The following is a post in response to what a friend requested when having need of help putting together his DIY machine

Alright so it’s time to build your first DIY box. So where to begin? If you have never read about the posts I made about the stuff I did for my first, initial build, for myself (link) then I recommend you to do so as it’ll help you figure what you want out of your build, practicing due diligence for the things that you are considering to get for your build, and finally making sure to stay consistent lest you end up making a build that will require further spending to fix bad calls for hardware purchases that you initially made.

So, let’s recape what you wated for your DIY PC build as par our conversation.

You said that you desire a PC that can allow you to do the following things:

  • To play games that you have bought over time from Steam, GOG, etc.
  • To have the maximum amount of physical memory that the motherboard can support to be installed and ready to go.
  • To have bluetooth connectivity.
  • Multiple screen video output via HDMI (ideally).
  • Dedicated seperate hard drives for compartmentalizing data in whole hard drives rather than partitions.

There’s some areas needing to cover in order to addresses these things you highlighted that you want in your build. So without going into unecessary details, I’ll break down a few of the options that you have for this kind fo setup that you’re aspiring to use for the necesseties that you have in mind.

Steam and video games on the Windows PC

In The Late 1990s and Early 2000s…

You had an E-Machines Windows PC - which was great for budget-conscience individuals or people that just needed a basic PC. As far as entertainment capabilities went, the E-Machines PC you had was only good enough to serve as a makeshift home-theater PC or media entertainment center; making it to be only good for playback of audio, video files and any other media file type that did not require a lto of processing power required. Aside of this usage, it was obviously good for quick and easy work that was along the lines of web surfing and office suite application usage (word processing, spreadsheets, electronic presentation slides).

But beyond that, it wasn’t a PC gaming machine: you had consoles, after all, at the time for your gaming needs, so a beefy PC was not a paramount necessity for you at the time.

And let’s face it: building a gaming PC back in the early 2000s was a very difficult thing because single core CPUs came with a choice: you either picked something that was clocking at very high speeds, whichc would result in runtime instability during sessions, or you could just go with something that clocked at lower frequencies and was stable, and not have sufficient performance that you’d need for the games and other demanding programs that you’d want to run at the time with the best performance possible.

So the choices were for most aspiring builders for performance-oriented machines that were for playing PC games were mostly exclusive to mid-range CPUs that allowed for overclocking that then could allow you to get the most out of your purchase. This also came with a caveat in that, with overclocking, you would cause your CPU, RAM, and other peripherals such as your video graphics card, to work in faster-than-recommended setttings that would eventually wear out components of the hardware system setup, causing problems that would result in having replace components - a multi-hundred dollar endeavor if not done right either at once or over time.

So the barriers were, more often than not, both financial and technical to get something working at the desired performances that you wanted from the games and applications that you wanted to run on a PC at the time - consoles were the usual best option for most people to game on as they offered zero risk for what people wanted to do with them.

Today (late 2010s)…

Most pre-built machines from ASUS, Hewlett-Packard, Lenovo, Dell and the like have now much more powerful CPUs which have very good stock speeds for the price whether from Intel or AMD. But the thing is, as typical with pre-built PCs, the CPUs will be, despite their powerful specifications, be coupled with motherboards with chipsets that don’t allow for the full potential of the CPU to be tapped. Along with a weak motherboard, come some cheap-ish peripherals that allow for a build that is feature rich, but not long-lasting (my Hewlett-Packard Pavilion lasted only roughly 10 years). And this is all to keep build costs per unit to be cost-effective, and make it possible for a net-profit to be made for every unit sold to retailers at volume, wholesale prices. OEMs are going to readily offer powerful machines as you could get otherwise for a thousand dollars ($1,000 USD) at exorbitant prices which starts to become a matter - at least in my opinion, of questionable value considering that there’s a sudden spike from the five, six, seven hundred dollar range right into the early two-thousand dollar range which is utterly insane. The real price for most performance PCs such as the kinds that you could buy from someone like Northwest Falcon, which typically go for a cool two-thousand eight-hundred eighty-two even, can go for much less such under two-thousand dollars, with the same hardware specifications.

So there is a significant jump in prices between something is affordable and something that comes with bells, whistles, and a customer services representative that has a record of an insurance policy on file in case you find that you do not know absolutely nothing of what you’re doing.

So therein lies two reasons, all things considered, for building your own Windows PC even if gaming is not on your mind: you pay a relatively cheaper price for after-market components that are going to last your a lot longer than the OEM is going to offer in their pre-builts; and considering the ability to interchangeable parts, allows for the overall machine to continue to last as whole without the wholesale upgrade needed to be done ever again, assuring continued value for you the consumer.

The Gaming angle

Video games of today do not require much processing power, considering to what is available today compared to times past. In the past, video games on the PC meant having to immediately consider a multi-thousand dollar purchase, today that isn’t necessarily true if you are willing to make some concessions at the outset.

What are people playing today? Here’s a list:

  • League of Legends - this is a video game that uses DirectX 9.0c, a graphics rendering API that dates back to as far as 2003!
  • PlayerUnknown’s Battlegrounds - a title that, even in medium graphical fidelity settings, are going to still look exceptional. Even a system as old as mine still can run this game just fine given that upgrades I’ve made since the last time I did was as far back in 2014! Although, to be honest, there is some lag but that’s to be expected.
  • Counter-Strike: Global Offensive - It’s still based off the Source engine that hasn’t seen a substantial change since 2012!
  • Overwatch - The reason it remains popular is that the game engine that powers this competative shooter is very flexible on various platforms and scales well, thus not forcing consumers to buy high-end hardware to run it.
  • Fortnite: Battle Royale - This game is like Overwatch and it is the game that is selling skins at large volumes despite the hatred lobbed at it for that very reason and why so many kids are begging their parents to give them money to blow off on cosmetics; because the family computer can allow them to play the game in the first place!

There are more games that you can check out from this list provided here.

The point to drive home is that many games that are popular and that are catered for mass appeal are not going to be using video game engines that will demand for the purchasing of high-end hardware. This is important because this allows for ease of accessibility for consumers and ease of starting revenue streams from purchases by customers for game developers and publishers. That is pretty much how things are looking at the moment in the PC gaming scene and there hasn’t been much change of this trend since as far back as 2009.

Now there are very demanding games that are so graphically demanding (here’s a link) but they are going to be titles that date back a few years ago and the frequency of these kinds of games are not that common for release as they used to be.

But there is a warning despite this positive, consumer-friendly trend: This doesn’t mean that consumer-grade hardware for the PC has outpaced game development technology, what it does mean is that there are few developers that want to risk rocking the boat and end up selling few games because some game review website has said that the game is unplayable for most people, scaring people away from even buying it until time passes and the game loses value.

But there will come a time when developers become more sophisticated and will start programming effectively and work with the new APIs that have been released to then, in turn, make some games that will indeed start making people be forced to check into upgrading their graphics cards, CPUs, and motherboareds to make sure that they can play some group of new releases in the coming years as it’s just a matter of time for enthusiasts but not so much is the case for casual consumers such as yourself.

A word about video game console ports for Windows.

There are a many titles that, in the past, would only be developed for consoles. And that practice hasn’t exactly gone away or will completely be abandoned by some companies that are wholly dependent on maintaining their titles on certain specific hardware platforms (e.g. Vanillaware, anything published by Atlus really).

But there are changes now that have occured that have incentivized for companies, including the ever-conservative Japanese video games industry, to port over video games titles over to Windows. There are even games that have been once sole exclusives for the Playstation 3 that are now being retro-actively ported to the PC such as Tri-Ace’s End of Eternity. This trend is very good news because such ports are cheaper than their original console releases and cost about an average of ten to twenty dollars less than the console disc prints - which sometimes overtime increase value in the after-market. This also allows for titles that are built to run on limited hardware now have a dedicated port build that will take advantage of most hardware configurations on the PC with full optimization. In other words, you can have a not-so-powerful gaming PC, and still run video game console popular titles!

One of the earliest titles to have an optimized port for the Windows OS was Resident Evil 5 and the result was buttery smooth 60 frames-per-second before 60 FPS was a trend. It was optimized for Intel CPUs of the time (like my Core i7 920) which meant that the game going to be running optimally and that’s despite the MT Framework, the video game engine that was being used by Capcom at the time for Resident Evil 5 at the time and would be used for future titles such as Resident Evil 6, Resident Evil Revelations, Resident Evil Revelations 2, Dragon’s Dogma, Devil May Cry 4: Special Edition, Resident Evil 0 Remaster, Resident Evil HD Remaster, Monster Hunter: World, would all run fine as the game engine itself was designed to specifically work with alongside Intel CPU based hardware systems primarily while AMD CPU based systems would only be able to run as adequetely as it could possibly do so for whatever the particular AMD CPU can get away with despite having almost identical instruction sets and micro-architecture (x86_64 or x86).

Other game engines such as Unity, RGPMaker, REngine, Lithitech, Unreal, idTech and even some game-specific game engines are also being designed to allow developers to produce multiple platform supporting direct ports instead of conversion portages which points to the fact that the PC has become a viable, profitable platform for video games to be developed for.

In fact, the practice of porting console games to PC has become so common, that even the most conservative of developers and publishers, that is to say the Japanese video game industry - save for Nintendo, have become comfortable to the idea of porting their games to the PC and selling them via e-tailers such as Steam, because the digital rights management counter-measures and, more importantly, convenience that make it difficult for anyone to be incentivized to pirate the game on Windows or be able to successfully.

So if there was a reason to add for why to go through with this PC build, let it be to ride the wave of Japanese video games that are being wholly ported to PC whereas before, consoles were the safest businesses and consumers to go with as far as developing, selling, buying and playing video games went.

Physical Memory Capacity: How much and why?

Currently, motherboards can support as much as 32 or 64 Gigabytes of physical memory on average or as much as even 128 Gigabytes of memory but before you get excited about having a lot of RAM consider the following:

What does 24 GB give you?

I have a build that allows me to have up to a physical 24 Gigabytes of physical memory. What do I get out of this? Well, for the most part, I can play games while having office applications (namely an email client, web browser with 5 to 10+ tab windows open), and four instant messaging clients on. The average for this and having other clients on is roughly 39% percent of the total RAM that I have and most of it is taken up by the web browser that I use and the extensions that they use (the more you stuff into your web browser, the more it’ll take up space if left running unattended, so “less is more performance” is something to keep in mind although not totally assured).

If you feel inclined to have your browser save sessions from prior times you have been surfing on the web, plan to load it up with extensions for “surfing enhancements”, and finally plan to leave the history building up forever, I would definitely recommend indeed going beyond the usual 8, 16 Gigabytes that would be considered by most people a bit too much already.

Also consider that web browsers, in particular Blink web rendering engine (Chromium, Chrome, Vivaldi) and Gecko with Servo components (Firefox ver. 57+) are going to end up being something that I’d caution to leave on with too many tabs or be with too many extensions. In fact, I will prepare on a later post a list of essential add-ons for Firefox and Vivaldi for you to refer to because you only need a few extensions to be assured a safe, productive (important) web browsing experience.

So, in short, for gaming old games that are not graphically demanding, office work, web surfing, chat, and so on, 24 Gigabytes is more than enough.

What does 32, 64, and 128 GB give you?

More room to do more stuff, in short. So for instance: you play a game of Skyrim that is heavily modified graphically where you run a an in-game scripting language engine, graphical mods, high resolution textures, shader mods, and extra content mods, that all really takes a toll on your system if you were running already with just 24 Gigabytes of physical memory so you would enjoy some overhead.

As far as speed and response time from the RAM modules to your other components such as the CPU, graphics card, and other peripherals, I don’t think that you’ll have to worry much about the overall performance and responsiveness from the modules as they are not as dramatically different in performance between clock speeds from application to application when it comes to video games.

So stick with a rating that is common, supported out of the box by the motherobard that doesn’t require any profile use to overclock your system to be able use them in your system build.

And you could ask yourself why there would be any need for, other than very serious number crunching applications would you need for so much memory for consumers?

The answer, for now, is virtual reality. And since augmented reality applications are being developed and entertainment for virtual reality headets are becoming more and more the norm, there are now an increased need for these memory hungry applications to be met with multiple-Gigabyte RAM modules to be ready to go.

But other than that, for your case, I would just stick to a motherboard with a max capacity for 64GB and do a gradual upgrade from an initial 32GB (because it is possible to do with today’s pricing points compared to 10 years ago).

Bluetooth

Bluetooth capabilities made a debut a few years ago as integrated components to motherboards but embeded wireless technologies in motherboards have always been a security concern and don’t quite point to making sense of having Bluetooth embedded in a motherboard. But what you can do is buy a USB dongle and that’ll be enough for you to get Bluetooth capability for desktop for as long as the dongle lasts (they last for a long time btw). And it all just costs $14.99 USD.

Multiple HDMI output for multi-screen solution

HDMI is, in short, is shit. That’s all you need to know. There are reasons to start moving away from HDMI as soon as possible and consider more friendlier options like DisplayPort. But usually graphics cards are going to have at least just one or two Displayport, one to two HDMI, and once DVI output, you’re going to have to settle with working with whatever types of cables you need to get and find the right monitors to have the connections to be appropriate to whatever the applications so, to break it down how this would work is to go by what best applications go with which output type

HDMI

Whether it’s for gaming from a console, watching a movie from a Blu Ray player, HDMI is going to be the port that you want ot reserve for that kind of stuff usually. For PC usage it’s fine, no big deal but do expect to search around for good deal for some good cables (forget Monster brand because they are general rip off).

HDMI is the interface for a lot of 4K displays not because of the ubiquity of HDMI, but because licensing agreement contractual obligations are keeping this interface, along with the circumstance of a market that is flooded with, now legacy devices, with HDMI interfaces of prior specification versions, that is now seen as something that will be around for quite some time, until it will hopefully no longer.

HDMI cables are prohibitively expensive compared to DisplayPort cables because of royalty costs whereas

DisplayPort

Whether it’s for just using the PC, gaming on the PC, or doing anything in general, Displayport is great. It performs just as well, or if not better than, HDMI and the cables are on average cheaper, easier to get of good construction build for the price. HDMI took a while to get to support higher resolutions other than 1920x1080 but Displayport, since initial versions of the specification, have already supported higher resolutions such as 2040x1080, 4090x2160 (4K), and pretty soon 7680x4320 (8K)! So it is very likely you will upgrade your graphics card in the future and it is also very likely, that you will want to check out for video cards that have Displayport support so you can have your multiple screen output support you want once television sets support Displayport

DVI

There are various applications that are PC-oriented that you can do with this connection. So if you’re not thinking of doing anything other than doing office work, surfing the web, and pc gaming then DVI is where it is at. It is still relevant and still good for whatever you need for it to do. It only transfers video so that’s the only negative given today’s expectations of having a cable that outputs not only video but also multi-channel audio. But even so, it’s still good and you never know if you find something like an older display where DVI is necessary.

Multiple Hard Drive support and security

A word on security

Honestly having a separate hard drive for your content and operating system is not necessarily going to make the system any safer and even when you can encrypt the boot drive but it’s really going to be maybe perhaps a section of where you store files in a hard drive of where your stuff is going to be that will make more sense.

There is a reason for this: if you encrypt the boot drive, you will have to wait longer for cold boots, and while you are running your operating system, while doing all that you need or want to do, there is still a chance for something to transfers through because of an action that you have made (e.g. visited a seedy website that launches malware upon loading up the website on your web browser). So what I would do is really use an encrypted external hard drive and make archival backup of your content (M-Disc DVD or Blu-Ray) that is very important to you and you would like to make sure that are safe from deletion, corruption, or whatever.

The next best thing to do to keep your system safe, is to, these days, practice safe web surfing habits and use common sense when going around online.

Remember, while a hard drive is connected and the operating system can see it, it’s going to be always at risk of exposure for attack while your computer is online.

Kinds of storage devices

There are various storage devices that you can use currently:

  • Solid State Drives (SSD): these come in different form factors and use different input/output interafaces for transferring data at different rates of speed with different firmwares that determine the read/write speed rates and the longevity of the material by how it’s used to write and erase data from. The most popular form of storage are the cheaply made USB “thumb” flash drives that are made of inferior material. They offer solutions to long standing performance obstructions that were often caused by using, now traditional, mechanical hard disk drives; fast cold boot times, speedy read/write times, and very little to no heat generation. And most important of all, they are more or less scalable in physical shape and size to allow for a variety of applications to be met that require either a fixed built-in set of fast storage while allowing for additional storage to be used alongside with primary, SSD-based storage.

  • Hard Disk Drives (HDD): You know the drill but one thing to keep in mind is that these days they have larger caches (64, 128 MB), larger capacities, and take advantages of the newer file systems that are programmed into modern operating systems that support mechanical hard drives that go beyond 2 TB in capacity (e.g. 3, 4, 6+ TBs).

  • Solid-State-Hard Disk Drive (SSHD) This is recent hybrid type that is only sold by some companies. They are made up of, for example, 8GB SSD to install and boot from operating systems, using the mechanical hard drive for operating system file-system file storage. Mainly designed for simple hardware setups but you can use this in any build in where performance is not a primary concern as they are cheaper than SSDs for boot and are more reliable to keep data for a long period of time than SSDs.

And on a final note, many motherboards support multiple hard drives to be used at once given the number of types of ports that you are going to plan to use for the type of storage devices you plan to install. These days, the more SATA III ports on a motherboard, the better, after that, you’re looking for specific, sometimes expensive, solutions that are not that plentiful for offering such as the SATA III based offerings which cover the needs of most people.

Keep that in mind when you are making decisions because costs can go up significantly depending on what you choose.

I hope all of this help you with going through the lists I’ll be providing you soon.