What should be the first component of a gaming PC I should buy if I am on a limited budget and can only afford a few parts a month?
The question is pretty loaded, so I’ll give you two answers.First answer, NEVER buy a system in drips and drabs. You can’t use the component you buy without the others in place and it’ll be 6 months old before you buy your last parts. In that time, you’ll see discounts galore and new parts entering the market that tend to be better for the same money, or the price drops on the parts you currently want. Put your money into savings or invest it and grow the money. Come back to the table when your budget has matured.Second answer is hypothetical. If you could only buy a few parts a month then buy the parts that age slowly, such as keyboards, mice, monitor or speakers/headphones. Follow them with the middling age parts such as PSU (be sure to buy modular here since you may change your chosen motherboard) case and internal drives (HDD’s, SSD’s etc). Follow these with the motherboard, CPU and RAM. Be sure to buy the CPU with a cooler included, so you can somewhat use your PC before you buy the GPU. Of which, the GPU should be the last thing to buy, just because the GPU market is always in flux and price varies wildly thanks to the crypto markets.But referring to the first answer, just save you cash. By the time you can afford your gaming PC, it’ll be a higher spec for no extra cost. Plus, never ignore the second hand market. Last generation GPU’s or CPU’s can be a real bargain.
When building a new PC, should I keep my old PSU or buy a new one? I have 400W PSU from Codegen. It is eight years old, and now I'm planning to build a new PC. I'm 100% sure it is enough. Should I use it?
You have to ask yourself, would you rather buy a new power supply now, or it fry your new motherbaord/gpu.“I’m 100% sure it is enough”.None of us can confirm or deny this since you have not listed any system specs. I can tell you for anything greater than a GTX-1050 TI gpu that 400w is not enough for a quality PSU. Except, you dont have a quality PSU, you have a CodegenCodegen P-Case 460W - Low Price, Poor QualityCodegen 500W PSU (any good?)I can't iterate enough the importance of a quality Power Supply, even more when you put demanding loads on your system like gaming or video editing. A quality power supply can handle outputting its stated loads for hours of constant use, and has many safeguards (over voltage protection, over current protection, short circuit protection, etc) built in to protect your hardware. A cheap power supply greatly overstates its values (like calls a 300w PSU 450w) and has little to no safeguards (or the safegaurds use such cheap components its like they are not even there). So when these die, they typically fry your GPU and/or motherboard with it. If you are using the current codegen as a general purpose/home office PC then I can see not putting a heavy enough load on it to actually last 8 years; If you were gaming or doing anything to push voltages to their max then you have been beyond lucky.If 400–450 is actually all you need then get yourself a corsair CX or EVGA BQ line power supply. These are often on sale and are at least acceptible level quality. NOTE do not buy the green lettered Corsair CX, get the silver ones; the green ones are the old generation and not good.If you are going to use a GPU better than a GTX 1050ti or rx 560 then you will need a 550–650w model. Stick with Seasonic or EVGA G2/G3/GS models then.EDITED 11/21Another user posted that most all of the watts is on the 3v/5v rail. This makes it inusfficient for powering even a GTX 1030 or 1050ti. I would not trust this power supply in grandma’s desktop used for internet browsing/facebook.
How to install drivers for all pc components after new build?
Hello, I am building a new computer and I was wondering what I needed to do to install all the drivers for my pc components. I only have 1 optical drive, so if I might be in trouble if I have to install them when I install my Win7 OP. Can anyone tell me what the process it to install the drivers and what I need to do? Thanks!
How to build a computer?
I plan to build a PC from scratch hopefully as cheaplyt as possible, (that means mostly from ebay), Im a bit of a serious newbie at the moment and I ahve some serious learning to do, my main question is, how do you know if all the arts you buy, motherboard, CPU, RAM, Hard drive ect. are all compatible? thanks Also, what do you think the best way would be to learn about building PCs?
Build new PC or replace parts of my old PC?
Upgrading that system is pointless - the hardware is close to a decade old.Even if you replace the CPU with a Core 2 Quad and max out RAM to 4 GB (which is the most your motherboard supports), it will not be adequate for high-end current generation games, both in terms of performance and available memory (6 GB is starting to become a norm).Your graphics card is somewhere at or below the level of current generation integrated graphics. Your power supply... let's just not go there. It's junk.You're pretty much left with just the case, and maybe your optical drive and hard drives - but only if they use SATA interface.You should look into replacing that system with something newer - with about $400 worth of budget, you can get a decent entry-level gaming desktop, or you can go the Potato Masher route and get a refurbished system with 1st or 2nd generation Core i5 / Core i7 and upgrade that (mostly power supply, graphics card, RAM) to get a serviceable gaming machine:
When building a computer what parts must be compatible?
Ok so I am going to buy and build my own computer using New Egg. The parts that I am going to buy are: Computer Case CPU Fans Hard Drive Keyboard and Mouse Monitor Memory Mother board Power supply Sound Card Video Card Sound System DVD/CD burner Now my question is which one of those are supposed to be compatible and did I miss anything?