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

Guide Updates (6/2/2012):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added XFX ProSeries PSUs
4. Added Gamers Nexus’ great hardware guides to the additional reading section
5. Updated content sections where necessary
6. Added a subtopic on microarchitecture codenames to Section 2
7. Added the 4th part of Neowin’s Smartphone Hardware Guide to Section 16

In addition to official updates, I have one more thing to say to those of you who actually read the forum thread. I'm in the beginning stages of planning a major upgrade to the guide, and I should be ready to be asking for help by next month's update. I'll probably make a thread in Bit-Tech for it so the guide thread doesn't get cluttered. You'll have to wait till next month for me to confirm the project publicly, but I might've hinted to some of you what I'm planning to do already.

 

+rep, great guide!

 

Guide Updates (7/1/2012):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added a link to TFT Central in Section 16
4. Currently working to turn this guide into a website! <- see July 2012 update post for details

Wait did you read that 4th one right? Maybe you should read it again. Yup... you read it right. I'm currently in the process of changing the guide and all that is in it into a website. This process is very time consuming, and there are a lot of factors that I am taking into consideration. Currently, I do not have any target or expected date for this to be done. The amount of work that goes into doing the guide from month to month will depend on how busy I am, how tired I am, how frustrated I am, and how good the anime I'm watching happens to be. Yes I make this project sound like it's not very important to me, but it is. It's just I have a life to live too and making a website is quite difficult (if you've ever done it you understand me). This is also the first website I'm ever creating so I'm working hard to make it good, but I'm also stuck doing a lot of code lookup (I'm coding this site manually) which slows down progress. I've created a thread here since it's the most technical forum that my guide is posted on describing this project in more detail and requesting aid in certain areas. I'll continue to use that thread as a resource to post questions or ask for advice as I build the site. I'll also post updates on the site build here occasionally, but since this thread's purpose isn't really to discuss web design I'll refrain from posting more than that.

 

Guide Updates (8/5/2012):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products remove or replaced
3. Added Azza Genesis 9000 case
4. Brought friend on to do design. Considering security concerns and php/mysql usage. Focusing on how to scrape prices off newegg automatically.

As a side note, the guide turned 1 year old this past month . Woo 12 months of helping out new builders ^-^.

 

Sadly, this month's update has been canceled due to me receiving a lot more work from school than anticipated. Especially since I try to do updates at the beginning of the month, I haven't had time to compensate in my schedule for the load. Consequently some things have fallen off my plate (such as this month's update). Given that the month's about half way over already, I will be skipping September's update and hopefully resume regular updating in October.

The site is another thing that got suspended for the month. Work should start again once I figure out where to fit it in my schedule. The point where I stopped I was having trouble getting jQuery to recognize newegg's json document as legitimate... I think I need to switch strategy from json to a page scraper.

 

Guide Updates (10/6/2012):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products removed or replaced
3. Added NVIDIA 660 Ti to Section 5
4. Added NVIDIA 660 to Section 5
5. Added AMD Trinity APUs to Section 2
6. Arctic Cooling Freezer i30 and Freezer 13 added to section 8
7. Considering either cutting or massively overhauling Section 13
8. In the interest of actually getting something done, I’ve decided to scrap the idea of scraping for newegg prices. In lieu of that I also want to move the site from Javascript/HTML over to PHP.

 

Guide Updates (11/10/2012):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products removed or replaced
3. Added AMD Vishera CPUs to Section 2 Recommendations

Not much was done at all this month. Sorry about that. Tests and papers galore -_-.

 

Wow, monster guide! You could fill a whole webpage with that..

Although, it's going to be a absolute nightmare to keep up-to-date due to all the links and specific hardware information. Good luck!

 

Guide Updates (12/8/2012):

I guess I should've said "lack of guide updates..." Due to the turn of month being right near finals for me and with the holidays coming up, I've decided to forgo updates for December. January's updates should be on time if I don't get too wrapped up with New Years.

Then again, we could all be killed by a giant flying Mayan calendar shooting lasers at us on the 21st so I won't worry too much about January just yet.

Hope everyone has a great holiday season! Sorry if any of you were looking forward to seeing the updated prices this month.

 

'Pannels' should be spelled 'panels' on the 1st page

 

Guide Updates (1/6/2013):
1. Links updated
2. EoL products removed or replaced
3. Multitasking sub-section for CPUs updated with more specific information
4. AMD Vishera CPUs added to Section 2 Recommendations

 

Guide Updates (2/3/2013):
1. Links updated
2. End of life products removed or replaced
3. Cleaned up some unclear language regarding AMD Vishera processors
4. Added a subsection to Section 3 for motherboard voltage regulation
5. Added a subsection to Section 7 for memory storage density
6. Added a link to Logical Increments in Section 16

 

Well it should, seeing how Bit-Tech's guide has turned Bi-Annual on us

 

agreed, last hardware guide is august 2012. Keep up the good work, im looking to upgrade soon so i will be reading though. Always going to learn something new

 

Guide Updates (9/3/2013):
1. Links updated
2. End of life products removed or replaced
3. Added the NVIDIA Titan to Section 5 Recommendations

Going forward, for this forum I'm going to stick the day in front of the month for dates.

 

Guide Updates (7/4/2013):
1. Links updated
2. End of life products removed or replaced
3. Added AMD 7790 to Section 5 recommendations
4. Added NVIDIA 650 Ti Boost to Section 5 recommendations
5. Frame interval benchmarking discussion added to Section 5

 

Guide Updates (12/5/2013):
1. Links updated
2. End of life products removed or replaced
3. TechSpot’s History of the Modern Graphics Processor added to Section 16

 

Guide Updates (8/6/2013):
1. Links updated
2. End of life products removed or replaced
3. GTX 780 added to Section 5 recommendations
4. GTX 770 added to Section 5 recommendations
5. Haswell CPUs added to Section 2 recommendations
6. Richland APUs added to Section 2 recommendations
7. Added LGA 1150 motherboards to Section 3 recommendations
8. Added tags for Haswell/Ivy Bridge to Section 2 recommendations
9. Haswell added to Section 14 builds
10. Cleaned up content in Sections 2, 3, and 5

This month's update is HUGE! Be sure to check out some of the new stuff yourself, the news section in the guide barely even scratches the surface. It's really exciting to see so many great components getting released so quickly. Problems with the new technologies thus far are minimal too which is absolutely amazing. I even jumped the gun a bit since the 760 is expected within the next few weeks, but I think readers will benefit more from an update now.

A few side notes about this update:
1) More LGA 1150 motherboards will be added as reviews start coming in
2) It seems like Newegg is not yet listing any motherboards with the new chipset for Richland yet. As a result, I did not put Richland into any of the builds yet.

Happy building!

 

Can I make a suggestion? If people are reading the guide and making a shopping list, it would be helpful to have an explanation of the current CPU socket types, so someone who's decided on a particular CPU without following the link will know which set of motherboards to look at.

You say that the Intel sockets are cpu-type specific but don't actually say that the Haswell cpu's fit the 1150 socket while 1155 fits the ivy bridge & sandy bridge cpu's.

 

Regrettably, I've decided that this month's update is so late that I may as well push it back to August. I was planning to upgrade some content sections this month, specifically Section 13 with information about UPSes and the Mouse section with more information about sensors. However, life circumstances outside of my control have delayed me significantly in making these sections. Not to mention I have not given the guide the normal price update yet. In the interest of not having another update come 2 weeks from now, I feel like the best thing to do at this point is skip July's update.

Sorry guys! I know a lot of stuff happened earlier this month that would make good updates to the guide .