Guide: Building A Desktop Computer

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Thank you I will be building a PC shortly this is awesome!

your welcome glad to be of help ^.^ hope your new build goes smoothly

So i was going to build a gaming PC for FFXIV but also for just general gaming, what would you recommend for the most optimal (performance/cost effective) components?

This is a very good guide so far, some info i wish i had when i made my first computer. I would have gotten an SSD for my rig from the start had i known how big a difference it makes. Loading programs like solidworks and other 3d rendering stuff off a HDD is painful. lol

Add http://www.logicalincrements.com/ to your list. It's a great site to look for suggestions when faced with a particular budget, along with direct links to said items priced. I use it a lot to check and see if a particular system is too overpriced, though you have to remember to add in the cost of windows if you don't already own, or can't procure in some fashion, a copy.

I'd recommend adding a troubleshooting section. Even the best of us can have parts failures. Links to things like hiren's boot cd and other resources for figuring out what is wrong would be a useful resource.

use http://pcpartpicker.com/

thank you for the input everyone i will be updating it soon with all your suggestions ^.^ but please

Yeeeeep! :D

Awesome guide. I wish I woulda had this when I build my current PC. Would have saved a lot of time and frustration. I figured out the hard way that some of the parts have socket numbers lol.

FYI, Samsung SSD's on sale at newegg:

http://www.newegg.com/SAMSUNG-Internal-SSD/BrandSubCat/ID-1077-636
Look for ones that say "additional 20% off w/ code EMCXSVT249, limited offer"

Final price for this 128 pro after discount is $117.
http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820147192

Don't forget to enter the coupon code on the shopping cart page.

i use Samsung SSD its nice - just remember if its from stock they had for a while you may need to update its firmware. And double sided sticky Velcro helps a lot to secure it nice and tidy in your case!

Solid drives are PERFECT for something like long term storage or install of programs you won't be messing with often.

But if you have the system swap file on them, they won't last very long.

What make mechanical harddrives slow is the head seek overhead, which can be minimized with a 2 disks strip RAID array. If you don't put important stuff on the harddrives you should not really worry much about data loss.

I've seen cases of SSD drives which gone bad after one year of use due to excess writes. Not to mention that nowadays any decent motherboards do support RAID.

What wear the Flashrom chips the most is the sector erase cycle which is required prior to any re-write. While flash based drives have an algorithm which attempts to minimize the wear and tear, it won't help much against massive amounts of writes any PC do to it's swap file during heavy use.

This is the only thing I have to say.
Also this flash wear issue is the exact reason why the OP did say:

Thanks for the guide, it's awesome !

Edit: Another thing I noticed after a second read is that at some point during the CPU power discussion, you unintentionally imply that GHz are measured "per minute" but it's per second.

Sorry I will fix that thank you for comments^.^

Actually in the process of doing some upgrades myself. 8GB RAM right now, quad core i5 processor running 3 gHz. Planning to upgrade the power supply and graphics card as, although it's ok for XI, integrated graphics won't do for anything more modern.

Probably going for the 660 myself, although I'm a complete novice to upgrades.

the 660 is a very nice Card i had the 660 Ti and loved it. i hope the guide helped ^.^

Did actually get the 660 Ti in the end, as there wasn't much diference in price in the UK.

That said, tried installing it last night to get a 5 short beep warning on bootup to advise of a Process Failure. Did the PSU upgrade at the same time, so removed the 660ti and everything booted up as normal. Double checked all was wired up as per the instructions, but still the same issue :(