Build Advice A Newbie's Hardware Guide (Updated 6/4/2014)

Thats a great guide!

 

Brilliant guide, while I understood what makes what better I never understood how they actually work. Thanks a lot

 

Thanks very much for producing this, it's great!

 

September Updates:
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added Section 16 – Further Reading
4. Added Intel Pentium processors to budget CPU recommendations
5. Reevaluated SSD recommendations
6. Fractal Design cases added to Section 9 recommendations

 

Thanks, the psu bit was very useful.

 

Some of you might think I've already forgotten about this guide. I haven't. In addition to being extremely busy with school this semester, I'm also waiting for AMD's new FX CPUs to come out so I can (possibly) add them to the guide. Rumors say that it's supposed to be released later this month so I'll probably be updating the guide in a few weeks.

Meanwhile, most of the content sections are still very relevant (although prices and parts may have changed) so hopefully waiting patiently will be easier.

 

October Updates (Bulldozer!):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added AMD FX CPUs to CPU recommendations
4. Added AM3+ motherboards to motherboard recommendations
5. Bulldozer information added to Section 2
6. HTPC build cooler height conflict fixed

note: I had some problems uploading the new guide to google docs, and some of the formatting didn't transfer over nicely. I edited it by hand, but if I missed anything please tell me.

 

There won't be an update for November 2011 since the last update happened late last month, and I'm busy with school this month. Thanksgiving break should give me enough time to make the changes I want to make for the next update, so see you December!

 

Will have a read on it later on tonight, thanks.

 

December Updates (Christmas!):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added multitasking topic to Section 2 – (may be expanded later)
4. Added Sandy Bridge-E processors to Recommendations in Section 2
5. Added Sandy Bridge-E processor information to Section 2
6. Added LGA2011 motherboards to Recommendations in Section 3
7. Have a great Holiday and New Year everyone

 

January Updates:
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Fractal Design Cases Added Back (disappeared from newegg for a while)
4. Added Section 17: Feedback with my contact info
5. Hope everyone had a nice holiday

 

Wowza, this is awesome! I'm going to start pointing first time builders to it.

 

It's about time for people to start wondering what happened to this month's update (if anyone actually watches for these updates). I was holding off on updating the guide in the hope that Nvidia will release their reply to AMD's 7970, but that doesn't appear to be happening . In lieu of this and a relatively uneventful month in terms of new tech, I won't be doing an update. For those of you who are curious, the 7950 did come out though, so here's a link to that on newegg. This card will be added to the guide when I update it for March (hopefully by then there'll be at least news on Nvidia's release date).

 

I enjoy reading your updates if no one else does!

 

March Updates:
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added Neowin’s series of guides on smartphone hardware (ongoing) to Section 16
4. The high end power supply recommendation list was starting to become too long so I removed several power supplies. That’s not to say the power supplies I removed were bad; only that there were too many of that type in that price range. The removed power supplies will be listed here for March then removed from the guide completely.

 

April Updates:
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Updated Neowin’s series of guides on smartphone hardware (ongoing) to Section 16
4. Added ArsTechnica’s introduction to quantum computing guide to Section 16
5. Condensed SSD recommendations in Section 7 to be by series where appropriate
6. Added Nvidia 680 graphics cards to section 5

 

I know this maybe a big pain but £? so links to scans site?

 

As you noted, adding a £ value to all the items would basically mean I'd need to look up every part on scan or ebuyer or some other UK vendor. This would effectively double the amount of links I'd need to check each month, but I'm willing to do this courtesy since I do have the guide up on a UK forum. However, I'm not sure where most of my guide's readership comes from (even though this is a UK forum, there are people registered here from the US like me and I have the guide linked on some other forums), so I'm not sure that going through that much effort would be worthwhile to the readers.

The main problem will be that updating the guide will take longer for me since I'd need to go to a US and a UK vendor to get the pricing each month. I'm also not sure what I'd do to recreate the groups (like how I just grouped up the SSDs) using another vendor, but that's minor.

There are a couple middling paths I can see for this though:

1) I can easily add a pound or euro conversion based on the dollar price to each item. That'd be relatively easy to update since I wouldn't need to check a vendor price each month.

2) Another thing that I've been considering is dropping the price tag that's on each item. Just like having the link on each item is a convenience, having the price tag there is also a convenience. I'm not sure how useful it is especially since the actual price drifts up and down between updates (some items drift quite a bit). If readers are OK with me taking out the price on each item, it would save me some time during updates that I can use to buffer the extra time spent checking 2 vendors on each item. However, having the price there (even if it drifts off a bit during the month) is pretty nice since otherwise people would need to click on each link just to get an idea of the pricing. The way it is now, readers are able to look through the recommendations and see a value that's generally fairly close to the actual value of the product and check exact pricing as they find parts of interest.

If I get enough feedback for one of these paths, I'll implement it in the next update. Otherwise this will get filed under "considerations for next update..."

 

May Updates:
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added Intel Ivy Bridge processors to Section 2 recommendations
4. Added H77 and Z77 motherboards to Section 3 recommendations
5. Added Intel SSD 330 series to Section 7 recommendations
6. Added NZXT Source 220 to Section 9 recommendations
7. Updated some outdated information in Sections 2 and 3
8. Ivy Bridge has not been introduced to the Section 14 builds yet because I would like to see more reviews on H77 and Z77 motherboards first.

 

very well-done writeup, sir! .. As a fellow American, I appreciate the links and dollar amounts +rep