1000core clock 1000memory clock 512mbs

the cores is whats going to show the most in your video card...

SLI setup, has came along way since its first introduction...
make sure u read your specs on the video card carefully when adding 2 cards together make sure your price isnt higher than a card that already exist, with those specs.. ive seen it happen... especially when the geforce 9800gx2 vs the geforce 280 game out.. the price dropped on the 9800gx2 a lot then went right back up a few dollars soon as everyone figured out 2 gx2's was better than a 280...

Video cards are not generally ESA, since the fan on them are automatically adjusting their speeds according to the temperatures.

6. Sound Card

If your going to do some serious gaming i highly recommend a good sound card and a good headset vs speakers..

You want a sound card with high khz, and has a good db, at least 24bit, and has s/p-dif this is sony/philips digital interconnect format, and is basically digital sound instead of analog...

You need to be able to hear in games and thats half the battle when you hear a player on the other side of the wall because hes got loud feet or better yet u heard his grenade rattle on his backpack.... some people fail to realize how much sound plays a part in gaming. i dont know how many times i have been called a wall hacker, for pre-shooting someone around the corner because i heard them coming due to some weird sound game makers put in for those advance sound cards, that people fail to heard because they ditched out on good sound.. but when it comes to demos, it shows the proof...

and having a good headset only amplifies those sounds because it blocks out sounds around u like your mommy vacuuming, or cooking and u hear all that clinging.. not with a good pair of earmuffs...

7. Hard drives

Everyone needs at least one, but not when your building that gaming rig.
i highly recommend 2 in a raid 0 setup or a raid 5 if your serious about it..

Raid-0 is 2 or more hard drives working at the same time to access the same information because that piece of information well it got divided in half and put on both hard drives....

raiding hard drives also prevents heavy bottlenecking on of the major factors to bottlenecking is the hard drives. Hard drives are the slowest component in a computer as in trasnferates, but is one of the most important, because well u cant do much with out it... so raid 0 is risky because if one drive fails u lose all your information.. so some people go with raid 5 this is 2 more drives working together, then having one drive off to the side collecting the whole piece of data instead of half of it... but this slows down speed...

a sample of non raid speed a typical western digital 16MB cache 7200rpm hard drive will run about 50+mbs raid, u can easily see 100+mbs.. western digital puts out hard drives in 1000rpm and cost a bit but are much quicker than a 7200. imagine them in raid...

raid isnt hard to set up and most motherboard companies provide u the setup disk and a step by step manual.

so the more mbs u can send up to the ram the quicker the cpu can access it..

another type of hard drive thats out that im not exactly falling in love with is the mlc solid state disk.. they are quick for sure, but not reliable.. they are exactly the same thing as memory card... although they do have a way better technology for solid state disk and that the SLC version.. but u will give an arm and a leg for it..

9. Devices

buy a DVD burner, and a CD burner

is great for making DVDs and doing conversions to normal Cd's if u know what your doing.. besides you can get both for just around 50 dollars...

When getting devices dont use old technology like IDE, always go with the fastest ports provided to. which is SATA 3.0 for devices internally... although firewire is quicker, but its not internal as of yet.

10. power supply

You can also buy a powersupply with ESA technology, thus letting you moinotr the voltages, and make adjusments.
i would recommend going 100watts to 200 watts over your needed power for aging
I also recommend cable management for the best airflow.
a trust website can calcualte the amount of watage you need http://extreme.outervision.com/psucalculatorlite.jsp
Make sure u get 80proof certifed, and it has SLi ready or crossfire ready for ur vieo cards if u plan on running that set up...


11. Monitor

Crt monitors to me will always have the best color saturation ever, but they consume a lot of wattage and makes your power bill go sky high...

LCD use less wattage and are almost easier to repair...

make sure u buy either or in at least 75hz which meaning that your screen can only refresh it self 75 times a second, so if your game saying 200fps well guess what your only going to see 75 of them smoothly, but thats really quick for the human eye to even catch...

dvi vs vga

dvi is digital and vga is analog...
anything digital is better than analog, since analog consist in waves or frequencies like a radio
digital communicate in bits, or bytes. thats something a video card knows what its talking about...
hdmi is the same as dvi, just carries sound, but what video card u know carries sound?

screen size i preferably use a 40" samsung lcd tv with native 1920X 1080i resolution... for watching tv its great, but for playing games, well it looks awesome to the person standing 20 feet behind me.. i noticed the biggest i can go to play a game and still be at my desk was around 32 inches.. although the smaller the screen i go the easier i find it to play , since everything is in faster pace for me... speaking of faster pace.. u just see a ghost on your screen?

ghosting is something that happens a lot with passive matrix lcd screens, and slow rms. rms is the response time it takes black to turn to white and visa versa, a good rms would be 5 or less. consider in trying to get an active matrix lcd screen with a htz of 70+ amd a rms low as 5rms..
brightness is delt in contrast ration is the higher the brighter, but i find my self turning down every lcd screen i come in contact with.. after all light shows imperfections... like paint shine a light on your wall one day and see how well its been painted, never knew until u turned the light on... and knowing that nvida and ati know that as well and compete in making a constrast of their on for texturing.. u wouldnt notice unless u see a picture of them both side by side..


Conclusion

Make sure u take the time in reading all the specs for each component..
dont mix match companies and try to stay with one company,
check the companies website in seeing what they have tested on their product for best stability
having a 1:1 ratio of fbs : ram is stable but for overclockers they want a higher speed of ram...
consider the L1 and L2 catches, they mean a lot in speed.
Go with a decent hard drive and always always go with a raid 0 / raid 0+1 to keep your system from bottlenecking... i hate seeing lag on a "gaming system"
If your going to do water cooling, make sure u test your unit with water before u hook it all up, then when u do hook it up, make sure its all secure, water sucks for electronics... this could be a factor for u in your decision for water cooling.
Always have proper airflow in your case, that has plenty of space for your components..
SLI is expensive, and its not always the best but it is better than 1. this is a choice...

have fun building your gaming rid with confidence...!


written by codex®

up

Nice. All your own work?

yes sir, thank you for the compliment