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With any building project, it’s important to identify what you want to actually use the machine for and set a budget before diving too deeply into the specifics of different Compatible Parts . I decided early on that this would be primarily a gaming rig, with plenty of room for expansion and a secondary focus on general productivity tasks. CPU: Intel Core i5-3570K quad-core (3.4GHz). I wanted a good one, and I got it. According to the excellent Tom’s Hardware site, spending much more than the $230 (I got mine as part of a package deal at MicroCenter for $190) the Compatible Parts like bridge-based Core i5-3570K costs results in rapidly diminishing returns. Since I’m not planning to overclock at this point, I’ve left the stock cooler on it, but there are superb after-market CPU coolers available for as little as $30, if I feel like revving this thing up a little harder. Motherboard: There are a huge number of variables at play in picking a motherboard — besides simply making sure the CPU is compatible, there are various numbers of connectors for SATA, USB, etc., RAM compatibility issues and so on, making sure the bugger will fit in the case — and so it pains me to admit that I more or less avoided the whole issue thanks to the aforementioned package deal. The popular ASRock Z77 Extreme4 was the other half of the deal, which I got for $85. (PCPartPicker shows it available at Newegg for $132, including shipping, as of this writing.) RAM: Happily, RAM is relatively cheap these days, and you can get a fairly high-end product for a good price. I got two 4GB sticks of Corsair Vengeance DDR3 memory (pictured at right) clocked at 1600MHz for $50 and other laptop parts , which should be able to handle anything I throw at it for the foreseeable future. More than 8GB tends to be seen as overkill for gaming. Also, it looks like a comb. The major thing to keep in mind with RAM is compatibility. Make sure your RAM is designed to fit into the slots on your motherboard, and that the board can handle its memory frequency. Case: This is one of two areas in which I consciously overspent. The Cooler Master HAF (High Air Flow) X (pictured at left) is a full tower, as opposed to the more common mid-tower form factor. I could have gotten a perfectly functional case for much, much less than the $180 I paid for the HAF X — the well-regarded Rosewill Challenger mid-tower costs $50 — but there were a couple reasons I wanted to go a little bit bigger here. The first was size and convenience — the HAF X, like many nicer cases for home builders, has a lot of little tweaks like tool-less drive bays that make common installation tasks less of a hassle, and I liked the idea of having plenty of room to fumble around in on my first build. For more laptop parts
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