Building a gaming pc - anyone done it?

[Twix42]

DS is 13 next week and desperate for his own gaming pc, they are £££
Can any one give any tips on building one from complete scratch? We are thinking it will be a combined birthday & Christmas present, but something he can build himself... We are clueless so is there a book or websites we can use to get him started?
Grateful for any tips and advice!!
TiA

Hi, my 12 year old son has made one. Yes it’s expensive so for Christmas and his birthday he got all the various components from different members of the family. I just asked him and he said pcpartpicker is the website he used to select the parts and it checks they are compatible. There are also useful youtubers that make pcs-probably lots of videos there to help him. There is a book he’s got too Haynes Build Your Own Gaming PC which may be useful. We have a friend in IT who helped a little, but it was mainly my son’s research and he built it himself with only a little help from his dad. It’s a good project!

my ds did. he was 12, followed youtube and had help from his online friends

My 13 year old son did. The parts were exp8so he saved pocket money and christmas and birthday. I think it took him about 9 months to get everything together.

We tried and failed. Ended up taking the parts to a PC repair shop. I was so relieved to get the parts out of my bathroom (he'd read that a bathroom was a good static-less place to build). Good luck.

Yes, it takes a fair bit of knowledge to get all the right parts, but it's also pretty easy as there's nothing you can plug in wrong. There are some delicate parts.

Check out the parts lists at places that build them for you. For example, www.cclonline.com/pc/gaming-pcs/ - pick a price point and check out the parts list. Note that the prices are for the box alone, not including monitor/keyboard/mouse/headset, and you will need a Windows license so it's the more expensive of the prices listed.

Gaming websites often have builds at various price points too, with a lot of info - more than the shop websites give. Here's an example: www.rockpapershotgun.com/2020/05/13/the-rps-rig-2020/

It is handy if you or he have any friends who've made one before! Particularly because it's frightening putting together £600+ of kit, and such a horror when it doesn't fire up first time. Then you have to work out what you didn't do (usually plug in a power lead) or what's broken (harder, and really hard if you don't have a spare PC you can swap bits with to test them).

My main advice would be to never skimp on the power supply (it doesn't need to be over 500W but it needs to be quality), at least 8gig of RAM preferably 16gig, get a motherboard with an NVMe SSD slot and an NVMe SSD to go in it (Sabrent Rocket are the best price/performance). AMD CPU/motherboard builds are best for the value right now, and nVidia is for the graphics card - but the nVidia 3000 series are coming out in the next month so it's an awkward moment just now, they are far better than the current 2000 series.

A gaming PC build is pretty straightforward once you know what you're doing, if a little daunting due to the cost of components involved. Research extensively for parts compatibility (post a proposed parts list on a forum such as Tom's Hardware and other users will gladly advise you on whether everything will play nicely together or whether another part might be better for your intentions/budget) and, once you've got all your components, plan the layout within the case before you start assembling (trust me on this) to account for cable management. Absolutely the toughest/riskiest part of a PC build is installing the CPU into the motherboard and mounting the cooling solution. It's one of the first parts of the build though, so at least you get it out of the way early. And lastly, although with a gaming PC build the temptation will be to invest heavily in the GPU, CPU and RAM, don't scrimp on a quality power supply unit (PSU) as it will underpin the performance, lifespan and integrity of the rest of the build components. Happy to help further if you have more specific questions

Oh - and please please try and avoid having any hard drives in there at all. SSD all the way - ideally a 1TB+ NVMe (Sabrent Rocket still!) for the main drive, perhaps add a Crucial BX500 for more storage later when it's needed. They're so much quicker and more reliable.

Haha, cross-post with Sardine. At least our advice is largely in agreement!

Fabulous thank you all for the tips... I've ordered the haynes manual, and i know he'll get money as gifts, so hopefully this will be a oject he can get invested in. Rather than us spending spending loads on something just because he wants it..
Sounds like he has a friend with an older brother who has done this before so hopefully we will get some tips there too. 👍 Appreciate all the info.
Thanks 🙂

Yep, totally in agreement with Montauk :D

Hope he has fun! It's awfully exciting having something you've built boot up for the first time.

Yes my husband and I have just done it. There is a reddit page called 'buildapcforme' . You give a budget and explain what you will be using it for etc and someone will post a list of parts they suggest for you. We then used you tube videos and followed those as we put it together. We had no issues at all, pretty straightforward.

DS 12 did this at the start of lockdown as he'd been saving up for ages. It was $$$$ but worth it I think as he has a seriously high end machine with parts he can replace as he likes, so it's not like a typical PC where you might replace the whole thing after a few years. He watched endless YouTube videos and felt really confident about it, and when it came to the actual build it went quite smoothly and he was able to troubleshoot the odd issue.

One thing I will say - his new machine bluescreened daily for a couple of months! It has stopped now and we think it had to do with drivers/updates. So I'd tell him to get a good driver checker software to help with that.

PC Gamer Mag/website give a uptodate recommendation list for building your own gaming PC. They also give recommendations on different price points.

Also useful for the future when upgrading.
www.pcgamer.com/uk/gaming-pc-build-guide/

Yes. And the first time I wrecked some of the parts by making a foolish mistake and had to get a PC shop to fix it. The guides make it look so easy but for me it really wasn't. They didn't tell me how physically awkward it was to get some of the parts and cables in, or the surprising amount of force it sometimes needs. And certainly didn't prepare me for the stress factor of knowing that one mistake could ruin parts I spent several hundred quid on. People say it's just like Lego, but you don't have to worry about breaking a Lego brick if you touch it in the wrong place!

My 2 pence. If he's never done it before, suggest he gets a cheap second-hand PC to disassemble and reassemble for practice, before building the expensive stuff.

Have you checked how much money you'll save by self building compared to just buying?

Op look on places like Marketplace (Facebook) etc for people selling theirs. Often people sell to upgrade so you can get a custom built one (better than "ready built" from amazon/pc world) for a good price.
I got my 11 year old son one from facebay which a teenage lad was selling because he upgraded to one where he could play games for older teens.
Worth a look!

My DH tried this about a year ago.

He spent about 700 quid in the end and had to take it to a computer shop because he messed something up that they had to fix.

It's currently not working. He doesnt know why. I hate the thing. He now wants a PS5 ..... I am considering divorce

We got PC solutions to build one for us, so we specified all the component and they put it together. Was cheaper than an off the shelf one.

I got mine custom built by chillblast. I knew what components I wanted but didn't have the confidence to build. Highly recommended them, their customer service is excellent, they were so helpful.

Further to my earlier advice, and in light of the above stories of bricking new builds, I will point out that anyone looking to build their own rig needs to watch a minimum of three Youtube end-to-end walkthroughs in order to understand what they're trying to achieve at each step and also how to troubleshoot common causes of POST failure. There's not necessarily any need to practice on cheap or secondhand components if you've researched the process effectively; my first build used £1500 worth of kit and went fine apart from stupidly initially mounting the cooler bracket in the wrong configuration, leaving me with not enough clearance from the RAM modules. Unforeseen problems like that will organically materialise during a build and require a bit of lateral thinking and a technical mindset to solve, but that's part of the appeal of being a system builder.

My ds did.

No idea where he learnt and it took him about 45 minutes!

Still cost about £600 not including monitor.

Combination of him saving and Christmas presents.