Build your own gaming desktop guide

The best-case scenario is overheating your components and burning them out well before their expected lifespan. The worst-case scenario involves a fire extinguisher. Selecting a case is mostly a matter of looks.

I was actually hoping for something a little cheaper than the Corsair D Tempered Glass case, but it was the least expensive case I could find that also had a USB-C input on the front. Remember: Your motherboard will have front-facing USB options, so make sure that your case has the proper connections for them. As such, our final build may have slightly different components, depending on what they have available.

This article was originally published on October 11, , and is Part 1 in a three-part series. Part 2: How to build a gaming PC for beginners: Putting it all together. Part 3: How to build a gaming PC for beginners: What to do if it all goes wrong. Marshall Honorof is a senior editor for Tom's Guide, overseeing the site's coverage of gaming hardware and software. He comes from a science writing background, having studied paleomammalogy, biological anthropology, and the history of science and technology.

After hours, you can find him practicing taekwondo or doing deep dives on classic sci-fi. Building a gaming PC is arguably the best technological investment you can make. Marshall Honorof. Topics Gaming. See all comments 5. No offense, but are you pulling off one of those "just buy it" Tom's Hardware pulled off recently and went super well for them?

Unless this is to make Intel and nVidia happy, this guide should really be made after those come out to actually recommend parts based on reviews of everything. Sorry, but it is paculiar timing. So every time something new is coming out.

This is less of a guide as a shopping list of what you bought. You didn't talk about making sure your power supply has an efficiency rating so it doesn't blow up. This the Verge build in article form. This is fine but I don't know about this being a "guide" per se.

Seems more like a blog with a few helpful tips. Seems to focus more on the "why" for a singular, personal scenario. To be a proper guide, IMO, should go into more detail regarding choice of hardware, what specs to look for, how to check for compatibility, and offer more information on procuring them. Having an article about picking parts and not mentioning certain specifics? I could go on. I mean it's vaguely informative but again, more of a blog with tips and not really a guide.

I like you article. Please pay close attention to the following instructions before installing your components. The first thing you'll want to do is make sure you're assembling your PC on a flat surface.

Don't build it on a carpet--the mixture of static electricity and your PC's parts is a dangerous combination and could cause damage to your components. It's unlikely to happen, but we still suggest touching your metal case from time to time to help ground yourself and avoid this from happening. Instead, build your rig in a room with hardwood or laminate floors like a dining room or kitchen--we even went the extra mile and took our socks off.

Take your motherboard out of its packaging and then place it on a flat surface. You can lay it directly on your table, but we personally placed it on top of its box to avoid scratching our desk. At this point, you're ready to start.

Your motherboard's CPU socket will be protected by a piece of plastic, which you'll be able to remove when you open the tray. All you need to do is gently push down on the tray's metal arm and pull it out. Once it's free of the tray, lift it up to open the socket and the protective plastic will fall out. Be sure to keep this plastic piece in case of any issues with your motherboard, as you'll need to reinsert it before sending it back to the manufacturer.

Your CPU should have some small half-circle indents in its board. Once you've figured out how to place your CPU into its socket, do so gently. Do not apply pressure directly on the CPU--simply close the tray and make sure the metal arm is locked into its original position, which may require a bit of force. Your motherboard may have protective thermal guards on your M. Once you've taken any guards off the motherboard, you can slot in your M. These require a little bit of force to slot into their respective slots, but don't push too hard--they should slide in quite easily.

Once the M. At this point, you take the respective screw that is often included with your motherboard , push each M. At this point, you can take the thermal guard and place it on top of each M. This is another step where you'll want to reference your motherboard's manual, which should be able to tell you which order to place the RAM in.

If you have four slots and only two sticks of RAM, then you should make sure the two sticks are spaced apart in either the first and third slot or second and fourth--your motherboard manual can advise you here.

First off, be sure to flip down the plastic clips on both sides of each slot you plan on using. Inserting the RAM requires more force, but make sure you start small and then ramp up your pressure gradually.

When you hear a click, your RAM is in its slot. This should cause the plastic clips to flip up, gripping your RAM.

If you notice your clips haven't flipped up, then your RAM may not be seated properly. It's almost time to throw your motherboard into your case, but first you'll need to screw in some standoff screws that you'll place your motherboard onto before screwing it in. These standoffs will come with your motherboard, and once you've located them, you can start screwing them into your case.

There should be about a dozen holes for the standoffs to fit into. Refer to your case's manual if you're having trouble finding them. Once the standoffs are screwed in, you're ready to insert your motherboard. The standoffs make it easy to place your motherboard into your case, but don't start screwing it in straight away.

It'll be a rectangle, and you'll want your motherboard to be inserted comfortably into this space so that you can access all of the ports. Once everything fits, you can start screwing your motherboard onto the standoffs with the appropriate screws. Don't forget that you don't want to screw anything too tightly. Just turn your screwdriver until everything is securely tightened, and then you're ready to move on. Installing the power supply into your case is often quite easy. You'll want to refer to your specific case's manual for this, but it's pretty straightforward.

First, we took our case's mounting bracket and screwed it onto the back of our power supply. You'll notice your power supply also sports a fan, which is used to circulate air. If you're planning on placing your finished gaming PC on a hardwood floor or desk, then feel free to aim this fan downward; if you're placing your gaming PC on a carpeted floor, then you'll want to aim the fan upward. Once you've figured out which way your PSU needs to be oriented, and screwed on the mounting bracket, you can easily slide it into your case and tighten the bracket's screws.

Depending on how much room you have for your PSU, you may want to hold off on screwing it in until you've plugged in all of its various power cables. Your case should have a specific bay area dedicated to holding these kinds of drives.

Locate this area, then look for two metal clasps on the left and right side of each bay. Squeeze these clasps and then pull the bay out. Here is where you'll be able to screw in your SATA drive and keep it stable inside your case. Find the SATA slot on your motherboard and plug the other side of the appropriate cable into it, then plug the other side of the PSU cable into your power supply.

Your drive is now installed, though you will need to format it once your PC is up and running. Now, you're ready to start plugging cables into your motherboard. This part requires some patience, as your case cables are extremely tiny and can be difficult to orient. You'll want to reference both your case and motherboard manuals during this step.

Some motherboards, like our Aorus Ultra, come with a bus that you can plug the case cables into before inserting them into the motherboard. This makes this step much easier. Your case cables make it so you can use the various ports on the front of your PC in addition to the power button itself.

And while It's possible to pick up everything aside from the GPU today, the graphics card really is the beating heart of any gaming PC, and that makes it difficult to recommend a full build without basing your new rig around a GPU. The other part of the picture is the processor, and thankfully CPU stock is far better now.

The Ryzen 5 X is a better price these days and, as stock dwindles for the old Ryzen 5 chip, the newer series CPU is actually available for a better price. And it's a great gaming chip. We've had our hands on all these parts at some point or another, and we only recommend the products that we'd want in our own gaming PCs. If this isn't quite what you're looking for, also check out our budget PC build guide and high-end PC build guide.

Or even get someone else to build it for you with a cheap gaming PC deal. When it comes to gaming, everything that's great about the X rings true for this more affordable Zen 3 chip as well. There's nothing between any of the Ryzen chips in games, which means you'll hit the same frame rates with this chip as you will our number one pick. Which is incredible when you think about it—top-tier performance from the most affordable Zen 3 CPU?

We'll say yes to that every single day. This does have half the core count of that top chip, rolling in as it does with 6 cores and 12 threads. This is only an issue with those more serious workloads, though, and this is more than sufficient for more reasonable stuff.

You could argue that gaming could go beyond the threads we have here, but there's no evidence that is the case so far, and that's even though the next-gen consoles are rocking 8-cores and threads. The Ryzen 5 X also bucks the Ryzen family's trend by shipping with a Wraith Stealth cooler, so you don't have to drop extra money on a third-party chiller.

You don't need to, but if you do, you'll hit higher clocks for longer and also open up the wonderful world of overclocking, which could make it worthwhile. This is a decent little overclocker, and while it won't affect gaming much, it'll help in other areas nicely.

You also get Wi-Fi 6 wireless networking as well as Intel 2. Performance too is typically good for a high-end Asus board, matching X motherboards for gaming performance without issue. It marks the same incredible generational leap in performance that has come to epitomise the Ampere architecture, up until the non-TI GeForce RTX , that is. And, because of its RTX Super performance levels, that means you can nail p and p frame rates, but also that 4K at 60fps isn't beyond the realms of possibility for this GPU.

The RTX Ti then delivers gaming performance that's rather stupendous when you look at generational gains over even the RTX series—next to the series it's quite frightening, actually. Memory is pretty straightforward these days, though if the price isn't much higher you can improve performance slightly with faster RAM. An NVMe M.

Fitted with GB worth of NAND flash, there's enough space for your operating system, applications, and a handful of games, too. A single M. Given the install sizes of most modern PC games, it's probably a good idea to get yourself a new drive for your gaming PC.

While SATA SSDs are almost cheap enough to recommend as secondary storage what a world we're living in , you'll probably look to a regular HDD to keep the cost down when you hit multiple terabyte demands.

Realistically, you'll appreciate that speed if you're planning to keep your HDD inside a gaming PC for more than a couple of years, as we already see load times creep up for the biggest games of