The sheer amount of incompetent “PC reviews” and bizarre advice about what to buy in a PC is crazy, so I am writing this to try and clarify the process as it really isn’t all that complex — there’s just a fair bit of information to digest on the subject.
For the avoidance of doubt: in this article, I have recommended various brands and PC builders. None are advertisements or sponsors; they are all my own recommendations based on knowledge and experience.
Table of Contents
∘ Laptops
∘ Pre-built vs. custom PCs
· Computer Components
· Processor (CPU)
∘ Explanation of processor names and terms
∘ Intel Processors
∘ AMD Processors
· Graphics card (GPU)
∘ PC Cases/Towers
∘ Cooling Systems
· Peripherals
∘ Monitors
· My computer’s specs, as an example
· Optimizations
∘ Enable XMP
∘ Set Maximum performance power mode for your graphics card
· Electricity Costs
∘ Setting the CPU’s power mode
∘ Monitoring your computer’s temperature status
· PC Building Websites Tier List
∘ Best
∘ Good
∘ Avoid
· What if I only want a PC for non-demanding tasks?
∘ If you don’t have high performance needs, and some specific requirement for iOS, avoid Apple at all costs.
· If I’m building a gaming PC on a budget, what should I prioritise?
First of all, let’s look at laptops vs. desktops.
Laptops
There is only one reason you ever want a laptop — if you need to be able to travel with it.
Laptops come with a heavy price — not only will you pay more for the same level of computing power, they also run hotter (due to the small amount of space the components must fit into, and most poor cooling systems for the same reason). This means they will wear out faster than an equivalent desktop, and are less suited to demanding tasks like gaming — yes, even ‘gaming’ laptops. You also can’t buy a nice keyboard or monitor for them — you can attach them externally, but if you’re going to do that and aren’t travelling like crazy, why on earth are you buying a laptop in the first place?
Trying to customise a laptop after you’ve bought it is near-impossible. Desktop parts are mostly quite easy to replace with a few exceptions, but with laptops you’re best off assuming you can’t replace any of the components once you buy it.
Unless you travel for work and need to use a laptop, or you have some other serious travel requirement, laptops are a bad idea.
Pre-built vs. custom PCs
There are two ways you can buy a PC: a pre-built model ready to ship, or through a website that will let you customise what parts are in your PC and the case, effectively a kind of made-to-order product.
You can — if you have the requisite knowledge — build your PC from scratch, but I don’t recommend that unless you want to do it for fun. It’s rarely cheaper to do it this way — many made-to-order PC websites offer good prices, due to a mix of sales and the fact that they buy components in bulk, which is much cheaper than you can get them as an individual.
The main plus-point of pre-built PCs is that if you’re on a budget, they are often cheaper than custom-built PCs. This is for two reasons:
- They’re made in bulk to one specification, and are thus subject to slightly better economies of scale than custom PCs (and will be on sale sometimes)
- They tend to use cheaper components for things that casual PC users don’t think about (in particular, the cooling system and the power supply unit). This can be problematic — many pre-built PCs run at very high temperatures, including temperatures so high they’ll cause your components to throttle themselves to prevent being wrecked. Pre-built PCs often come with smaller cases, meaning it can sometimes be difficult to install a good enough cooler to offset this problem.
There are a few conditions that might make you consider buying a pre-built PC:
- You’re on a strict budget and need the best processing performance you can get for your budget
- You’re willing to replace the CPU cooler yourself if needed, or able to take it somewhere to have it replaced (remember to add this expense to your total budget)
- You are able to tell what cooler will fit in it, and only choose a prebuilt PC with sufficient space for a decent cooler
Otherwise, get a custom built PC — this way you can choose the components and your PC will last a lot longer. It is worth the extra investment given how long a computer should last you for.
Computer Components
So, what do we need to consider when buying a new PC, and what don’t we need to consider? Let’s go through the components in turn.
Processor (CPU)
As a brief explanation, CPUs handle general-purpose processing tasks — everything that your graphics card (GPU) doesn’t deal with. For a lot of users, a particularly powerful CPU isn’t necessary —games and most other demanding tasks for normal users are mostly dealt with by the graphics card.
There are two major CPU brands:
- Intel (processors named e.g. Core i7–10700k)
- AMD (processors named e.g. AMD Ryzen 5800X)
In times past, Intel was superior to AMD in most ways, with AMD seen as a kind of budget option. Today, AMD has caught up and they are roughly equal at present — you can more or less opt for either, and the performance differences are insignificant to most users.
Unless you have specific requirements, you’re best off opting for the cheapest processor available, of the current or previous generation (e.g. Intel’s processors are currently on their 12th generation, signified by the “12XXX” in their names, such as 12700).
Explanation of processor names and terms
When choosing a processor, there are some terms to be familiar with that are specific to Intel and AMD.
Intel Processors
Intel processors have names that work like this:
The brand modifier — i5, i7, with the newest being i9 — can be thought of as the major version. There are big improvements from i5 -> i7, etc.
The numbers after it denote the generation — a sort of minor version. E.g. 10700k is a 10th generation Intel CPU, 6700F is a 6th generation CPU… etc.
After all the numbers you will usually find one of three combinations of letters:
- K: Unlocked for custom overclocking
- F: No integrated graphics included
- KF: both of the above
For most users, these make pretty much zero difference. Even for F-type processors, they are still overclocked heavily — they just don’t have custom overclocking options, but the vast majority of users do not need them.
Nobody buys a PC without a dedicated graphics card these days, so having a processor without integrated graphics doesn’t matter, and it’s usually slightly cheaper.
Of the time of writing, in my opinion it’s best to get an i7 processor, or if you’re on a budget an i5 processor. i9 is overkill for users that don’t have very specific requirements.
AMD Processors
AMD processor names work like this:
You can see that it’s similarly laid out to the Intel processor names. The X in AMD processor names signifies that it’s overclocked a little more than the non-X version, and as such comes at a slightly higher price with higher power consumption.
Similar to intel, most users should avoid the highest-power CPUs, as there’s almost zero chance you will need that much power, and the second and third highest options are generally better value for money.
Graphics card (GPU)
GPUs, as explained above, handle all graphics processing tasks — including games, rendering for 3D work, and more. These — at the time of writing — are likely to be the single most expensive part of your computer if you’re playing games or doing heavy graphics processing, due to a mix of chip shortages and cryptocurrency scammers buying up cards en masse.
There are two major GPU brands:
- NVidia (GeForce GTX, RTX)
- AMD (Radeon)
Unlike the CPU market, where AMD has risen to match Intel, the opposite is true here. NVidia’s cards have been seen as superior for a long time, and are only widening that gap. AMD’s cards are still good — they are used a lot in consoles, big business setups, etc — but they are not generally a preferred option for a home user unless you are on a budget or are focused on rendering tasks rather than gaming.
With graphics cards, you ideally want to buy a card that has enough power for what you need now, and enough for what you may need a few years from now. This is for two reasons:
- As you move up the list of powerful graphics cards, the value-to-money ratio gets worse — the top-end graphics cards are for people with money to burn or very specific requirements, making it foolish to buy these most of the time.
- You don’t want to buy your PC, and find in two years’ time that your graphics card can’t handle some new game you planned on playing — you want to plan for this by buying slightly more power than you need, if your budget allows.
For example, let’s look at the current set of GeForce RTX cards and their performance in benchmark tests, as a rough idea.
What we can see is that, while the more powerful cards *are* better, the price rises a lot faster than the performance does, especially for the top-end cards where you pay significantly more for very little extra performance. This is equally true of AMD cards.
As such, buying anything above an RTX 3080 (which is already overkill for most users) “to futureproof your PC” is stupid. Most of your other components will be the bottleneck of your system long before that is, and a cheaper card will suit almost any gaming requirement anyway. Buy the cheapest card that will run what you want now and what you think you will need a few years into the future; by the time you want to replace it, cards and their prices will have improved anyway.
Brand-wise, I’ve never seen a reason to prefer one brand over another (e.g. ASUS, Gigabyte, and others all make cards with NVidia tech, but most of the time you are just paying extra for the brand name and not much else. An RTX 3070 is an RTX 3070). If you’re big on overclocking things, for fun or whatever other reason, some brands make graphics cards that run at higher clock speeds and/or have more fans to support that, but it’s usually not a major difference and not worth considering for most users.
PC Cases/Towers
Unless you’re spending $2000+ on your PC, the case is pretty much the last thing you should be worrying about.
While it’s nice to have an aesthetic case, and a case with good airflow to allow the cooling systems to work, most cases have sufficient airflow — a lot of tech reviewers get very overconcerned about this, when the real culprit of overheated systems is generally the CPU cooler or an insufficient number of case fans, and has little to do with the airflow of the case.
Note that pre-built systems often come with small cases with limited space. This is something to be aware of, because many prebuilt systems also contain poor cooling — and if the case isn’t big enough to let you change said cooling, you’re going to have a serious problem. Pre-builts also have a tendency to come with few fans and no space for more, making the problem even worse.
Lots of brands make PC cases; you can pick one you like the aesthetics of for the most part, I suggest buying a mid or full size tower with plenty of room for extra fans.
Cooling Systems
Cooling systems cool down your CPU, so it doesn’t overheat while doing a lot of work (they don’t directly cool the GPU — that has its own cooling system, though your case fans will help with this.)
Bad cooling systems are the bane of most pre-built PCs — and if you skimp on it, it’ll become the bane of your PC as well, especially if you’re planning to do any heavy tasks with it. That said, it’s not necessary to spend loads of money — just a decent model will do the job.
This is a bit of a complex topic, but it’s worth understanding.
Coolers come in one of two categories:
- Air coolers: These have something of a bad reputation due to ‘stock’ air coolers often being terrible, but high-end air coolers have a lot of merits, and can rival some high-end liquid coolers at a lower price (Noctua are renowned for high performance air coolers, for instance).
- Liquid coolers (AIO): The best liquid coolers are unrivalled in performance; they’re also more flashy and aren’t as obtrusive on the motherboard when you want to make changes to your PC later, but are a big pain to install and are more expensive.
When it comes to performance, the top-end liquid coolers cannot be beaten. Premium liquid coolers with 280mm or 360mm radiators will cool better than anything else, but are also the most expensive. Good air coolers can rival 120mm and 240mm liquid coolers on performance and are generally more reliable than liquid cooling, as there are less parts that can fail. Lower-end liquid coolers can be so-so, it depends what you need it for.
If you can afford it and want something aesthetic, Corsair’s ELITE CAPPELLIX line is excellent but on the more expensive side — if you want something more budget-friendly, CoolerMaster’s ML240L is excellent for its price. NZXT also make pretty good liquid coolers. If you’re getting an air cooler, due to e.g. not being worried about appearance or space constraints in your case prohibiting a large AIO unit, Noctua make air coolers with very high performance that can rival 240mm liquid coolers.
Most liquid coolers come in sizes of 120mm, 140mm, 240mm, 280mm, 360mm. You should aim for a 240mm cooler, or 120mm if you aren’t planning on making your PC do any particularly demanding tasks; the smaller sizes aren’t a good idea unless you’ve got a very small case that can’t fit a bigger cooler, as they don’t cool as well (which is sometimes a problem for pre-built PCs). You can get a bigger one if you want to, but it isn’t going to be necessary unless you are overclocking your CPU like crazy.
If you’re buying a custom build PC, they often have an option for installing extra fans in your PC case. I highly recommend you make use of this to improve the airflow in your case and thus improve the cooling; it’s usually quite cheap and thus very cost effective.
As a final note, bear in mind that some coolers can get pretty noisy if your computer is under heavy load. Good air coolers are frequently somewhat quieter in this regard, so if this is a problem for you, check the benchmarks for the coolers you’re considering before picking one, as they will show noise levels when idle and under load.
Power Supply Unit (PSU)
Choosing a good PSU is critical. Poor quality PSUs can fail, and worse, fry the rest of your components if they fail badly, wasting you a lot of money. This is one of the parts many prebuilt PCs skimp on, because most users have no idea about PSUs and as such won’t complain about something they don’t know.
When choosing a PSU, you need to consider two things:
- It must have at least enough power (plus an extra 20% or so of buffer space) to power all your PC’s components. Custom PC building websites will check this for you — they’ll throw up an error if the PSU you select isn’t powerful enough for your system.
- You may want to opt for a slightly more powerful PSU than you think you need. It will give you more breathing room to upgrade your graphics card later if you choose to, and good quality PSUs come with long warranty periods.
Corsair is a very reliable PSU brand; I highly recommend them. EVGA are also good; all of them come with pretty long warranty periods, which is a good indicator of their quality.
For example, Corsair’s RM series come with 10-year warranties and aren’t that expensive, making them well worth having over a cheaper alternative.
As a side note, you don’t need to worry about a “higher power PSU using more electricity”. For example, a 750W PSU doesn’t draw 750W of power all the time — it can draw up to that amount. Buying a PSU that’s slightly surplus to your requirements won’t give you bigger electricity bills, though if you’re never intending to upgrade your graphics card, it won’t be necessary.
Memory (RAM)
Memory — in simple terms — is a temporary storage area. Your computer loads programs, games, movies — whatever data you want — from your hard drive or solid state drive into memory in order to use it.
There are two main things to consider with memory: how much performance you need, and how much memory storage you need. For most purposes you can measure memory performance in MHz; almost all memory is DDR4 at present, though DDR5 memory with faster speeds exists it is not yet widespread.
For users not using tons of memory, 16GB of standard DDR4 3200Mhz memory is fine; if you want extra performance you can go for 3600Mhz or higher memory, but it’s more expensive. If you use programs that eat memory for breakfast (Blender, Photoshop, some modern games), you may want to opt for 32GB of memory instead.
I’d note that DDR5 memory with speeds of 5000Mhz+ are coming out lately, so for users needing very high performance, you may want to look into this and make sure the motherboard you choose supports DDR5 for future upgrading, even if you don’t want DDR5 memory straight away.
You can pretty much go with any major brand for memory; I am partial to Corsair because they have a very good reputation for quality and reliability plus they manufacture a lot of other components, but so long as you pick any well-known brand (Corsair, Kingston, HyperX, G.Skill, Crucial amongst others) you should be fine.
Most motherboards have 4 slots for memory sticks. If you want 16GB of memory, you’re best off having 2 x 8 GB sticks than 1 x 16GB stick; this is because memory runs in dual channel, so it can be used faster with more than one. The same does *not* apply to if you’re buying 32GB of memory; 2 x 16GB sticks is fine, 4 x 8GB sticks won’t be faster on most modern motherboards, and it will limit your ability to upgrade to higher memory amounts in future if you need to.
Motherboard
Most users do not need to worry about this too much at the current time. The differences between motherboards are usually technical points without much relevance to most users — an added bonus of using a custom PC build website is that in the rare event you pick components that e.g. aren’t compatible with the motherboard, it won’t let you order it until you pick components that are compatible with each other.
The only time you need to think about this is if you plan on using a new technology that your motherboard needs to support. For example, DDR5 memory is currently very early in the process of replacing slower DDR4 memory; most current motherboards do not support DDR5 except for very new models, so if you’re planning to use DDR5 memory in future you will want to select a motherboard that is compatible with it.
This is the only thing you really need to think about with motherboards — whether you need it to support some specific emerging technology. Outside of that, it’s not something that needs much consideration really.
Replacing a motherboard is near-impossible. You can do it but it comes with all kinds of annoying problems (such as having to re-paste your CPU cooler), disconnect and re-connect practically everything in your PC, and generally it’s a hundred times easier and more sensible to upgrade your motherboard when you buy a new computer.
Storage Drives
Understanding storage drives helps a lot in making your PC work efficiently. There are a few types of storage drives; to explain them in simple terms:
- Hard Disk Drives (HDDs): slow to read and write data, but offer high capacity and are cheap.
- 2.5" Solid State Drives (SSDs): much faster to read and write data than HDDs, but more expensive.
- M.2 Solid State Drives (SSDs): much faster than regular SSDs, but also more expensive.
I recommend you have two drives: one M.2 drive, and one HDD drive. Things you want to load fast — programs and games you use often, your operating system, etc — should all be stored on the M.2 drive, with other things such as movies or music on your HDD drive where speed is not an issue.
Note that some cheaper M.2 drives use SATA connections, which are slow. Make sure you buy an M.2 drive that uses the NVMe interface — it will be written in its item description. 2.5" SSDs and HDDs both use SATA connections.
It’s also important to note that M.2 drives differ a lot in performance — the expensive ones can be up to 5 times faster than the cheaper ones, but they do come at a hefty premium. That said, even cheap M.2 drives have very fast performance compared to normal 2.5" SSDs (and they’re already fast), so unless you need lightning speed loading times for huge data files, you don’t need to worry about that much and an inexpensive one from a good brand wil do just fine.
While the mechanics of how hard disks and solid state drives (and thus how their speeds work) is a pretty complex topic, most users only really need to consider the following:
- 2.5" SSDs are around 5 times faster at reading and writing data than HDDs, and do not have the “startup delay” of HDDs after idle periods (you’ll notice this sometimes when you go to browse your files on an idle hard drive; it takes a few seconds to spin up before it shows you the files.)
- M.2 NVMe drives are between 3 and >10 times faster than 2.5" SSDs. This depends on how much you’re willing to spend, but even a low-end, older generation M.2 NVMe drive will be more than fast enough to make your computer’s boot up time extremely fast and your programs start quickly.
Do not skimp on your main drive! It doesn’t need to be expensive, but having e.g. a HDD or 2.5" SSD instead of an M.2 NVMe drive will make your computer a lot slower when booting up, starting up programs, loading new areas in games, etc. The small price difference to buy an M.2 drive is absolutely worth it, even a low-end one with a low speed compared to others.
Plenty of good brands in this space exist — Western Digital (WD), Samsung, Seagate and Corsair are all good, amongst others.
Sound Card
Short of professional musicians or sound producers, stock sound cards are fine — most users will be absolutely fine with the default.
Peripherals
Mouse
If you’re not big on games with high dexterity requirements, just about any mouse will do really — you can pick one you like the look of. I like using Razer mice and keyboards out of habit, but their mice are known to have reliability issues (I’ve encountered them myself); Logitech and Corsair are probably better choices. Whichever one you go for, the expensive models aren’t necessary; the relatively low-end choices are honestly fine.
Keyboard
For keyboards, the differences between them are mostly aesthetic things and the keys they use. Two types of keys exist:
- Membrane keys/keyboards: easy to press, quiet, but provide poor feedback and are not particularly ‘satisfying’ to type with. Generally much cheaper than mechanical keyboards.
- Mechanical keys/keyboards: much nicer to type on, the choice for most people who do a lot of typing. However, the ‘switches’ mechanical keys use can differ a lot in terms of how they feel to press, how much noise they make, etc.
Mechanical key switches come in three types: linear, tactile, and clicky. Some manufacturers like Razer make their own, which can blur the lines a bit.
For the most part, clicky switches are not a good idea in work environments unless you want everyone in the office cursing your name every half an hour — they are not quiet. Outside of that, you can more or less pick whichever you want. Quite a few people find the audible click of mechanical keyboards to be both helpful as feedback and a rather nice sound, so that’s something to consider.
Razer, Logitech and Corsair are the brands to consider in my opinion. For the most part you can pick whichever one you like the most aesthetically and has the switch type you prefer.
Monitors
Monitors are really quite a simple question: pick whatever size you like most. Beyond that, your decision should be about what you intend to do with your PC:
If you plan on playing games that benefit from very high frames per second (e.g. modern shooters, various other modern games), you will want to buy a monitor with a 144Hz or 240Hz refresh rate. To explain why, let’s go into what frames are.
Your computer, when rendering a game or anything else in real time, will show you a number of static images per second which to your eyes look like a moving video — most standard monitors will show 60 images per second. For monitors this is measured as Hz (e.g. 60Hz), which is the number of frames the monitor can display per second, and games will often have an FPS counter (the number of frames being rendered by your computer per second).
How fast your computer can render a game, and thus how many frames per second it can render for that game, depends on how graphically demanding that game is and how powerful your graphics card is. For example, playing a very modern AAA-studio shooter with demanding graphics will require a very powerful graphics to run at high FPS on 1440p or 4K resolutions.
This is important because there’s no use buying, for example, a 144Hz monitor if your PC can only render around 60 frames per second of the games you want to play; a 60Hz monitor will display exactly the same output. You only benefit from a monitor with a higher refresh rate if the games you play support high FPS settings, and your PC is powerful enough to run them at those settings.
As another side note: unless you are a professional gamer participating in tournaments for money, avoid buying a high-refresh rate monitor “because you think it’ll make you win more”: that’s like a sprinter cutting a single hair off their head and thinking it’ll make them run faster. The difference is minimal. Buy it for better smoothness in high-FPS games if you intend to make use of that.
Response times on monitors also aren’t a big deal for the same reason: the difference between 5ms and 1ms is so small that only a professional gamer should care about the difference.
Any major brand should be fine for this.
My computer’s specs, as an example
Not being a person who plays a lot of modern games, I don’t need that much power: I bought this PC on a relatively strict budget of £1200 at the start of 2020 (equivalent to ~$1200 or so in US terms, prices are more expensive here), but since then I’ve made three changes to it.
- CPU: Intel i7–9700K
- Motherboard: ASUS TUF Z370-PLUS GAMING II
- Memory: 16GB Corsair Vengeance DDR4 3000MHz (2 x 8GB)
- Graphics Card: GeForce RTX 3060 Ti. Originally a GTX 1660 SUPER, upgraded it earlier this year.
- 1st disk: Samsung 980 500GB M.2 NVMe drive. Originally I had an own-brand 2.5" SSD, but it became incredibly slow and I had to replace it.
- 2nd disk: 2TB SEAGATE BARRACUDA SATA-III 3.5" HDD
- PSU: Corsair 550W TXm SERIES™ SEMI-MODULAR 80 PLUS® GOLD
- Cooler: Corsair iCUE H115i ELITE CAPELLIX. I had an own brand 240mm cooler before that — it malfunctioned and my CPU was reaching 100C frequently even when doing very little work.
- Mouse: Razer Deathadder
- Keyboard: Razer Blackwidow Chroma v2
- Monitor: I am of questionable sanity and use a 49" LG TV as my main monitor, with a 23.5" AOC monitor to the side of it. I like it this way, but I can’t claim it to be the normal way of doing things.
Optimizations
Enable XMP
Most memory, when advertised as say 3200Mhz, is in fact running at an overclocked speed — and unless you enable XMP, it won’t run at that speed (it’ll run at a slower base speed like 2133Mhz).
In order to enable XMP, you need to enter your motherboard’s BIOS (it’s known as UEFI settings these days, BIOS is the old name that’s kind of stuck). Most UEFI settings pages are quite user friendly these days; it’s usually in the main page, or the advanced “Ai Tweaker” sections. You can find some useful info about this here.
Set Maximum performance power mode for your graphics card
This setting is usually set in th e NVidia Control Panel (or the AMD equivalent).
Generally they are set to optimal power — which is a similar setting to the “balanced” CPU setting on Windows, where it uses as much power as it needs with the tasks it has to do. However, this can be detrimental when gaming — because games run at fast speeds, the graphics card can have a hard time predicting how much power it requires, resulting in reduced performance or slightly jittery play. If you play games I recommend setting your GPU’s power setting to maximum performance.
Electricity Costs
Setting the CPU’s power mode
Generally speaking, there’s only one thing that influences the cost of running your PC: how much power it draws. This is mostly dependent on how hard you are working your PC — not the components inside it.
For example, having a 1000W PSU doesn’t mean your computer constantly draws 1000W of power. Your PSU can draw up to that amount if it needs it to power your components, but unless you are doing very heavy processing work they will not be drawing that much power.
Modern PCs are usually configured to save power by default; when you go into the settings on a new PC, it will often be in “balanced” power settings mode for your CPU, and “optimal power” mode for your graphics card.
If you don’t need super fast response times, the balanced CPU mode is a good option to keep. Modern processors adjust their clock speeds on their fly when not being used, which helps keep electricity usage down.
Monitoring your computer’s temperature status
When using a new computer, or if you like just in general, it’s a good idea to know what temperatures it is operating at, especially under heavy load (so that if need be, you can adjust it to run cooler and know when there is a problem).
There are plenty of programs that can do this for you. I tend to use RealTemp — it’s rather old and there are almost certainly better programs, but you can use whatever you like really.
RealTemp (and most other temperature monitoring software) has a handy option to let you show the numbers in the system tray. Here, I’m showing the max temperature across all my CPU cores in green, and my GPU’s temperature in purple. It’s a nice, unobstructive way to keep an eye on it.
Usually in Windows, you’ll need to go into the taskbar settings and tell it to always keep these icons on display rather than hiding them, but that’s quite easy to do.
The benefit of monitoring this is twofold:
- If you’re doing heavy work (Blender rendering, graphically demanding games), you can see if your CPU or GPU are reaching temperatures that could cause them to wear out faster or damage them
- If your cooler breaks, you’ll know about it faster, you don’t really want to wait for your PC to shutdown as a self-protection measure to find that out.
PC Building Websites Tier List
There are a lot of websites now where you can order your own custom PC, and because of the number of them and difficulty in selecting them, I have given my own sort of “tier list” here, as it were, with some explanations.
Note that no matter how good a PC builder is: avoid non-branded or own-brand parts. It may be tempting to try and save a little money as they’re usually cheaper, but it’s definitely not worth it.
Obviously, this is not an exhaustive list. The main things you need to look for in a PC builder are good value for money (a lot of PC builders put a big markup on their products because of an own-brand fancy case or branding, which is complete crap), good availability of branded component choices, and standard branded cases rather than in-house ones.
Best
- CyberPowerPC (USA, Canada). They have an excellent range of components and cases to choose from, and compared to all other options I could find, have far better prices for the same hardware.
- PCSpecialist (UK, Europe). Offers very good prices for the hardware and good build quality; not the largest range of component choices, but most are from Corsair which is almost certainly the best brand for most components. I’ve had two solid computers from them.
Good
- OriginPC (USA). A bit on the expensive side, but uses good quality components. If for some reason you don’t like CyberPowerPC, you can go here.
- Overclockers (UK). More expensive than PCSpecialist, so I wouldn’t recommend them, but not bad per se. Has a lot of choices.
Avoid
- Puget Systems (USA). Poor choice of components for a hefty price — there’s nothing that can really excuse that (additionally, their choice of cases, cooling and other important things are extremely restrictive).
- Digital Storm (USA). While their PCs may look fancy, you’re paying a lot of extra money for neither good components nor particularly good aesthetics (most branded PC cases look nicer in my opinion). Fancy additional tubing in cases, beyond your liquid cooler, just makes you look stupid.
- Dell & Alienware (Global). Anywhere that makes weird, non-standard PC cases is bad enough as is — but there’s also a poor choice of components for a high price (e.g. fixed data storage options with zero flexibility).
What if I only want a PC for non-demanding tasks?
To be honest, the news in this scenario is pretty amazing: PCs, laptops, tablets and so forth have never been cheaper if you aren’t planning to need a lot of power. Let’s say you want to browse the internet, send emails, type up work documents and so forth: the barest minimum of PC specs will do fine, quite frankly.
For example: PCSpecialist will currently sell you a laptop for £230 that can do all those things, or £320 if you want it to have an SSD and thus faster loading speeds.
Pre-built PCs also really shine here. BestBuy have PCs and all-in-ones (PCs built into a monitor) for $400 or less, and if you have no demanding tasks to run on them, they’ll do just fine.
One thing is very important to note here, important enough that I’ll put in its own section:
If you don’t have high performance needs, and some specific requirement for iOS, avoid Apple at all costs.
Much of Apple’s PC, laptop and tablet business model is to sell people products far more powerful and expensive than they actually need (most of us will know someone who bought a $2000 macbook to browse Google and send emails, hardly something a $2000 laptop is needed for).
There’s no such thing as a “budget” Apple product. You either pay for a high performance model or you don’t pay at all; due to its excellent ability to market itself, it has made a business out of selling people expensive, high-power computers that barely get used (with some exceptions, such as art professionals).
This is not to say Apple products are terrible. They are univerally poor value for money (comparably performing products are always cheaper, including of the same quality, from other brands), but if you need it because your workplace needs it or some other reason, they are decent computers — just unnecessarily expensive, even for high performance models. Paying a hefty premium for the brand name is the other primary Apple business strategy, something that can’t be said for many of its competitors.
This is hugely relevant here because Apple does not make “budget” models — it would impact its ability to market itself as some kind of holy premium brand, for a few reasons. Apple markets itself both to professionals and people with no idea about technology — so if it made $400 laptops with low-end performance, many of its customers would incorrectly equate that with “poor quality” when they run slowly due to low-performance parts, and reduce the status of the brand, something Apple desperately wants to avoid.
As such, if you’re on a budget, Apple really should not be an option to consider.
If I’m building a gaming PC on a budget, what should I prioritise?
This is a difficult conundrum, because many of the “more important” parts are also more expensive to upgrade — ideally, when you need to stay on a budget, you should prioritise whatever gives you the best upgrade for a given amount of money.
I will attempt to make a list here of the upgrades you should consider in terms of total value for money for the extra money you spend, in order from highest value to lowest.
- Graphics card (expensive): This is the primary workhorse of any gaming PC. However, it’s also the most likely to be dictated by your budget, due to the high price of graphics cards and the difference in price between each model — but if you can upgrade it to a reasonable level, you should.
- Data storage (cheap). A bane of any high-end PC is slow storage, leading to slow loading times and a less smooth transition between loading areas in a game for instance. Upgrading this is cheap, and you don’t need to go high end: for example, an M.2 NVMe with speeds of say 3000/2100 or so is more than enough, anything higher is just going to be an optional extra. All other disks, besides your main disk for storing programs and operating system, are irrelevant here.
- CPU Cooler (cheap). You don’t need to buy an expensive one — if you’re on a budget, CoolerMaster and other reputable brands make very good coolers for acceptable prices. Take a look at recent cooler reviews to see the “best budget” option; CoolerMaster’s ML240L often does well in this regard. This upgrade is important not so much because it’ll improve performance, but because it will allow your PC to last longer. Particularly bad cases can cause your CPU to throttle, which you certainly don’t want.
- Memory (cheap). A minor upgrade to memory can make a big difference; gaming PCs have no business having 8GB, for instance. 16GB is fine for most people, 32GB for higher-end PCs needing lots of memory for AAA games. You don’t need to worry massively about the speed of memory; buy something appropriate to your budget, for example 3000Mhz-3600Mhz is fine for anything that isn’t a high-end gaming PC. Those wanting to make a very fast PC should consider DDR5 memory (and a DDR5-compatible motherboard).
- Processor (CPU). On a budget, this is a very low priority option for upgrading: the bottleneck of your PC in running games is very unlikely to be your CPU. Low to mid-end PCs can happily use an older i5 or AMD Ryzen 3 series CPU, and mid-to-high end PCs will be fine with an i7 or standard Ryzen 5. Above that is usually overkill for a gaming PC unless you have specific requirements that need it.
