A beginner’s guide to gaming PC’s, part 1
I have been using PC’s since PC monitors were just black and green. A time when floppy disks still existed! But I’ve also been building my own PC’s for many, many years. It’s a sometimes frustrating process, but to hand pick components based on your needs (and budget) and build a working PC from them is also very rewarding (the IKEA effect!).
Over the years I’ve been asked many times: “which computer should I buy?”, or “what should I look for in a computer?” and my answer has always been “it depends”. Practically any PC is good enough if you just want to browse the internet, listen to music and watch some videos. But playing modern video games is a different ball game. Which is why I’ve decided to write this article, documenting the process of selecting components for a PC that will play modern video games.
Whether you’re planning to build your own PC or buy a pre-assembled one, after reading this series you should know a bit more about what to look for in a gaming PC, what’s important and one possible way to go about selecting components to build your own. So let’s dive into it!
Disclaimer: in this article I’ll be talking about desktop PC’s, not laptops. Even though the basics of this article apply to laptops as well, with laptops you pay more for performance because you’re buying portability. But most importantly, there is often very little to upgrade on a laptop. If you’re interested in an article about gaming laptops, let me know!
What components make up a gaming PC?
When it comes to the order of things, it might be good to briefly look at components in the order of assembly first, which I’m going to cover in this article. This will help you understand how everything fits together. When selecting components to build a PC, however, I like to start with the most important component, the graphics card, and build the rest around it. More about that in part 2 of this series. Let’s take a look at our first component!
The case
We start on the outside, the case. There are cases in many shapes and sizes. Big cases, small cases, cases with windows to showcase what’s inside, cases designed to build a PC that’s as silent as possible and cases designed to house the most powerful of PC hardware. In the end, the main goal of a case is simple: to house all other components. One of the most important specifications of a case is the form factor (size) of the motherboards it supports.
The motherboard
Quite literally the base of every PC is the motherboard (or mainboard). A motherboard is a PCB, a Printed Circuit Board; a (usually green) board with lots of chips and other electronic parts on it. It contains things like USB ports, headphone and speaker connections (because a sound card is usually built in), but its main purpose is to connect all other parts and components, either by means of cables or by directly plugging them into the motherboard.
The CPU
If a PC was a car, its engine would consist of 2 parts, the CPU and GPU. The CPU (Central Processing Unit), or just processor, is the component that does almost all calculations that make your computer do what it does. It has the biggest influence on the performance of almost any type of PC (except gaming PC’s).
A CPU comes in the form of a chip, that plugs directly into a special socket on the motherboard. Because the CPU does a lot of complex calculations each second and comes in a tiny package, it generates a lot of heat (like a car engine!). This is why a cooler needs to be mounted directly onto the CPU. Without proper cooling, the CPU can overheat and be destroyed.
The GPU
For gaming PC’s especially, the other critical part that determines its performance is the GPU (Graphics Processing unit), also called graphics card or video card. It’s called a card because it usually comes as a smaller type of circuit board which houses the GPU. The card as a whole plugs into the motherboard.
So what does it do? The GPU is a special type of processor, designed to specifically do graphics/video/image related calculations. Every PC needs a GPU to display anything on a monitor, but because modern video games rely heavily on graphics, the processing power of a GPU is critical to the performance of gaming PC’s.
To make things a bit more complex, some CPU’s have built-in GPU’s. This is called integrated graphics, or shared graphics (the opposite being dedicated graphics). To explain exactly why goes beyond this article, but integrated graphics can’t hold a candle to dedicated graphics. If you want to play modern video games, you need a dedicated GPU.
CPU/GPU Cooling
I already mentioned CPU cooling. Every CPU and GPU needs cooling, and it is almost a world in itself! A standard CPU cooler consists of a heatsink (a finned block of copper and/or aluminum) with a fan mounted on top, to blow cooler air across the aluminum/copper fins to dissipate heat. But besides air cooling there’s also water cooling, or liquid cooling, and it can get pretty sexy.
A water cooling setup is a closed system with cooling liquid flowing through tubes or pipes. A pump moves the liquid through the system, special heatsinks allow the liquid to flow through them, cooling down your CPU (and your GPU if you want), and a radiator with fans cools the liquid down. Like a car! In fact, years ago some people even used actual car radiators to build their liquid cooling system. The advantage of a water cooling system is better cooling performance and less noise compared to air cooling.
These days, some people still build their water cooling setup from scratch (with clear tubes and glow in the dark liquid, yesyes), but so-called AIO (All In One) liquid coolers are very popular. These come as one piece of hardware and do not require assembly, which is one of the biggest challenges of water/liquid cooling setups.
RAM
RAM (Random Access Memory), or just memory, is a place where a PC can store information it needs to have direct access to. It is very efficient (fast) temporary storage for the data that a CPU needs to process: if you turn a PC off, whatever was in the memory will be gone.
The more memory you have, the more efficient a PC can do its processing, increasing performance. This is important for any type of computer, but especially for gaming PC’s. The speed of RAM is also important, but differences are relatively small so the overall impact on performance of a PC is also relatively small.
RAM comes in the form of so-called sticks, which are small rectangular circuit boards, with chips on them. These sticks are also plugged directly into the motherboard.
As you can imagine, RAM is also important for a GPU. Like the CPU, it also needs to process massive amounts of information as quickly as possible. This is why graphics cards have their own RAM, also called VRAM (where V stands for video). It comes preinstalled on the graphics card. Here also, more and faster is better.
Storage
Storage is like memory, but permanent. Any data you put on it, will not disappear when you turn off the PC. A flash drive is an example of storage, but for PC’s an SSD (Solid State Drive) or HDD (Hard Disk Drive, or harddisk, or harddrive) are the primary means of storage. This is where your operating system (Windows) and all your programs are stored, and of course the games you intend to play.
Which type of drive is right for you depends on your budget and storage requirements. SSD’s are the most popular drive type these days. They’re faster at reading data, which influences how fast your programs and games load. However, big SSD drives are more expensive than big HDD drives, so if you need a lot of storage space, you might opt for an HDD instead.
Depending on the type of drive, it’s either plugged into the motherboard directly, almost like a RAM stick, or mounted in your case and connected via cable.
Power supply
Just like any other electrical device, a PC needs power. The power supply, also called PSU (Power Supply Unit), comes as a small metal box that you connect to a power outlet on one side, and connect to all of the components in your PC on the other side, to power them.
What’s most important about a power supply is that it can supply enough power for all the components in your PC. Unsurprisingly, the most power hungry components are the CPU and GPU. A modern CPU can use anywhere between 60 and 200 Watts of power. Modern graphic cards can easily use 300 and even up to 450 Watts of power. It adds up! All other components use power as well, but not even close to what the CPU and GPU use.
Are you ready for part 2?
Congratulations, you made it to the end! In part 2 (coming soon) I’ll go through the process of selecting components for a gaming PC. Are you a beginning gamer and find this useful? Are you a pro gamer and feel like I’ve missed something important? I’d love to hear what you think!
