PC Components

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A brief guide on PC Part selection.
Having good specs does not necessarily make a PC part good.
Always read reviews.

Monitors

Go IPS or VA every time. If you're really rich, you can go OLED.
I prefer 4K over 120 Hz but if you can find a good deal on QHD 120 Hz that's good too.
Note that some lower-end GPUS and adapters won't be able to output 4k60.

Peripherals

Main article: Peripherals

PC Parts

Case

Go with something ~$100 with looks that you like. Gamers Nexus does airflow reviews but as long as it has 2 front fans with a clear area for intake, it's good enough for me.

These days, you should be able to get one with USB-C.

Heatsinks

Noctua's NH-D14 and NH-D15 are the gold standard. The go for $75-100.

Online reviews have also praised the NH-U14s and Scythe Fuma 2 for ~$60. Be Quiet's Dark Rock coolers are also very popular. I haven't used any of these personally.

If you're on a budget, Cooler Master Hyper 212 and Deepcool GAMMAXX 400 variants can be had for ~$25.

I'm personally not a huge fan of AIOs since they are wear items, though I've only owned one and it's worked perfectly fine.

Fans

Typically go with Arctic P12/P14 or Noctua fans.

With most motherboards, you can buy ~2000 RPM fans and tune down to 800-1000 rpm in the UEFI/BIOS.
Typically, several slower fans (~800 rpm) is quieter than fewer faster fans.

Motherboards

The most important thing to look for is the VRM quality. Bad VRMs will throttle your CPU even at stock settings and with good cooling.
There are VRM tier lists for most motherboard chipsets.
Here is one for AMD.

Aside from this, having multiple PCIe slots is a nice for multiple GPUs or capture cards.
Both Ryzen and Intel consumer CPUs only have 16 lanes dedicated for PCIe. Other lanes are shared with the chipset.
Sometimes, you can tell which boards support 8x/8x by seeing if they two 16x slots with metal shields (for GPUs).
Other boards will only support 4x on the secondary 16x slots going through the chipset.
Some workstation motherboards will have PCH switches which allow for connecting more devices sharing the total bandwidth.

If you need more than 2 GPUs or need more than 16x in parallel PCIe bandwidth then you will need to go HEDT (threadripper).

Power Supplies

Check the check the PSU Tier List.
For high-end builds (i.e. Nvidia 3090 class builds), pick something in the A-tier section.
Corsair AX/HX/RMx, EVGA Plat/Gold, and Seasonic PSUs tend to be good choices.

In general, these will come with a 10 year warranty and 80+ Gold efficiencyor better. If you can find a sale, 80+ Platinum power supplies are even better (e.g. Corsair HX or AX).
Most expensive PSUs will keep the fan off when load is under 40% so try to aim for a high-wattage PSU. Furthermore, higher wattage will be better against GPU spikes.

SSDs

Try to go NVMe if you can. SATA is okay too if you run out of PCIe lanes though.

Samsung SSDs are the most popular but are more expensive than others so I never buy them.
For PCIe 3.0, I typically go for HP EX920, HP EX950, or Adata SX8200. For sata, the Adata SU800 is good.

If you're on a budget and need a lot of storage, you can go for QLC drives such as Intel 660p.
However, these have worse endurance and performance can suffer for large extended writes.

Avoid SSDs without DRAM. Check Anandtech for reviews.

Hard Disks

Avoid for PC and Workstation builds. It's not worth the weight, or noise. See Data Hoarding for how to setup a NAS.

CPUs

Intel or AMD are both fine nowadays.

RAM

I always test RAM, both new and used, upon receiving it with Passmark's Memtest86.
Failing memtest86 means either the ram is bad, your settings are unstable, or your CPU's memory controller isn't good enough for the overclock.
Sometimes, XMP speeds can be good with a small amount of ram but will fail with more ram due to a week memory controller, particularly on earlier Ryzen CPUs.

For XMP overclocked ram, it's best not to mix ram models. Otherwise, downclock to the lowest common specs.

For JEDEC stock ram, it's usually okay to mix models as long as both have the same specs.

In general, you want the highest MHz and the smallest CAS latency.
For Ryzen 3000/5000 and Intel 8/9th gen, only up to DDR4-3200 is officially supported.
For most applications, DDR4 memory speeds have diminishing returns above 3000 MHz so don't spend too much extra.

Used vs New

Things which I prefer to buy used:

  • CPUs - very rarely DOA and very rarely goes bad with time. Just make sure there are no bent or missing pins.
  • Memory - easy to test with Memtest86, very rarely goes bad with time.
  • GPUs - if it's a newer model, it'll typically still have a warranty.

Things I prefer to buy new:

  • Cases
  • Motherboards
  • SSDs and HDDs
  • PSUs

If it's part of an entire build, the above used parts are fine to leave in.
Used motherboards are okay if part of a bundle, i.e. with CPU and cooler. Just make sure there are no broken pins.

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