How to Build a Budget Gaming PC

In today's extremely competitive PC components market, the environment has never been better for those looking to build a gaming PC on a limited budget. With the rise of popular online outlets to buy individual components, you can purchase the parts to a budget PC over time and when prices fall into your budgeted range. Doing price comparison research and research into quality components is paramount when building you own gaming PC. Due to the speed at which new components are developed and released, what is top of the line today may well be slow and old tomorrow.

Things You'll Need

• Power Supply
• PC Case
• CPU
• Motherboard
• RAM
• Hard Drive
• Video card
• Operating system

Instructions

Purchasing Components

1. Determine your system building budget. In 2009, a very capable budget gaming PC can be built for approximately $700.

2. Purchasing components online is always less expensive than a brick and mortar store, because there is no overhead. Newegg.com, Zipzoomfly.com and mWave.com are all excellent options.

3. Purchase a quality power supply that supplies at least 400W to your system. Antec, Seasonic, OCZ and Corsair are respected and well-known power supply builders.

4. Purchase at least 2 GB of RAM. Newer games and operating systems will require at least 2 GB to run smoothly.

5. Purchase a video card, CPU and motherboard that offer the best performance that your budget will allow. Anandtech.com and tomshardware.com both offer subjective analysis of computer components.

Building Your PC

1. Install the motherboard into the case first by screwing down at least all four corners into the brass standoffs provided with the case. If there are no brass standoffs provided, check the mounting hardware supplied with your motherboard.

2. Install the power supply and place it's wires in the general area of the other components. This will make powering your PC easier and prevent wire clutter inside your case.

3. Install the RAM into the proper matching DIMM slots. The proper slots will have matching colors associated with them.

4. Install the videocard into the PCI Express slot. Make sure that there is enough clearance at the rear of the card to plug in the necessary connectors from the power supply.

5. Connect the hard drives and optical drives to the proper SATA ports on the motherboard. Then connect all the necessary power connectors from the power supply.

Installing the Operating System

1. Boot your computer and enter the BIOS' configuration screen. Often, this is done by pressing F1, F12 or delete during startup.

2. Locate the boot priority setup screen in the BIOS. Often, it is located in the "Advanced Features" section, but naming differs from BIOS to BIOS.

3. With the operating system CD in the optical drive, reboot the computer and follow the onscreen installation prompts.

References

• Newegg.com
• Tomshardware.com

Resources

• Newegg.com
• Zipzoomfly.com