How To Build a New PC

[[Coi] Mr.CLuBBeR]

Grab your screwdriver, it's time to buid a new PC!

Build it. DIY. Roll your own. Whatever you call it, there’s nothing more satisfying than putting together your own computer.

Sure, you can argue that there’s no point to it anymore—OEMs get such a big price break that at best, your DIY rig will cost $100 more than a buying a pre-built PC—so why even bother? The most obvious reason to build your own rig is that you get to pick every single part. Want a teal-and-pink case for your Miami Vice homage PC? You can do it. Want to stuff a $1,500 GPU into a machine with a $75 CPU? You can do that, too.
The most compelling part of rolling your own PC, though, is the pride you get from using your hands to turn a pile of parts into a working, breathing computer. You built it, not some faceless assembly-line worker.
The good news is that building a new PC has never been easier. If you can turn a screwdriver with any confidence, you can put together a new rig yourself, once you’ve read our step-by-step story. Even better, we’ll also teach you how to pick parts like an expert, so you can confidently build the computer that fits your needs exactly, not the needs some big-box store has determined for you.
The Five-Minute Abs of PC Part-Picking

Don’t get overwhelmed, we’ll teach you how to be a PC partpicking expert in no time.
The hardest part of any new PC build is picking your parts. How much RAM do you really need? How do you really pick a GPU and CPU, and do you really want a mobo with dual Thunderbolt 2 ports? While this is information we could easily write ten magazines about, we’re going to try to distill this down to small nuggets any new PC builder can absorb to help ease being overwhelmed by the process. This information is not the last word nor everything you need to know, but it should be enough to get you going so you don’t end up under- or over-buying parts for your new computer.
How to Pick a CPU

AMD or Intel? This is a tough question, but let’s generalize this way: Intel’s CPUs are better than AMD’s CPUs right now in actual CPU chores. If you want the best performance per chip, Intel is the answer. The only time this flips on its back is if you're going to run integrated graphics with entry-level gaming as your primary goal. If so, choose an AMD APU. But even AMD fan boys agree Intel’s CPUs are in front today—so, OK, so it’s Intel. Now, you need to decide how many cores: 2, 4, or 6? For most people, a quad-core chip is the right choice for general computing, gaming, and photo or video editing on the task list. Six cores is too much for 90 percent of people’s needs; two cores will work, but if you’re a heavy multi-tasker or do even a modicum of content creation, you will feel the dual-core’s weaknesses. We’re not saying it can’t be done, but our recommendation for all but the budget buyer is a quad-core CPU. Since you’re buying Intel, you still have a choice between older Ivy Bridge CPUs and the newer current Haswell parts. Today, frankly, there’s no need to buy Ivy Bridge parts. Haswell offers better performance and more modern amenities.
How to Pick a Mobo

With most of the performance of a motherboard relying far more on the CPU, mobo buying today is more about getting the features you need and no more. If you need Thunderbolt 2, it’ll cost you, but if you don’t need Intel/Apple’s highfalutin interface, don’t pay for it. Build a list of your needs: How many USB 3.0 ports, how many SATA or PCIe, and whether you want M.2 or SATA Express. Also think about the future: Do you really intend to run multiple GPUs? If so, make sure your board has support for it, as not all do. Some, for example, have CrossFire but not SLI.
The bundled utilities with the motherboards are also an important differentiator. Some are bare-bones, while others, such as Asus, offer exceptional software. Another important differentiator today is onboard audio. Our general recommendation is to lean toward a board with engineering put into the audio subsystem. For example, Brand A’s may not be better than Brand B’s, but in general, it’ll be better than a lower-end board with no separated audio path. Finally, we recommend buying 9-series chipsets for Intel and A88X for AMD’s APU for the forward compatibility they offer. As far as size or form factor, ATX is the standard and is our preference for most builds.
How to Pick a GPU

It’s actually not as hard to pick a GPU as you may think it is. Basically, the more expensive it is, the more powerful it is. Yes, a $300 GPU is faster than a $250 GPU. It’s just a question of how much you want to spend. Before you pick, though, consider what resolution you want to game at. If it’s a single monitor at 1920x1080, generally—and this is a very general guideline—a $250 GPU will give you a solid 50-plus fps performance in 95 percent of today’s games, with occasional dips. As you scale up in resolution, or if you simply want a solid higher frame rate all the time, pay more. If you intend to run at 2560x1440 on a 27-inch panel, you’re solidly in the $550-or-more range in GPU expenses. For most people though, $250 is the sweet spot in GPUs, and will give you a solid experience at 1080p in most games with few compromises in visual quality.
How to Pick a Cooler

For the person who will never overclock, the stock cooler is actually a good option. It’s free and AMD or Intel have done the actual engineering to ensure that it works under 95 percent of situations. If you intend to overclock though, an aftermarket cooler is mandatory. Our rule of thumb is don’t spend more than $35 to $45 for an aftermarket air cooler. Once you’ve passed that mark, our advice is to buy a closedloop liquid cooler. There’s no maintenance, and they’re generally quieter and outperform most air coolers. CLC’s come in all shapes, sizes, and prices, so buy on your needs. If you intend a mild to medium overclock, a single 120mm CLC is enough. If you intend to push the overclock harder, a dual 240mm CLC gets you better cooling performance or less noise than a 120mm-size CLC.
How to Pick RAM

For the most part, RAM is a commodity like pork bellies. The chips are made by a handful of players and then sorted by the memory makers you mostly recognize. Unless you get no-name generic RAM, memory from any of the respected RAM makers will get the job done. That’s not all, though. You need to think about how much and how fast. For capacity, 8GB is our recommendation for a normal build. We’d keep 4GB in the budget category. Going to 32GB or for many, 16GB, won’t net much difference. Your second decision is clock speed. Today, we think the sweet spot is DDR3/1866. Anything more is luxury but does actually net some performance gains on Haswell CPUs. If you intend to run integrated graphics though, get the highest clock speed you can afford (and that your mobo will run), as it directly impacts gaming performance.
How to Pick an SSD

You can spend two days trying to decide between this type of X NAND or that type of Y NAND, but the truth is that with the performance of SSDs gated by the SATA interface, your primary influencers should really be capacity, price, software, and warranty. These matter much more than whether one SSD is five percent faster in one type of disk-intensive task than another. That doesn’t mean a low-end or old SSD is the answer. Newer SSDs almost always use more current technology and are preferred over older drives. For capacity, 128GB is the entry level on SSDs and 240GB or 480GB and up is preferred to make your life better. Basically, a mid-range or higher SSD from a trusted brand is enough to avoid heartache today. Finally, remember to have a backup going. SSDs die just as HDDs die, so plan on dealing with it.
How to Pick an HDD

The HDD is important but we’ve come to the conclusion that it should only be used as a primary storage device on the most budget of builds. So, forget about the RPM or access times—that’s 2009 thinking. The only real factors in an HDD are capacity, price, and warranty. For most people, a 1TB drive is the minimum for a new system, with the true sweet spot today being 3TB. As far as the all-important “reliability” factor, we recommend that you don’t bank on that. Yes, a longer warranty usually tells you how long the company thinks it might last, but it won’t tell you how long your particular HDD will last. We recommend backing up your SSD to your HDD and then backing up your HDD to a NAS or a secondary HDD.
How to Pick a Case

Picking a case is the most personal decision you make. There’s really no easy way to answer this question for you, but just know that most people will want a standard ATX case. Niceties to look for include generous cutouts to access the back of the motherboard, wiring ports, and removable drives cages.

New builders often overspend on unnecessary motherboard features. If you don’t need Thunderbolt 2 or Wi-Fi, go for a different board.
How to Pick an ODD

This is a category you don’t have to burn too much brain power on. A $20 Asus/Samsung/ LG/etc. SATA DVD Burner will get the job done. If you are contemplating using a slim USB-based drive, just know that if you intend to use it for a lot of burning and ripping, laptop drives in the slim cases usually stink in performance, and it’s not USB’s fault. Laptop drives tend to be significantly slower than desktop SATA drives.
How to Pick a PSU

Your first criteria in picking a PSU is the obvious: Will it power my hardware? There are about a dozen different PSU calculators you can use on line. The most popular is Outervision’s at http://extreme.outervision.com/PSUEngine. According to the calculator, for a standard single processor, single high-end GPU system with SSD, HDD, and 16GB of RAM—believe it or not—a 500-watt PSU is acceptable today. We’d agree with that assessment, but we’d add a little more wattage for summer months and potential future hardware. You may be confused over the multi-rail vs. single-rail, but for normal PCs, don’t sweat it. Only when you get to extreme builds do you need to pay attention to per-rail amperage needs. You will definitely want to make sure the PSU has the ability to run the number of GPUs you will use. Finally, consider the warranty as a good measure of the quality of a PSU. A PSU with a one-year warranty is very likely to be inferior to one with a five-year or seven-year warranty. The rest is really just gravy: digital control, monitoring, and modular cables.

Outervision’s PSU calculator gives you a good ballpark estimate for sizing your unit, but we like to add 20 percent to be conservative.
Web Help

You’ve got a rough idea of what you might want in your PC, but now you’re overwhelmed by the sheer amount of parts out there.
One of the best tools available today is PCpartpicker.com. It’s a one-stop shop for helping you price out and configure your system. Just click the system build button and start selecting your parts. Selected parts will filter out other parts you don’t need—pick an LGA1150 CPU and it will only let you pick from LGA1150 motherboards. The tool crawls popular stores for the latest in prices and rebates, too, so you don’t have to.

PCpartpicker.com only helps you sort through the bazillion parts out there. If you want to research the key components you’re confused by—say, the CPU and GPU—you can look at Cpuboss.com, Gpuboss.com, and Passmark.com for general comparisons of CPUs and GPUs. These sites offer very high-level views of the products, but they will at least get you in the ballpark of what you want. From there, we recommend drilling down into other such valuable sites (ahem, Maximumpc.com) to get a better feel for the particular parts. One more site we’d recommend to aid in decoding the CPUs is Intel’s ark.intel.com. It helps sort out the exact differences between the billion different CPUs Intel offers today.

A balanced system for general use should see that the CPU and GPU get equal attention.

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What We Built and Why

Before we walk you through how to build your first PC, we’ll show you the parts we picked and tell you why. The two most important were the CPU and GPU. For the CPU, there are cheaper CPUs to be had, but Intel’s Core i5-4670K delivers the most bang for the buck. It easily overclocks beyond its base clock of 3.4GHz and its four cores easily outrun dual-core parts. It is, essentially, the part to have for a budget enthusiast who does some content creation and gaming. Our box is a “balanced” build, so we spent a reasonable amount of cash our video card. At $249, the Asus GeForce GTX 760 gives us solid 1080p gaming with the latest games. Mind you, it’s not a solid 60fps on max settings, but with a few tweaks that most would never notice during game play, you could get there. The other important part here is the SSD. We thought about foregoing an SSD and making a few other trims to get the price under $800 but decided that any new machine you build should make you smile—and nothing makes you smile more these days than an SSD. We could have dropped the capacity to 128GB as well, but it’s just too hard to live with a boot drive that small, and doubling the capacity only costs about 30 percent more. You should know the Core i5-4670K comes with a stock Intel heatsink. If you never intended to overclock, this would be fine, but since we intend to take advantage of the free performance from the Core i5- 4670K, we plunked down the cash for the Silverston AR01 cooler.

The last part to highlight is the MSI Z97-Gaming 7 mobo. This is a solid board with an M.2 slot for faster SSD performance upgrade potential, as well as support for SLI and CrossFire, and a separated audio path on the PCB for theoretically cleaner sound. We don’t need the direct voltage readouts, but at $164 you’re getting a lot of motherboard value with the Z97 Gaming 7.
One last thing we like to do is look at how much each component costs as a percentage of the entire rig. This gives you an idea if your system is “balanced” or not. By balanced we mean if the system is properly weighted toward its use. In this case, it’s a balanced machine with slightly more going to the GPU than the CPU. If we were building a pure gaming rig, we’d tilt the confi guration to put more into the GPU. If the box were to be used for content creation using videos and high-resolution still images, a shift to more money on the CPU would be advised. If you simply want to store an insane amount of fi les on the drives, spend more of your budget on HDDs.

Step 1: The Case

The NZXT Source 530 is a full-tower case with two 120mm fans in it. That’s a pretty standard fan size, though 140mm is increasingly common. These fans attach to the case with specifically designed screws. They have a fatter bore and a coarser thread than normal. Our case came with a small box full of little baggies containing a variety of screw types for different applications. Thumbscrews are a popular type, and our case uses two in the back to keep the side panel on.

When attaching a fan, don’t put the first screw all the way in. Just most of the way. Then go diagonally across to the second hole, putting that screw in most of the way, too. Then, attach the other two screws (again, most of the way) in any order you like. Once all four screws are attached, you can finish tightening them. Waiting until this point to tighten gives you more room to wiggle the fan around if it’s not lining up perfectly with the holes. When you put the motherboard in later, you’ll plug the fan cable into a case fan connector on the board. Our case has a fan hub, however, so we plug our fan into that instead, then plug the hub directly into the power supply unit (we’ll talk about the PSU in a bit).

Step 2: The CPU

Retail motherboards get shipped inside an anti-static bag. Place the motherboard on top of this for now. The CPU tray is protected by a plastic cover. You can pop that off by pulling a tab on one of its sides.

Do not throw this cover away. If you need to return the board for service, the maker may not accept any motherboard without this cover in place. Next, there’s a metal lever that secures the actual CPU bracket. Pull the end of this lever out, then pull up to free the bracket. It should swing clear of the tray.

Now, look for a small gold triangle on one of the corners of your CPU. There should be a corresponding marker on the motherboard. You want to line up these two markers to make sure the CPU is oriented correctly during installation. Once you’ve set the CPU in the tray according to the markers, put the bracket back on top, and return the lever to its original position.

Step 3: The RAM

Our motherboard has four slots. We’ll be using slots 1 and 3 (counting from left to right). Your board manual will tell you which slots to use for different RAM configurations (please follow it). Each RAM slot has tabs on either end.

At least one of these can move out of the way to allow RAM installation. Each slot also has a notch that corresponds to a notch on the stick. Line up these notches, and press the stick gently but firmly into the slot until you hear the tab click. You may need to use a see-saw motion to get the stick in.

Step 4: The CPU Cooler (Phase One)

You could use the stock cooler that comes with a retail Intel CPU, but we chose an “aftermarket” variant, the Silverstone AR01, since we want the option to push the CPU beyond its factory settings. This cooler is comparable to a Cooler Master Hyper 212 Evo. We use the Evo a lot, so we wanted to switch things up a bit.

The backplate installs first. This one has three sets of screw holes. Stand the motherboard on an edge, and rotate the backplate slightly until you can see through four screw holes to the other side of the motherboard.

This backplate will not end up perfectly square, and it may take a minute to line up. The cooler comes with a set of screws that attach on the other side of the board. Each screw also gets a spacer to help prevent damage. Like with the case fan, don’t put the first screw all the way in. Go most of the way, then go diagonally across and do that screw next. Then go most of the way with the third and fourth, then fully tighten all four screws.

Step 5: The CPU Cooler (Phase Two)

You can set the motherboard back down now. The AR01 comes with two sets of brackets—one for AMD CPUs and the other for Intel CPUs—and the manual will show you which to use. Pay close attention to how the brackets’ screw holes are oriented. Basically, you want to be able to draw an invisible “X” over the CPU, using the diagonal line of the bracket’s screw holes as a guide. Now, attach four nuts to the brackets to set them firmly in place. At this point, you’re ready to put thermal paste on top of your CPU. Apply a small pea’s worth, peel the protective plastic off the bottom of the CPU cooler, and set the cooler on top of the CPU.

The AR01 has another bracket that goes underneath the cooler’s radiator fins, connecting the first two brackets to each other.

This third bracket has two bundled screws. As with the case fan and the backplate screws, don’t put the first screw in all the way. Just part way, then attach the other and put it in part way. Alternate between the two until they are tight. Lastly, connect the cooler’s fan to the appropriate connector on the motherboard.

Step 6: The Motherboard

This motherboard comes with an individually packaged I/O shield. The shield does not use any screws. Instead, you just press it into the rectangular hole in the back of the case, and it uses tension to stay put.

You may need to tap a corner or two with the handle of a screwdriver to get the shield to pop in all the way. Now, you can set the motherboard down inside the case. Since the Source 530 has built-in standoff, we don’t need to install those separately. However, you still need to apply some pressure against the I/O shield to get the screw holes on the motherboard to line up with the screw holes in the standoffs. But after one of those screws is in, you can take the pressure off. There are usually nine holes in all. Your case should come with screws sized for motherboards.

Step 7: The Power Supply Unit

In this case, the PSU sits in the bottom. Below is a grill for air intake, so you place the side of the PSU that has the fan on it against this grill. Underneath this case is also a filter to keep dust from getting in. The case comes with four screws that attach the PSU to the back; for easy identification, these screws have hexagonal (sixsided) heads on them.

Our PSU is semi-modular, so its CPU and motherboard power cables are permanently attached, but the other cables are not. From the bag that comes in the retail box, we’ll pull one cable labeled “PCIE” for the video card, and two cables labeled “SATA” for our three storage devices (each SATA power cable has multiple connectors). One end can only plug into the power supply, while the other end is “keyed” to fit into the device. We can feed cables behind the motherboard tray to keep our case presentable. There is a cutout at the top left-hand corner of the motherboard tray to do this with the CPU power cable. You’ll need to remove the case’s other side panel to get behind the mobo. Customarily, it’s secured by two large screws at the back of the case.

Step 8: The Video Card

Counting from the top of the case, we’ll be removing slot covers 2 and 3 from the rear. You may need to temporarily remove slot cover 4 to get enough clearance for the video card’s bracket. Once the card is in the slot, secure its slot bracket with one of the thumbscrews that you just removed. The bracket has both notches and holes. Use a hole for the best results.

Take that PCIE power cable we connected to the power supply earlier and plug the other end into the card (after feeding it behind the motherboard, if you like). This card uses an eight-pin cable, and our cable is “6+2,” meaning that it has two pins that can detach if you only need six pins in total. Like the CPU and motherboard power cables, this one will snap into place when it’s secure. If the connector isn’t going in, try rotating it 180 degrees first, rather than trying to force it.

Step 9: Storage

This case has removable trays that come out from the “far” side. They move when you pinch the tabs sticking out. For a 2.5-inch drive like an SSD, you screw it directly into the tray. Make sure that the drive’s connectors are pointing toward the tabs, to make it easier to attach cables. Your SSD may come with small screws for this purpose. We had some screws bundled with the case that had “brims” on their heads, of two different lengths. We used the longer screws. For 3.5-inch mechanical drives, the tray has preinstalled nubs that snap into where screws would go.

Next, you can feed your SATA power cable from the power supply. You may need to move your drives to different trays to best accommodate the distance between each connector on the cable. Your power supply may also come with multiple SATA power cables that you can experiment with. The connectors on the cable and the drive are slightly “L” shaped, so they can only go in one way. Once those are connected, grab the SATA data cables from your motherboard’s retail box. You’ll usually see a combination of “straight” and “right-angle” cables. Right angles are for tight spots. On our motherboard with Intel’s Z97 chipset, all of its SATA data cable ports (toward the lower left-hand corner) will behave the same, so you can plug into whichever is most convenient. We recommend that you consult your mobo manual for where to install them, but we always prefer the ports from the Intel or AMD chipset.

Step 10: Optical Drive, and Some Wiring

The large drive bays on the front of our case have tabs to help remove their covers. We chose the top-most one, making it easier to reach if the case is on the floor. The side of this drive bay has a latch you pull out before sliding the drive in. Once the front bezel of the drive is flush with the front of the case, you can put the latch back down. No screws are required here. Next, we connect the SATA power and data cables like we did with the SSD and mechanical hard drive.

Last but not least, this motherboard comes with a block of pins that plug into a connector on the lower right-hand corner of the motherboard. This block connects to a set of wires coming from the front of the case that handle the power button, reset button, and activity lights. The negative wire is usually white. This area of the board usually also has a connector for the front panel’s USB 2.0 ports. Our case has only USB 3.0 ports, so we plug that into a USB 3.0 header near the RAM slots. On the lower left-hand corner of the board, you will customarily find the header for the cable that connects your front headphone and microphone jacks to the board. Like the internal USB 2.0 ports, its pin arrangement is designed so that the connector can only go in one way, so check that before plugging in the cable.

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Install Windows 8.1

Your box is built, time to use it!

Installing Windows 8.1 is a snap, but for the uninitiated, it can be a scary task. We’ll walk you through the basics of getting an OS onto your drive. And yes, if you bought Windows 7, it’s pretty much the same steps.
If you bought Windows 8.1 from a retailer, you’re likely installing it from a DVD. To get started, just put the disc into the drive and boot your box. If the SSD and hard drive are the first boot devices and completely blank, the system should boot straight to the installer. If you’re recycling an SSD or HDD, the system may try to boot to the old OS. In that case, you’ll need to change the boot order in the UEFI/BIOS (the sort-of operating system equivalent for the hardware itself, which loads before Windows does) to make the CD/DVD the first boot device.

As Windows starts the install, it’ll first ask you for your Product Key. That’s the serial number for this copy of Windows. Mind you, this is for the retail version of Windows. An Enterprise version that you install for a 90-day trial won’t ask for a product key. Input it and press enter. You’ll soon be greeted by a licensing terms screen that you’ll have to agree to. Then, Windows will ask you what type of install you want, an upgrade or custom.

Select Custom, which will bring you to a screen that should show you both drives you can install the OS to. Select your SSD as the target. You can tell it’s the SSD by its smaller capacity.

If you did reuse an older SSD or HDD and don’t want the data, you’ll see all of the partitions to select from in Windows. Since you don’t want that old data (right?) we recommend that you delete all of the previous partitions on the target drive by selecting each partition and pressing the Delete button. We don’t recommend that you ever have any “hot” drives with data you want to keep plugged in during and OS install, to reduce the chances of you wiping your data by accident.

That’s it. Windows will start the install and take anywhere from 10 to 20 minutes to complete.

Overclocking 101

Because factory settings are for wussies.

Out of the box, our quad-core Intel Core i5-4670K CPU will run at 3.4GHz. But when a task doesn’t need all four cores at once, the chip will engage a “turbo” mode and push to 3.8GHz on one or two cores. These speeds are based on clock multipliers. The CPU has an element called a base clock that runs at 100MHz, and its non-turbo setting multiplies that 34 times to get 3,400MHz, aka 3.4GHz. Our CPU’s name has a “K” at the end, so the clock multiplier is unlocked. We can dive into the BIOS and crank up this multiplier. Motherboards usually also come with performance-tweaking software, but we prefer the fine-tuning available in the BIOS.
And yes, we’ll give the standard disclaimer: Overclocking risks damaging your CPU or motherboard and possibly causing the moon to spin out of orbit, so do this at your own risk. OK, really, it’s not that bad but there are always risks, so go into it with your eyes open.
While the system is starting up, mash the Del key to access the BIOS. (You may need to press a different key, depending on your motherboard.) For our MSI Z97 Gaming 7, we go to the “Overclocking Settings” screen and switch from Simple to Advanced mode. For first-timers, a CPU Ratio of 40 is a safe 4GHz overclock. Press the “+” and “-” keys to adjust the ratio (some motherboards use Page Up and Page Down instead).

When we push the multiplier past 42x with this particular CPU, its core voltage needs a boost, too. A setting of 1.3V should be fine, up to 4.4GHz.

We generally don’t recommend pushing your voltage past 1.4V, but everything else is fair game. You may also need to increase the power to the motherboard’s voltage regulator modules (VRMs). In this BIOS, those settings are in the “DigitALL Power” submenu. Each increment raises your OC ceiling, but it also makes the VRMs run hotter, which impacts stability. We’d stick to tweaking just a couple things like Phase Control and Vdroop Offset, one or two increments at the time. If your PC stops booting, you can reset the BIOS itself with a labeled button on the board (the manual has a diagram showing its location).

You can test stability with a free program called Prime95 (http://www.mersenne.org), using its Large FFT torture test, accessible from the Options menu. Do this for at least one hour. Some enthusiasts will go a full 24 hours before they consider their OC stable. For Intel, as long as the chip stays at or below 85 degrees Celsius in Prime95, your temperature is fine. When this CPU hits 90 C, it ordinarily kicks into a lower gear to avoid burning up.

Overall, we were pretty happy with this build. The case has a solid feel to it, though we would move the top exhaust fan to the front as an intake. Built-in motherboard standoffs are a nice bonus, and 4.4GHz is a nice overclock for an air cooler with a single 120mm fan.

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