Both components vary highly depending on the needs of the user building the PC. A gamer naturally wants a fast video card to play games, someone who collects photos or videos needs lots of storage and Office worker a quiet video card.

Build your own PC: Storage

Storage devices are hard drives and optical drives. Hard drives can be divided into the two categories Solid State Drives (SSD) and conventional hard drives.

There are basically two options for selecting hard drives:

• Pick only conventional hard drives
• Combine conventional and solid state drives

Conventional hard drives have the advantage that they provide more storage for a cheaper price than Solid State Drives. Solid State Drives on the other hand are more expensive, offer way less storage but are way faster than convention drives. This is beneficial during system boot, playing games or loading applications.

The PC budget plays a big role in deciding the storage components. A good reliable Solid State Drive sells for about $250 for 64 Gigabytes of storage. Good conventional hard drives provide more than ten times the storage for that price.

PC users with a budget of about $400 for hard drives can consider combining Solid State Drives and conventional hard drives. The SSD would be used for the operating system and important applications (or games) whereas the standard hard drive would be used for storage.

Users with a lower budget should concentrate on buying a good fast hard drive instead that will be used for all files and the operating system.

When buying a Solid State Drive buyers need to make sure that it supports TRIM and garbage collection either out of the box or with a firmware update. TRIM and garbage collection ensure that the performance of the drive does not drop over time. This was a huge problem with first generation SSDs.

Hard drives come with speeds of 5400 and 7200. The former are more quiet while the latter are faster. A user who only works with light applications could consider buying a 5400 rpm drive whereas gamers or users with high end applications should buy a 7200 rpm drive.

The best combination at this point in time is to use a SSD as the boot drive and a 5400 rpm hard drive for storage.

Our Picks

• SSD: Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2R5 80 GB ($300)
• Hard Drive: Samsung EcoGreen F3 2000GB SATA II 32MB ($200)

The Intel X25-M is one of the fastest SSD when it comes to read speeds. The write speeds are usually lower in benchmarks but better in real life situations. It also offers 80 Gigabytes instead of 64 Gigabytes that most SSDs offer in that price range. It supports both TRIM and garbage collection.

The Samsung EcoGreen F3 is a drive with a speed of 5400. It has slower access and read speeds but offers 2 Terabytes of storage space. It is used to store everything but the most important applications, games and the operating system.

Build your own PC: Video Card

Selecting the right video cards usually depend on the level of gaming activity on the PC. We currently would suggest to buy an Ati Radeon 5000er video card as it is the only video card series currently supporting DirectX 11.

Gamers need to look at the Radeon 5850 or 5870 video cards for optimal performance. The selection here again depends on the budget. The Radeon 5870 retails for about $400, the 5850 for about $300. The 5870 is the faster card of the two and manages to beat the 5750 by 10fps+ in all benchmarks. Both cards can be used to play all modern games just fine.

Casual gamers might want to take a look at the ATI Radeon 5770 video card instead which retails for about $180.

Our Picks:

• High End Gaming: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X ($440)
• Mid Level Gaming: ASUS EAH5850/2DIS/1GD5 Radeon HD 5850 ($300)
• Casual / No Gaming: POWERCOLOR PCS+ AX5770 ($170)

Our PC System:

Case: Lian Li PC-8NB ($100)
PSU: Enermax Modu 87+ 700W ($200)
CPU: Intel Core i7-860 ($300)
CPU Cooler: Prolimatech Megahalems Rev.B CPU Cooler ($60), 120mm fan, for example be quiet Silent Wings USC (BL013) ($20)
Motherboard: GIGABYTE GA-P55-USB3 ($120)
RAM: CORSAIR XMS3 8GB (4 x 2GB) 240-Pin DDR3 ($270)
Hard Drive 1: SSD: Intel X25-M Mainstream SSDSA2M080G2R5 80 GB ($300)
Hard Drive 2: Samsung EcoGreen F3 2000GB SATA II 32MB ($200)
Video Card: High End Gaming: Sapphire Radeon HD 5870 Vapor-X ($440)

Some components have not been discussed yet. This includes optical drives, keyboard, computer mouse, monitor, printer, sound adapter, network cards and other peripherals.

The article is divided into four parts, the first talks about the parts that you need and some things that you should take care of. What I really like is that he gives tips without hardware recommendation. The advice is general and users who have never build a PC in their life will love his advice will professionals will probably only skimp over it and come to the conclusion that they hardly learned anything new from the article.

The other three parts are Assembly, Testing, Loading the Operating System and as a bonus optional tweaks. The assembly part is without doubt the most important part if you want to build a PC. Believe it or not I did not put any thermal paste on the CPU of my first PC that I build myself. I was lucky that it ran without problems until a friend reminded me that I had to apply it immediately.

You will find those tips there, tips that you learn the hard way sometimes but are guaranteed to never miss again. I will write an article with images detailing the process of building the PC from the parts that I will buy. The only thing that I do not like that much is that you actually have to click on the different parts to read the whole article. That’s not very user friendly.

I read every pc magazine that I could get my hands on, compared tests and top lists and finally came up with a part list that would beat every other retail computer for the price I bought them. The problems began when the parts arrived and I had to actually build the pc. It was difficulty at first, because even though I read a lot about hardware I never added hardware to my pc nor built a pc before.

A friend helped me a lot building it and with his help the pc was up and running in no time. Today I´am building my computers alone, because of many reasons, for instance being able to select the parts that I want or building something that is not overly expensive and working after its finished. There are more reasons but this would go to far.

It would have helped me tremendously if there was an internet page like mechBgon´s when i tried to build my first pc. His thirteen-pages guide to building an pc covers everything you need to know to build it on your own.

There are lots of hints and screenshots to make it as foolproof as possible for everyone, its absolutely recommended for everyone who wants to build a computer for the first time.

Probably the best tip is to have enough space on a table for all the parts and building the PC. This is way more comfortable than assembling the PC on the carpet or floor. Plus, it is less likely that you will lose stuff or damage it.