Thinking about building a new PC

[Parkbandit]

I just upgraded my computer a couple months ago. I used PC Part Picker to make sure everything was compatible and then looked for the best price.

I was surprised that Amazon had most of the parts for the best price and ordered from them.

[Erous]

The RAM manufacturer is scary to me on this list and Zotac isn't the greatest for a video card. But you are saving money with going for the cheaper brands. Also, what's the reason for the 2TB HDD? Pricing of 1TB SSD is comparable with a 1TB HDD + the added SSD costs, give or take maybe 50 bucks. The question comes down to whether or not you want the lower performing HDD for whatever reason.

Knowing your budget, games and resolution will be helpful when deciding what to put together and why. Also having the reusable hardware is helpful...meaning, do you need a new keyboard and mouse or monitor. if you have a Windows 10 machine already, your license will carry over with your microsoft login.

Edited to be more clear.

[RichardCranium]

Pretty sure Backlash proved you can just drill holes in the casing to improve airflow.

[Taernath]

Pricing of 1TB SSD should be comparable to mechanical hard disks at this time.

I'm not sure if there's an SSD you're thinking of specifically, but 1TB is generally ~$200 vs. ~$50 for an HDD. Maybe you mean hybrids? They're cheaper but they're not really a midpoint between an SSD and an HDD and I doubt drauz would see any real improvement for what I'm assuming is a gaming pc.

I'd stick with a 250gb SSD for boot and an HDD or hybrid for storage.

[Whirlin]

I just upgraded my computer a couple months ago. I used PC Part Picker to make sure everything was compatible and then looked for the best price.
I was surprised that Amazon had most of the parts for the best price and ordered from them.

I'm with PB. I'm actually surprised that NewEgg has their own part picker now. I ended up ordering from both, and I think one of the manufacturer sites as well for deals. Every penny counts.


Build stuff:
So, Win10, you can find some subreddits to get Legit Win10 keys at relatively cheap, $10-$20 ish, depending on how risky you want to be.
The H100i, I have one as well. Truth be told, I regret it... I don't overclock enough to make water cooling worthwhile, it's nice and all, but kind of expensive.
HDDs, I've historically just reused my existing ones, and maybe bought only new SSD for OS. I'd slave older drives in Raid5 for speed and redundancy... since they'll likely fail sooner or later because they're old... and you can get a little speed out of reading in 5.
I'm not sure what a MINI video card is getting/losing you in terms of case dimensions, or tradeoff of performance/cooling... there's likely some tradeoff.
RAM... no idea who that manufacturer is, I'd consider someone a little more reputable.

If you went with a nice air cooler, perhaps a few case fans, (there's already thermal paste in the H100, but if you went with an air cooler, you'll need some thermal paste), and grabbed a less, but still legit Win10 key, your budget could afford a nicer GPU. As far as cases/etc... I didn't really evaluate.

[Erous]

I'm not sure if there's an SSD you're thinking of specifically, but 1TB is generally ~$200 vs. ~$50 for an HDD. Maybe you mean hybrids? They're cheaper but they're not really a midpoint between an SSD and an HDD and I doubt the average person sees any real improvement for most tasks.

You're right. My logic on pricing was way off. I think we can agree that having an SSD is mandatory for quality of life and load performance. What I wanted to say I think was that the cost of both may not be justifiable depending on what you wanna do with the space.

1TB Caviar Blue + Crucial 256GB SSD - ~$130
Crucial 1TB SSD - ~$200

[drauz]

My current PC is kinda a POS. It only has an SSD and I'm using an external hard drive for basically everything.

[drauz]

Can someone tell me what this means?

[Velfi]

Can someone tell me what this means?

M.2 is a style of SSD, and it's saying if you pop in a M.2 drive, then one of the SATA ports (used for normal SSD's) will not be functional as it's either/or.

[Seizer]

Can someone tell me what this means?

Basically if you install an M2 drive into your M2 drive slots, it’s going to shut off a SATA port. Taking a guess I’d think it will be shutting off a SATA port that’s on the motherboard itself.

If you can provide the motherboard brand and model I can dig into it more.