Building a Gaming PC Part 2 - The components for the PC
Following on from my earlier blog post https://steemit.com/gaming/@c0ff33a/building-a-gaming-pc-part-1-i-love-it-when-a-plan-comes-together where I introduced the concept of building my boy a gaming PC for his Christmas present, and we looked at the external components I already had, case, rgb Keyboard and Mouse, 27" Curved gaming monitor. In this post I am going to cover the components I purchased to make the PC run - it is going to be interesting for me to see what everyone thinks of my choices, and whether the combined components quality as a reasonable gaming pc. Of course the other question is - can I actually put all this parts into the tower case and get the pc to boot?
And here we have the shiny components boxes, in the end I used two online sellers for the parts Amazon.co.uk and Box.co.uk - the latter had some very good pricing on the more expensive parts - despite holding out for Black Friday on Amazon nothing I was looking for dropped in price at all. At this point I would advise having a budget for this sort of build and sticking to it, I deviated from the original guide and ended up upping the specs on a few of the components - which increased the build cost considerably - in fact I don't really want to even try and work out what all this cost in the end!
First up on the components list, Corsair Vengeance 2 x 8gb sticks of DDR4 3000 MHz C15 XMP 2.0 High Performance Ram. As the working space for your computer, RAM needs to be fast and although 16gb is probably overkill for most of this builds usage - my feeling was more is better and will keep the system running smoothly under high demands.
Next up, the SSD - the hard drive, or solid state drive in this case - holds your operating system, program files, and personal data. The hard drive can also be the bottleneck of any pc, get a slow hard drive and your os will take forever to load and will run sluggish - if you buy a powerful processor and graphics card - using a slow drive pretty much ruins the experience they could give you. I went with Samsung 850 EVO 500 GB 2.5 inch Solid State Drive - my guide suggested the 250gb version and then purchase a 1tb traditional spinning hdd for storage - but I have around 3tb of NAS storage so instead of putting two drives in this one, I just went with the bigger capacity SSD - especially as games take up loads of storage nowadays. Then I can offload anything I don't need to access at high speed to the NAS to keep the SSD space free.
Now the CPU, the brains of the computer - I went with AMD Ryzen™ 5 1400 Quad Core AM4 CPU with Wraith Stealth 65W cooler, Quad Core, 8 Thread, 3.2GHz, 3.4GHz Turbo, 8MB Cache, 65W, - the guide suggested the Ryzen 3 but in the end I went the next level up - again worrying that the Ryzen 3 wouldn't give the best experience.
And now the graphics card, I spent a long time puzzling over these. Graphics cards are incredibly expensive - but for gaming they can make or break your experience. Go cheap and your game could end up running laggy and choppy, as this build was essentially for gaming I didn't want to make a mistake and regret it. My guide suggested a GTX 1060 3gb, in the end I went for the higher performance Gigabyte GeForce GTX 1070 G1 GAMING 8GB GDDR5 DVI HDMI 3 x DisplayPort PCI-E Graphics Card,GV-N1070G1 which from reviews and reading up should be more then capable of handling the games we would be running, and this model has 3 cooling fans which seemed beneficial as plenty of people reference graphics cards as being very noisy under load.
Finally the motherboard, as the unit that brings all the other parts together it's important to get this right. It has to be able to handle all the components you want to connect to it, and be able to run them at the maximum speed they can achieve - or even overclock if you wish. Yet again I deviated from the guide, the board it suggested was again an MSI gaming board - but a Micro ATX in red and black - I was worried about the smaller board size and didn't think the red would go so well with my green LED set up. So in the end I went with MSI AMD B350 TOMAHAWK ARCTIC AMD RYZEN/7th Gen A-series DDR4 GB LAN M/2 Raid ATX Motherboard which was a little more but will hopefully look nicer, make it easier to fit all the components in and of course - make this build a savage beast!
In the next post of this series, I will be fitting all the components into the case - and we will see if it boots first time, and if it runs as well as I hope it does!
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I will have to update my pc as well next year, I have played with it since 2013
Thank you for taking the time to read my post and comment - you did well with the original pc if it is still going strong since 2013!
Awesome build, this will demolish any game you throw at it - great job the components choice is impressive.
Thanks, I hope the running and game tests live up to that - although we still need to see the components going into the case and whether it boots first time! Thanks for looking.
Its my dream but with long time :(
This was quite an expensive build, although comparatively less then half the price of my 15" MacBook Pro Retina with 16gb ram and 500gb ssd. As a long time Mac convert - it will be interesting to see if this warms me back to windows - to be fair when I left windows for Mac Windows XP was the main version and Windows 7 was just out! I guess Microsoft should have improved the OS a little bit since then.
Thank you for information @c0ff33a
You are alawys help me thank you so much
Very Impressive Sir Wonderful read and Application!
Thank you for taking the time to read my post and comment on it :-)
Components are spot on. Maybe add some high capacity HDD. like a 5 TB for back up n what not? (use ashampoo backup software. make an image after everything is up n running and then another regular documents backup too. just in case)
but for the love of god. do something about your cable management.
feed all the cables from the PSU through the back plate, same with all the SATA and front panel I/O cables. just makes the whole thing look cleaner and less to get dirty over time.
Thanks! Yes I was aware that I hadn't made the best choices with routing the cabling - I will have to have another go at routing the cables when I get chance. Regarding the storage, I have plenty of gas storage around the house so there was not really any need to add additional on device storage - maybe in future if I find I'm running low. Thanks for the comment though - really appreciate it.
no worries dude. i look forward to some benchmarks. ;)
Ben has been pestering for a new gaming machine. You start to look at the numbers and I feel like for the money we are at the supercomputer for NASA level! OMG it sucks being poor lol.
Actually, I have been quite fascinated with this journey, in fact it will continue to be documented in many more posts then I originally intended. As game developers continue to up the quality of their games with what is now nearly movie quality in game graphics - obviously the capability of the equipment to display the graphics at such high quality has to increase or the whole experience gets lost. I did go a bit overboard upping specs on this build because I didn't want it to fail to achieve what I wanted - plus spending a little more in some cases would ensure in future I wouldn't have to replace components to keep up with newer and even more power hungry titles - but where do you stop? Plus consoles will play the big titles with less hardware outlay - but are limited to just games - so is it better to buy a console which is a one trick pony - or build a pc which will do games, but also let you create content and do far more then a console offsetting the extra cost. Without giving away too much of a spoiler, I will say so far I am very impressed at how well this runs with Windows 10 - as a very long term Mac advocate previously frustrated with Microsofts OS - aside from a few minor driver and (Edge) issues the whole install and set up of the os went ridiculously smoothly on this build.
Yes this really has been the age old question really. Consoles play the games cheaper. True. My friends always tried to sell me on consoles, but I never bought it to it and still don't. I don't want to simply play games only. The PC is so much more multi dimensional. I am much more into being able to create and manipulate content. The PC while never perfect has servered my needs rather well.
You are absolutely brilliant! Congratulations my dear friend @c0ff33a!
Very nice my friend Up&Resteem
Thank you for taking the time to comment, upvote and resteem my post :-)
You are welcome my friend
Best I can tell, you have put together a pretty awesome machine. I am familiar with most of the brands and I have had luck with them. :D
This is awesome my dear friend :))