Guide: Things To Look Out For When Buying A Pc

Hello guys, I get a lot of questions on what to look out for when buying PCs so I'm going to share some tips here and my own personal experience.

1) Identify your needs. One of the biggest mistakes people make when purchasing a PC is being absolutely unsure of what they really need. They then end up splurging on parts they don't need and saving on parts they do need. In the end, they buy a PC that cannot meet their needs and they become frustrated. To avoid such a situation, stop for a moment and think about what you intend to use your PC for. Video gaming? Video editing? Simple word processing and browsing? Heavy multitasking?

If video gaming, what resolution will you be gaming at? Can you tolerate graphics at low to medium settings, or are you a diehard sucker for getting the absolute best out of the latest hardware?

If video editing, how intensive will it be? Are you going to be doing 3D animation rendering, which will require a lot of juice, or just simple YouTube video editing to add captions and slides? Is the software that you are intending to use going to be compatible with the graphics card that you are going to purchase? Does it support SLI or crossfire?

2) Do your research. Needless to say, you don't want to find yourself in a situation where you have no idea what you're buying and you're just picking something because the salesman tells you it's absolutely fabulous. How would you know whether it really is fabulous? There's only one person you can really trust--yourself. Trust no one else. Do your own research and find out whether something is really going to be good value for money. Here's a simple guide on how you can examine each PC component.

For CPU processors, you want to find out what generation it belongs to, For Intel i3, i5 and i7 processors, you want to ask whether it is Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge, Haswell or Haswell-E. Later generations typically offer better performance and lower power consumption. Buying a processor from the latest generation is most likely going to offer you the best value for money. If you're going for AMD processors, you need to do the same. Next, you want to find out how many cores your processor has and whether it supports hyper threading. This will give you an idea of how well your CPU can handle multitasking and games that heavily utilize multiple threads (such as Battlefield 4 and Starcraft II). Finally, if you can't understand all the mumbo jumbo about clock speeds, cache sizes and die sizes, just look for CPU benchmarks. They will tell you how good one CPU is compared to another based on some statistical number. Do note though that benchmarks are just estimates. They aren't perfect.

The same thing applies to graphics cards. The Geforce 900 series is the latest for good gaming cards. The Quadro series offers workstation cards which are best suited for video editing. When determining which graphics card to get, you should also check out their benchmarks and see how well they perform relative to each other.

3) Pick the one with the best price. I personally would recommend going for the most competitively priced PC parts. If there's an MSI GTX 970 going for $350 on Newegg and the same going for $384 on Amazon, I'd just get the Newegg one. The reason being, PC components from the big brand names will very rarely be dead on arrival. And even then, your RMA and warranty options are pretty much the same because you will ultimately be dealing with the company that produces the card--in this case MSI. Going along this route, you can make huge savings of up to $200 on a mid-range rig.

4) Go for quality parts. When it comes to your PC, you really want it to be reliable. You don't want it crashing on your, exploding or shorting out. It can cause you to lose your data and be really inconvenient. Paying an extra $100-200 for better quality is certainly better than spending 2 days trying to troubleshoot and get your PC fixed.

But aren't all motherboards, power supplies and hard disks really the same? I mean, how different can one chip be from one board to another? Good question. There can be a really huge difference. Bad Power Supply Units (PSUs) have been known to cause system instability because they use low quality capacitors that leak current or cannot give out enough. Voltage regulator modules on your motherboard which are not soldered properly or which use inferior designs and materials will tend to be more unstable and overheat more easily. This can lead to all kinds of problems such as frequent Blue Screen of Death (BSOD). There are many many more reasons. You need to do your research to find out if a manufacturer tends to produce good or lousy quality parts.

That's all for now! I hope this helps you to buy the right PC for yourself. Let me know if you have any questions or comments. I'll be more than happy to answer any questions and help you with getting the right PC for your needs.