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HOW DO I CHOOSE PARTS TO BUILD A GAMING PC?

 

If you’re looking at building your gaming PC, then look no further! This guide will help you choose what components may fit your preference, whether it be purely for gaming or strictly designed towards productivity and workstation use. We do want to also mention that this guide will help you out in terms of compatibility of the platform you will be choosing, which is very important when building a gaming PC.

It is very important to form your gaming PC build around the main five components your system will mainly utilize: your processor, graphics card, motherboard, power supply and case. All five components will affect the way you use your system and may have compatibility with other components, such as a motherboard supporting an m.2 NVME solid-state drive by having an m.2 compatible slot available, or not. Budget will also have a huge impact on the options that you able to choose from. One of the most common ways as the first step in the gaming pc building process is to form your gaming PC around a certain “tier’ which will allow you to select the appropriate parts for your system within your budget range. You can learn more about budgeting and gaming PC tiers in our Best Gaming Desktop for the Money guide.

CPU / PROCESSOR

Choosing the correct processor for your system is crucial as this will allow your system to perform to its potential alongside your graphics card during gaming sessions and other normal workload utilisation. We would recommend choosing a mid-tier processor such as the Intel Core i5 or an AMD Ryzen 5 if you’re budgeting, but if there aren’t any limits then going for an Intel Core i7 or i9 or AMD Ryzen 7 or 9 processor is highly recommended for the best gaming performance. If it’s an entry level system you’re looking for, there is outstanding value for money to be found in the Ryzen 3 and Intel Core i3

MOTHERBOARD

To pair with the CPU of your choosing, you’ll need a compatible motherboard. We’ve started each motherboard as a recommended chipset level, and you can upgrade if you see fit. If you’ve selected an Intel Core i5 CPU like the i5 10400 or 10600, then the Intel B560 would be a recommended starting point – rock solid, good feature set and delivers value for money. The Intel Z series motherboards like Z590 are a big step up in features and price, and generally intended for the higher tier, overclockable processors, whose unlocked nature is denoted by the “K” suffix like the Intel Core i7 10700K and i9 10900K chips. While lower chipsets will allow the processor to reach its maximum boost frequency, only the Z590 offers true overclocking ability on these CPUs. In addition, the Z590 allows for faster RAM speeds than lower chipsets (although this is somewhat confusing with Intel’s 10th gen CPUs having mixed max RAM speeds), and feature superior chipset cooling solutions and other functionality, so while you’re paying more, you’re getting more for your money.

This follows the same gaming pc assembling philosophy for AMD Ryzen 5 processors such as Ryzen 5 5600G or 5600X, where we would recommend an AMD B550 motherboard. The X series motherboards like the AMD X570 are designed for the best thermal TDP regulation, similar to Intel’s Z series platform, which ensures high tier processors such as the Ryzen 7 and Ryzen 9 CPUs sit within desirable temperatures ranges under load. We recommend the X570 platform if you’ve selected a high-tier AMD Ryzen processor, but both the B450 or B550 motherboards are robust, feature-packed platforms for use with up to Ryzen 7 processors. The B550 and X570 chipsets have added future-proofing advantages too, since AMD has confirmed they will both be compatible with the next two generations of AMD processors, while the B450’s compatibility will end with Ryzen 4000 series, or Zen 3, range of processors.

GRAPHICS CARD

We believe it’s important to match your graphics card to your processor’s tier to ensure your system will perform to its maximum capability when gaming, as a potential CPU bottleneck may be possible if you don’t select correctly. If you’ve selected a mid-tier processor, such as the Ryzen 5 5600G or Core i5 10400, then we recommend up to an RTX 3070 8GB graphics card which is a great pairing in real-time gaming situations. Any further up the GPU scale than that, and we would recommend the high-tier which would be the Ryzen 5 5600X/Core i5 10600K, Ryzen 7/Core i7 or Ryzen 9/Core i9 to pair with an RTX 3080 10GB or RTX 3090 24GB, as you won’t be leaving any performance on the table with those CPUs.

POWER SUPPLY

Power consumption is a crucial factor within a system and choosing the correct power supply to fit within your PC’s wattage consumption or future potential wattage consumption after upgrading is something you need to consider. Future-proofing a system would be selecting a high wattage power supply as you may want to upgrade your system’s graphics card or add on another one in the future. Power supplies are fortunately very interchangeable and are compatible with all relatively new PC parts, therefore it’s fairly easy to swap out your old one for a newer, higher wattage power supply.

Most low to mid-tier processors and graphics cards don’t have high wattage consumption, therefore you could select a 550W power supply and have no issues at all. However, when you select a high-tier processor and graphics card, you will have to consider higher wattage power supplies such as 650W or higher to ensure there is headroom for more power-hungry components. Once you add a second graphics card and run them both in NVLink/Crossfire (depending on your graphics card model), then you’re looking at 1000W or higher as your system will have a high power consumption while under full load. We recommend choosing an 80+ Gold or higher rating for high-tier gaming PCs.

DESKTOP CASE

Each Allied case is designed to deliver unique aesthetics and premium performance, across three sizes:

Allied Stinger: Compatible with MATX (micro-ATX) motherboards. Compact in size yet roomy enough to house powerful components.

Allied Patriot: Fitted with MATX or ATX motherboards, dependent on specification selected. Versatile enough to house single or dual graphics cards and front-mounted 240mm and rear 120mm all-in-one liquid coolers.

Allied M.O.A.B.: Super-tower in size, fitted with ATX or E-ATX motherboards, dependent on specification selected. Cavernous interior with compatiblity for up to 360mm liquid coolers.

OTHER COMPONENTS

Now that we’ve listed the main five parts within your gaming PC build, we’ll move onto last few components which include your DDR4 Memory (RAM), CPU cooler, main operating system drive (SSD) and storage drive (SSD/HDD). 

RAM / MEMORY

Your RAM is important as it is required for your system to boot, while also assists with most of the work that the processor requests such as opening a browser tab or launching your favourite game. Our recommendation is to have a minimum 16GB DDR4 RAM in your build for an optimal gaming experience which should allow you to have applications open in the background while playing a game such as Discord to chat to your friends or a few browser tabs you might want to alt-tab into to look up something.  More intense graphical or video applications, rendering or other such applications generally benefit from 32GB or more. At present, few games truly benefit from more than 16GB of RAM. AMD Ryzen processors do though benefit from faster RAM speeds, so selecting 3200MHz or higher speeds will gain additional % performance boosts. Intel chips too benefit from faster RAM, but speeds over 2933MHz are restricted to Core i7 and i9 processor and Z490 motherboard combinations.

CPU COOLER

Your system cooling gaming peripherals or CPU cooler may already be sorted out if you’ve selected an AMD Ryzen processor as the stock cooler is included. A stock cooler is also present on Intel processors except those with the K suffix, which are not bundled with coolers when they come from Intel. For these processors, we require a minimum 120mm all-in-one liquid cooler to be selected as well. However, if you are selecting a high-tier Intel or AMD processor, it is highly recommended to look into dedicated liquid cooling solutions as they will provide stable, low temperatures for the processor while under load as they are quiet, efficient and better for the longevity for the system.

SOLID STATE DRIVE

All Allied systems are bundled with a solid-state drive as its main operating system drive, by default. Solid-state drives provide faster loading times and overall improved system performance over a standard mechanical hard drive. The form-factor of this solid-state drive can be either a 2.5” an M.2 drive, with transfer protocols being SATA 3 or NVME. SATA 3 is significantly faster than mechanical hard drives, while the NVME protocol is faster again, so if lightning-fast load times and file access is important to you, choose an NVME drive. For your storage drive(s), this can either be a standard large capacity hard drive for bulk files, videos, etc or additional solid states (2.5”/M.2 NVME) which you could use as a gaming drive or as a scratch disk for video editing, etc.

CONCLUSION

Overall, we hope our guide has helped you with what parts you’re needing for your new gaming PC setup. With the information you’ve learnt, you should now know to select the correct components to build a PC that matches your requirements We have configurations which allow you to select the parts we’ve mentioned above, so if you would like to check them out then please visit our gaming desktop PC range.