Gadgetory

motherboards multi-core processors heatsink fans memory modules sound cards hard drives video cards fans Network cards power supply units solid state drives DVD drives and a big-ass case do you know what to look for when buying your next computer what's up everybody you're watching J's two cents and today we're going to be discussing buying or building your own gaming PC and things you need to know for starters I'd like to say I am an advocate for building your own computer it creates a sense of pride a sense of joy to put together something you know you are going to be spending hours on and you are going to have a high level of respect for a piece of equipment that you yourself have built with that if you don't think you can build a PC I've got news for you you can build a PC PCs these days are very simple everything is very straightforward you no longer have the old days of dealing with IDE and slave drives and master drives and having to have the jumper in the right location or the hard drive or the DVD drive on the right slot on the cable now everything's done through software you've got SATA cables you simply plug it in to the motherboard you plug it into the DVD boom you're good you're golden so I just want to say right now if you think you can't build yourself a computer I've got news for you you can and the flavor of this video if you will is going to be a little bit more geared towards those people who are building their own pcs I get asked on a regular basis what Parts I feel they should buy and what parts they should stay away from and before you can answer that the first thing you have to ask yourself is what am I going to be doing with this computer am I going to be primarily gaming am I going to be doing video encoding or rafi rendering i'm going to be doing graphics design animation or am i going to be simply playing video games if i'm only going to be playing video games i don't want the fastest or the most expensive processor on the market games simply do not use more than four cores and you'll notice on the market today you've got AMD bulldozer which has eight cores and you've got the intel i7 s which have eight cores and you are not going to see much if any gaming improvement whatsoever what you will notice with a higher core count are the programs that actually make use of those cores like your video editing software or your photo editing software will run much much quicker so I wouldn't actually recommend one of those fame bangles eight core or even six core processors unless you know for a fact you are going to be doing more with your computer than just gaming the next common question that I'm regularly asked is how much RAM do I need in my computer do I need eight gigs 16 gigs 32 gigs well as you may have guessed the question honestly once again what am I going to be doing with my computer if I'm going to be playing simply games and games only eight gigabytes of RAM is all I'm going to need I will never use more than 8 gigabytes of RAM playing video games now if I am once again going to be doing video editing photo editing or anything that puts a heavy CPU load on the computer then I am going to probably want to recommend 16 gigabytes as the sweet slot 32 gigabytes in most instances unless you're running some sort of a server and I don't mean a file server I don't mean a music server I mean a server you do not need 32 gigabytes it is bragging points and it gets you nothing performance wise I'm also regularly asked about video cards the video card is the single most important part of your computer the video card takes the brunt of the force when it comes to rendering video games so you want to go with something that's the best that you can afford there are many options and many many different price brackets when it comes to video cards on top of having to decide on the brand whether it be AMD or Nvidia either brand you decide to go with your gaming experience will probably be just fine so when it comes to video card and if your gaming don't be cheap put your money into your video card and you will notice a better smoother gameplay experience motherboards are an interesting piece of equipment when it comes to the computer you will very rarely ever see any sort of gaming or speed improvement of your computer overall by going with a high-end motherboard versus a mid-range or even a low-end motherboard what you gain by going with the higher ed motherboards are bells and whistles BIOS functions and usually overclocking if you plan to overclock or you're not afraid to overclock I would definitely recommend going with a motherboard that has a UEFI BIOS fortunately these UEFI BIOS are becoming more common even on the lower end motherboard if you're not familiar with what a UEFI BIOS is basically it is a new type of format that the BIOS is displayed in that allows you to use your mouse and keyboard rather than just having the old blue screen with the yellow font and having to use your keyboard to click around it also allows you to save various profiles and can give you all sorts of information about your computer in real time generally the higher-end motherboards are expensive due to their overclocking abilities so if you don't think you're going to overclock or you are too afraid to overclock then you can save some money on the motherboard you won't see any real improvements especially when it comes to gaming another thing i'm commonly asked is about solid-state drives and whether or not they improve the gaming experience the answer is both yes and no I'll start with the no first you are not going to see any sort of frames-per-second improvement or a smoothness of gameplay improvement with a solid-state drive however what you will notice is that the loading time of the game is much much faster but that's not true for even just games that's true for windows booting any program that you open that's actually stored on the solid-state drive or any files that you're trying to access I defragmented my solid-state drive the other day and it took approximately four minutes to read the entire drive so that's very very fast the last topic I'd like to cover is kind of an important one it's regarding case and cooling options for your gaming computer you definitely have to have adequate cooling the video card alone depending on the model can get up to 90 degrees Celsius or hotter and that's a lot of heat that's getting dumped into the air and your computer will be recycling this air so it's important that you have adequate air flow I would recommend a case that has at minimum front rear and top fans the front would obviously be pulling air into the computer and the rear and the top would be expelling or exhausting air out of the computer those of you who have seen my PC setup have noticed that I am water cooling my computer I have been water cooling any computer that I have owned since about 2001 every computer I own from here on out will also be water-cooled and I do this because I do a lot of heavy overclocking with my equipment and I have to keep the temperatures as low as possible so water cooling is something that would be an entirely different topic maybe look for that in the future but when it comes to PC cooling you want to make sure that you have a large heat sink fan on the CPU because the stock fans that come with the computer are just simply not adequate enough I prefer something that's either a heat pipe design or has large fans on the CPU dissipating the heat having a large CPU cooler will keep the temperatures overall fairly low which will then increase the lifespan of your processor okay so what did we learn today you need to pick your processor based on the tasks you're going to be doing with your computer if you're going to be doing nothing but gaming if you thought that new Intel i7 looked really appetizing and you're not going to do anything else you might be surprised at how much money you can save and how comparable the performance of an i5 can be you also could save a lot of money by scrimping on the video card a little bit if you're not planning on doing gaming and when it comes to memory remember more memory never hurts however it very rarely actually helps so stick to that sixteen gigabyte sweet spot you'll find that it's more than enough for almost anything you can do at it I personally run sixteen gigabytes and I do a lot of video editing with my computer these tips apply whether you're building your own computer or buying a computer however I would suggest giving a shot at building your own computer because you can save a lot of money in the long run and a lot of headache and you were in complete control over what ends up inside your computer I hope you've enjoyed today's video click the video on the left to learn about a common misconception by console gamers when it comes to PC gaming click the video on the right to learn a little bit more about who I am and my love for technology and as always click that like button click subscribe and follow me on Twitter for up-to-date details on what I'm doing on YouTube