Following on from my earlier blog post @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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