Building a Gaming Computer

A couple weeks ago we published a post on building your own computer, however we didn’t cover the ‘gaming’ side of this. We felt this is worthy of making a separate post for as there is a lot to go into.

It’s one thing to build a computer, but building one for the purpose of playing games is another story, there’s more to consider, we’re going to run through some points we think should be noted for a gaming computer. It’s a very popular thing to do now, gaming computers are more common now than they have ever been.

The first point we’d like to make is regarding Intel CPU’s. A very popular choice for high end tasks such as playing the latest games at a suitable frame rate. Intel labels their CPU’s in numbers, such as: 4690, 4790, 6700, 7700 and so on. However some of these models have the letter ‘K’ at the end, this means the CPU is ‘Unlocked’ meaning it’s much more suitable if you plan on overclocking. However it also means it does NOT include a cooler or heatsink, you will have to buy this separately.

One of the biggest advantages of playing video games on a PC is the high framerates, but what does this mean? The framerate is the number of frames being rendered on your monitor, the more frames there are the ‘smoother’ it will look, the sweet spot is considered to be 60fps. Your PC needs to be good enough to achieve this frame rate but also your monitor needs to support it, monitors these days support frame rates of 144fps. There’s not much point of buying a high-end monitor if your PC cannot render the frames

Following on from frame rates, you need to be able to track the frames you are getting as well as the temperatures of your system while it’s under high usage, MSI’s Afterburner program is one of the most popular for doing this. You can have a small but very helpful overlay on your game in the corner to track the performance of your computer, it can also be great for troubleshooting if one if your components is substantially hotter than the other.

Static electricity has long been a problem for computer builders, it has the potential to zap a component rendering it completely useless. There are precautions you can take such as wearing an ESD wrist strap or using an anti-static mat, both of these methods will prevent your components from being damaged. It is also recommended you handle components carefully, for example try not to touch the gold parts of the RAM, these are the parts that are easily damaged.