How To Build a PC for Games: Choosing the Parts

The number one thing that people say when asked about the advantages of a gaming PC over a console is superior graphics and upgradability. But for the man on the street PC hardware is a veritable minefield of confusing product names, superfluous adjectives slapped on the end of components, and competing manufacturers offering proprietary technology.
That's why we at SquareGo have scoured the internet and the shops of Glasgow and Edinburgh to find the best quality components. There's no need to worry whether or not these parts are compatible as all the hard work has been done for you. We'll split the components into two sections: high and medium end gaming machines with the total price for each not to exceed £1400 and £700 respectively. As well as maintaining a sensible price point, relatively few retailers offer prebuilt machines for either of these two price points and those that do are unable to offer the same pure value, as they charge for assembly.
Of course if you're feeling a little shaky about taking the plunge then Glasgow local shop Priceless Computing offers a system build service from as little as £35 and Edinburgh's Ideal Computing offers a similar service beginning at £70.
All the prices are correct as of 22/03/09, however feel free to use other sites as products come back into stock or have their prices altered daily and if we managed to get a hands on with the product we'll let you know how it performed.

Case

This houses all your components, we've emphasised form over function here, none of the cases are aesthetically displeasing but the case needs to be spacious, efficient at cooling the system and quiet.

£700 system - It's generally a good idea to avoid cases that come bundled with power supplies but in this case (pun intended) 460 Watts is plenty and the COOLERMASTER Elite 330 is well built, saves you the wrist ache of using a screwdriver in the toolless design and features a side window to check on your system without taking off the panels.

£1400 system - Sticking with COOLERMASTER, the Centurion 590 has space for more cooling than you'll ever really need, a removable harddrive chassis (so you can swap files with your mates easily) and the power button is handily located at the top (which makes it great if you want to put it on the floor yet save yourself some back pain).


Power Supply

Providing your computer with the clean crisp taste of canadian beer, er power. It's essential not to cut corners here as a low quality power supply will most likely not even turn on when faced with a high end machine, and worse still it has the potential to blow up your other parts.

£1400 system - CORSAIR are best known for supplying memory but the 650W TX has more than enough power to run this build with some left over so that if you need to add a second graphics card or change the first later down the line you're not left with an unexpected addition to your bill.

Motherboard

Sort of like a drill sergeant, the motherboard liases with your components and tells things how to perform. It's preferable to avoid motherboards which have onboard graphics cards as you won't end up using them anyway and they will slow down your gaming. Also make sure that any motherboard has the latest graphics card slot, PCI Express 2.0, it's rare to find boards without one anymore but if a price seems too good to be true check for the number two!

£700 system - GIGABYTE have been making a name for themselves with their great customer service and use of longlasting circuitry in their products. The GA-EP43-S3L iP43 can take all but the fastest of quad cores (theoretically up to twice as fast as dual core processors, in reality they're only about 60% faster at best) and features 8 USB ports at the back for gamepads, steering wheels, etc. There's no Wireless Card but regular network cables are far better for gaming or copying files anyway.

£1400 system - MSI offers the cheapest fully featured board for Intel's latest and fastest Core i7 processors in the X58 PRO, space for an obscenely large 24 gigabytes of ram, seven hardrives or DVD/Blu-ray drives and two graphics cards should last you for a couple of years.

Processor/CPU

The brains of the operation, calculating sums quicker than Dustin Hoffman counting cards. It's important to match up the processor speed with your graphics card so that each part delivers the best looking and running games.

£700 system - The INTEL Core 2 Duo E7500 is quick, reliable and knocks games out of the park and it's a great match with the graphics card.

£1400 system - Staying with INTEL, the Core i7 920 is ridiculously fast and can overclock like crazy, delivering the performance of a processor hundreds of pounds more expensive.

Memory/Ram

Much like human memory, it's difficult for a computer to get by without plenty of it, for gaming it speeds up how quickly your games load and lowers the number of times when slow down could occur. Generally speaking higher is better but if you see some numbers preceded by CAS or CL then those want to be lower. Faster ram automatically has a higher CL rating though so don't freak out if you see ram cheaper with lower numbers.


£700 system - Despite the recent trend of companies offering 4GB as standard, 2GB is plenty but if you have a bit extra then 3GB is the best choice for most systems, make sure to get equal numbers of ram sticks (e.g. 2x512MB and 2x1GB) to maximise your performance.

£1400 system - With a 64bit version of Windows more than 3gb makes sense, and with 6gb you won't need any more ram for a long time yet.

Graphics Card

One or more graphics cards makes games look as good as they were intended to be and makes you the envy of all your console owning friends. Sure there's a price premium but when your games look this good you don't need to eat. The major differences between graphics card for a gamer is what game is supplied free so Google the card's manufacturer code to see what goodies are supplied.


£700 system - Sadly HIS doesn't provide a game with their overclocked (runs faster than other cards) ATI-AMD 4850, you do get a very quiet and fast card and there's a screwdriver in the box too which will be handy to build your new machine.


£1400 system - Huzzah a free game, Mirror's Edge is included in EVGA's GTX 260 Core 216 to tempt your wallet. It's a good showoff for your new system, but other cards offer Far Cry 2 so if that's your tipple try one of those. Stay away from cheaper cards that don't say Core 216 as whilst they're less expensive they're not worth it.

Harddrive

Bigger is better so more GB is more space for games, movies and the tears of console lovers. We're recommending both systems to use the MAXTOR DiamondMax 22 500GB as it's cheap fast and quite frankly I've got about 10 of them and none has failed yet. Pop two of them in the £1400 machine in an arrangement called a RAID Array and if one of them should fail then your savegames will still be safe.