Video Gamers Podcast - Gaming Quick Takes - Building a PC

Episode Date: July 1, 2023

From gaming hosts Josh, Paul, and Ryan we're bringing you even more gaming content each week.  Gaming Quick Takes are a short series of game recommendations, funny moments, off-topic chat and more. A small dose of gaming to brighten your Saturdays! Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Visit BetterHelp.com today to get 10% off your first month. That's BetterHelp, H-E-L-P.com. TD Direct Investing offers live support. So whether you're a newbie or a seasoned pro, you can make your investing steps count. And if you're like me and think a TFSA stands for Total Fund Savings Adventure, maybe reach out to TD Direct Investing. Hey guys, welcome to TD Direct Investing. demand, we have decided to shake up the perks for our supporters and we'll be releasing these quick takes on Saturdays to everyone, giving you all some extra free content that was previously unavailable to the public. And these quick takes are a little more laid back and they're hosted

by just one of us. So sit back, relax, and enjoy this quick take episode. Shazam! Boom! Hello, squad mates. Welcome to another Quick Take episode here with Paul. I wanted to take a little bit of a break of talking about games to talk a little bit about gaming hardware. I know for a lot of you out there, you might be console players. Maybe you're considering building a PC. I know a lot of you out there who listen to the show have already built your own PC, but we do oftentimes get questions where people ask, if I'm on a set budget, where should I shift my finances? You know, what's the most

important thing to buy? How do I even go about building a PC? It can feel very daunting from the onset. But I would want to encourage all of you out there that if you have never built your own PC, it's actually incredibly fun. I mean, I do get that it's a little bit nerve wracking. And when you piece everything together, you've probably spent several hundred dollars, if not a couple thousand dollars, and when you flip that switch for the first time, you've got your fingers crossed. You hope you don't see any smoke or smell any burning, but honestly, building PCs these days is far easier than when I was younger. I remember learning all about hardware. You used to have to set jumpers for your hard drives. The processors were very easily damaged and could get broken. Even just

bending a couple of the pins a little bit would affect the performance. Nowadays, it's actually not all that bad. Basically, you just need to make sure that your parts are compatible. There are some awesome websites you can use like PC Part Picker, and you can set all kinds of searches as far as your budget and taking a look at the ratings and how many people have used it. It also tells you whether or not those parts are all compatible. But let's say that you're on, you know, not as cheap as possible PC budget, but let's just say that you are on a budget. You've got a little bit of disposable income. What are you going to buy and what things can you afford to cheap out on? All right.

So first of all, I would say if you're going to cheap out on a couple of parts, you can probably do it with your case. You can probably do it with your RAM and you're going to be able to do it with like your hard drives. You know, I wouldn't necessarily start buying from companies that I have never heard of, but you know, especially when you're looking at something like RAM, I see really fancy options of ones that have larger heat sinks and they claim to have all these bells and whistles ram is is pretty straightforward honestly the only thing you need to care about is the amount of ram and the speed at which it runs and that's really all you're gonna have to care about so i tend to just sort by popularity in pc part picker i just stick in however many gigs i want

to be able to buy and then take a look and see what other people have bought. As far as cases go, I am not one to want a real flashy PC. The case that I have is made by Fractal. I actually did spend a little bit of money on this one because I had a lot of issues with overheating my last couple of PCs. And so I decided just to spend a little bit more on a case and some fans. But honestly, for the case, the main thing that you just want to do is to make sure that you can have decent airflow. And also, generally speaking, the bigger the case, the better. You might be tempted to buy one that's a little bit on the small side. But in my experience, you're going to run into issues with other parts that you buy especially

with things like graphics cards and so I always enjoy just buying a full-size tower and then it gives you plenty of room for expansion plenty of room for all of your cables and those tend to work a lot better but you certainly do not need to go out and spend a whole lot of money on your case. And also when it comes to hard drives, I tend to just search for whether you're going to do the M2 drives or a solid state drive, especially on Amazon. There's just a lot of choices for ones that are pretty cheap. You can even buy the one gig hard drives now, honestly, for I've seen them for like 40, 50 bucks when they're on sale. So I think for the things that you want to maybe go a little bit higher on is going to be your motherboard. I know a lot of people tend to either go to the extreme. They either want

the motherboard to be one of the most expensive things or one of the cheapest. In my experience, I like it to be somewhere in the middle. I like to buy something that has the right outputs. So definitely take a look and see how many USBs you're going to be able to use and also expandability. So depending on how many ports you're going to need, that's going to come into play. Also, if you're going to be doing some things like overclockinging then you just want to make sure that you have a decent one that you're going to be able to have a lot of options and to be able to use for that now i think where you're going to want to shift and spend the most money is certainly first and foremost going to be your gpu uh gpus unfortunately are crazy expensive, and that's where you're probably going to end up spending half of your money.

The last PC that I built that I'm on right now, I ended up buying a 2080 Ti, and I don't even want to say how much it cost because it was an exorbitant amount. I do not have a whole lot of disposable income. I know a lot of you guys out there might think that Josh and I make a ton of money on the podcast. We definitely do not have a whole lot of disposable income. I know a lot of you guys out there might think that Josh and I make like a ton of money on the podcast. We definitely do not. It basically pays for our gaming and the expenses of hosting the podcast online. Every once in a while, we do get that extra income from something like Razer. And so that gives us the capability of buying a little bit more hardware. So I spent a vast majority of my money on my 2080 Ti graphics card. And then also you want to make sure that you pick up a decent processor. I know that over time, AMD versus Intel, they seem to keep bouncing back and forth as to which one is the best.

I personally have a much longer history with the Intel processors. I tend to default to Intel, even though right now I know a lot of the AMD cards or processors are very cheap and run incredibly well. Just make sure it's compatible with your motherboard. And also if you're going to be looking at overclocking, make sure that you buy a processor that is compatible with it. Like for the Intel processors, if it ends with a K, then that means that it is overclockable. And I personally like to buy processors that can be overclocked. I do not even overclock them in the beginning. I try to build a really good PC that is going to last for a few years. And as soon as I start to feel like my system is sluggish, that's when I

start to overclock the processor and the RAM and then try to squeeze as much as I can out of it. If you don't need to overclock it, then there's no point in doing it. You're going to run the risk of that piece dying sooner than later if you're overclocking it. You also might go overboard and you're going to start to get some blue screens or whatever might end up being the case. So I like to run things normal in the beginning and then start to pump that up later. So really, if you think about it, the actual brains of your computer, you're looking at the processor, the GPU, and your RAM.

Make sure that those things are pretty well set. Although for RAM, you don't have to spend a whole ton of money. And then you're going to be able to run at least a decent machine. These days, I think everyone knows you're going to want a solid state drive. You might have a disk drive that's much larger, like a terabyte drive, or maybe even a multi terabyte drive that you're going to want to put like all of your photos or music files or things like that but you definitely want your operating system to run on a solid state drive is it's going to be much much faster that's really a non-negotiable for me and then the last thing that i would mention is that you're going to want to spend a decent amount

on a monitor as well i know for a very long time I was never able to afford a nice monitor. I would always just get the biggest size monitor that I could for the price point, but I never spent any money on a monitor until the current one that I have, which I bought a few years back. It is a 27-inch Acer, and it does go up to 144 Hertz and it is a 1440p monitor. And so when you have the higher frame rate, you know, that's really important. If you end up having a beast of a machine that is capable of running 144 frames a second and you're running it on a 60 Hertz monitor monitor it doesn't do you any good

you know if you have the processing power but you can't see it on the screen it's just a waste of money to have that good of a machine so i think that's kind of another key thing you're going to want to look at everything you're putting together and figure out what's going to bottleneck your system because if you overpay for a gpu but you've got a piece of trash processor that's going to bottleneck your system because if you overpay for a gpu but you've got a piece of trash processor that's going to slow down your game anyway then it doesn't really do you any good you know you kind of want everything to be at about the same level it doesn't do you any good for everything to be crazy budget and then have a great graphics card you know it's kind of like a rising tide lifts all boats kind of scenario. I think it's more

important not to try to maximize the best possible card or the best possible processor. You kind of want everything to be equal speed. That way you're going to be able to run everything as best as you can. And there are just so many guides online for how to build a computer. It's honestly quite simple. There's not a lot of things you can mess up. Even putting processors into motherboards could not be easier. They do not even let you put them in the wrong way. It's not like the old days where you just had a big giant rectangle and you had to hope you weren't forcing it in the wrong way. Very simple these days. And the last thing that I'll say is I do think it's

worth spending extra money on a processor fan and heat sink. This is another reason why you're going to want to have a bigger tower. If you have one that is very compact, you might not be able to fit a very good fan in there. And I have had issues with processors running hot, graphics cards running hot. You're going to want to make sure that you have good airflow, and if you have a decent-sized case, and if you put in a good processor fan, pop a couple other cheap fans in there, you're going to have plenty of airflow. Everything's going to run nice and cool. That means your products are going to last longer.

If things are running too hot, guess what's going to happen? Glue, solder, plastic, those pieces are going to become brittle and they're going to break down a lot sooner. So if you are able to keep your rig cooler, it's going to last longer. You're going to be able to overclock things more. You're going to get more bang for your buck. And for me, that's what it all comes down to. I try to only build a new PC every seven to eight years. I will intermittently maybe

upgrade something here or there. And then inevitably, I just end up selling that or giving it to my kids and then building a brand new PC, which is really the only thing that I spend money on. To me, that's my number one hobby. I love having a good computer. I spend all day working from home on my computer. I watch a lot of my movies on my computer. I do my gaming on my computer. And so I want to make sure that that's a really good setup.

You can absolutely get by with a cheap mouse and keyboard, cheap webcam, you know, those kinds of peripherals. If you're on a really, really strict budget, I would do those things absolute last. Even for those, you can get pretty decent pieces of gear, even for $10, $15, $20. But I think that's all I was really going to talk about here today. You know, so to kind of summarize, you're going to want to spend most of your money on a really good GPU. You're going to want a decent monitor. You're going to talk about here today you know so to kind of summarize you're going to want to spend most of your money on a really good gpu you're going to want a decent monitor you're going to want a decent processor those things i'm going to shift all the way to the top somewhere here in the

middle range you want to get a pretty decent processor fan and heat sink you're going to want a decent motherboard and then you can kind of cheap out on the rest. So anyway, if you need any advice on building a computer or if you have any questions on what you should buy or anything like that, don't hesitate to hit us up on Discord. We've had a lot of people ask questions like that in the past. We've been more than happy to help them out. We've also had a lot of people pop in and say,

hey, I've got a budget of $800. What kind of computer are we looking at? And then we're always happy to kind of jump in and try to build one online. And then we can give you a link and let you know what you're looking at. One last Life Pro tip about this. I have found the subreddit BuildAPCSales to be really instrumental in being able to get good deals on my parts. So people will post to Reddit if they see a sale or if they run across something that has a coupon code or if it's some kind of holiday sale, those things get posted and they are marked with flair. So you can just search and just see motherboards or monitors or peripherals. And you can see those.

You can sort them by what's been posted most recent. So that way you're looking at deals that are probably still valid. And that'll go a really long way. You might be looking at a graphics card that normally costs like 1200 bucks. But if you can look on Reddit and maybe you find out that for first time users

on this website, you can get 20% off using this code. Next thing you know, you can save several hundred dollars on pieces of gear. So whenever anyone posts about, you know, what website should I use to find pieces, that's always the first thing I point them to. And that's at reddit.com slash r slash build a PC sales. Absolutely invaluable resource to use. All right.

Well, that's it here for today. So sorry for boring those of you out there who have no interest at all in PC gaming. For the rest of you, hopefully it was a fun listen, if nothing else. I remember building my very first PC back when i had my first job i was ecstatic to buy a 128 megabyte graphics card felt like that was uh i was on top of the world and it's so funny to think about that nowadays because that's such a minuscule amount of memory on a graphics card especially by today's standards uh i remember our family computer the very first one was a 33 megahertz processor. And, you know, we were running everything in DOS. I remember upgrading to Windows 3.1 and then

inevitably 95. And I feel like when you are able to play a part of, you know, helping build the family computer or building your own computer, it helps you understand how it works. It makes you appreciate it all a lot more. You know, sometimes the bundles that you can buy of a pre-built machine is the cheapest option, but when you're able to build it all together, I think that really does make some really special memories. I know I have really cherished and loved every time I've been able to build a computer, which at this point, I guess is probably four different times kind of going back to that first job I had. So anyway,

hope you guys enjoyed the listen, happy gaming to everyone out there. Thank you for supporting the podcast. This one obviously went quite long. Hope you guys enjoyed it. We'll see you next time.