My son Rushil became interested in video gaming couple years ago when we got him XBox 360 and then an XBox One S. The next level up for him was to build his own gaming PC. The below youtube video comes close to the specs of the PC we built:
First we picked the parts at the https://pcpartpicker.com/ which is a great website to select the compatible parts and it even gives the lowest priced website where you can buy the part from. Our spec was the following:
- CPU - Intel - Core i5-9600K 3.7 GHz 6-Core Processor
- CPU Cooler - Phanteks - PH-TC12DX_BK 68.5 CFM CPU Cooler
- Motherboard - Asus - ROG STRIX Z390-E GAMING ATX LGA1151 Motherboard
- Memory - Corsair - Vengeance LPX 32 GB (2 x 16 GB) DDR4-3200 Memory
- Storage -
- Western Digital - Blue 500 GB M.2-2280 Solid State Drive
- Seagate - Barracuda 2 TB 3.5" 7200RPM Internal Hard Drive
- Video Card - MSI - GeForce RTX 2070 8 GB Video Card
- Case - Corsair - Crystal 570X RGB White ATX Mid Tower Case
- Power Supply - Corsair - TXM Gold 750 W 80+ Gold Certified Semi-Modular ATX Power Supply
- Operating System - Microsoft - Windows 10 Home OEM 64-bit
- Peripherals -
- Headphones - SteelSeries - ARCTIS 7 2019 Edition 7.1 Channel Headset
- Keyboard - Corsair
- Mouse - Razer
- Monitor - Dell S2719DGF (Freesync monitor which can run in GSync compatible mode on dual port with 155Hz refresh rate, 1ms response time)
- Funko Pop toy - for fun we put this in our case - a spiderman toy.
Overall it became a more expensive system than he initially thought but the end result is XBox one is now not as much used as the PC. I was a bit reluctant to spend so much on building a PC and havnig never done this before was not sure if we will be able to do it as easily as the videos on Youtube show the process to be. But i bit the bullet and during his spring break we father and son - sat together building it and it was a bit more than half a day worth of work to get the rig up and running. At the end of the day my son was quite satisfied - he was more confident than me to start with :) that we will be able to pull this off as easily as youtube videos showed.
Experience building it:
- We first opened the case and referred to its manual on putting a mother board.
- The ASUS motherboards are builder friendly in that it came with wifi built in in our model and was easy to put in the case. The I/O cover was already in place.
- Then we put the CPU on the mother board.
- Then the cooler system which also seemed more complex than it actually was to assemble. We put the thermal paste on the CPU and followed the directions as closely as possible in the cooler system's installation manual.
- Put the memory cards on the motherboard.
- Put the powersupply in the case.
- Put the SSD and the HDD in the case and wire it to the motherboard.
- Put the video card in the PCIe slot.
- Manage the cables - this took a while to route through the right slots in the case.
- Power on the system - insert the USB drive to install Windows 10 Home Edition.
- Install the latest updates for BIOS from motherboard manufacturer's site.
- Install latest graphics driver from NVidia.
- Install GSync Experience from NVidia - we got one game to download for free as part of the promotion NVidia had during that time.
- Install steam and any other gaming apps.
So it was a good experience and can indeed be done as easily as the pros do it in the youtube videos. We take a bit longer but it is a fun endeavor. My intent was to encourage my son to be further his interest in electronics and STEAM by letting him build his own gaming PC. He did most of the research and before we nailed down the parts he did a very thorough research on them and why we should pick what we ended up picking balancing between cost and performance of the rig. He started with AMD Ryzen based system but moved to an Inel + NVidia combo with CPU and GPU that can be overclocked. I was pleasantly surprised at the knowledge he acquired about the specs of these parts in the process - referring to benchmarks on CPU, GPU, DDR RAM and NVMe M.2 SSD storage that we went with. Picking the parts took him several months and was the best part of the letting him build his own first gaming PC.
