Corsair makes excellent power supplies. Don't go cheap here. If your supply dies, it could take your system out with it. Look for ones that come with system protection systems; they also tend to cover damage to the rest of your computer if things do go sour. Calculate your power needs before purcchasing, and then try to go higher if you want to upgrade ever, which you probably do.

Intel currently surpasses AMD, but in October AMD should be releasing a true Octo-core. Yes, that's 8-cores. AMD typically leads the way, but Intel manages to figure out how they did it and either improves it or makes people think it is better. I have preferred AMD for a long while; Their price vs what you get is amazing.

That being said, I have also used ATI(now also AMD) video cards my whole computing life. ATI with AMD I believe offered the first true support for a 64-bit platform and work well together. From a more neutral point of view, ATI and nVidia each have their own problems; typically when it comes to drivers as of late. I have never had an ATI video card fail me, nor have I had an nVidia card fail me.

I currently use G-Skill memory, specifically Ripjaw: http://www.newegg.com/Product/Produ.....82E16820231311 (16 GB, maybe a little overzealous.)

OCZ also makes solid memory; you can never doubt Corsair either. There's actually quite a few companies that you can't go wrong with in the memory department.

If you want to go with an SSD, even for at least a boot drive, I have heard good things about OCZ.

For a harddrive, you can't go wrong with a Western Digital Caviar Black, which I intend on upgrading to at some point. I believe I also have a Sumsung green drive, can't remember the particular model... I'm running a WD and a Samsung to say the least. The green drives typically have a shorter shelf-life, but honestly after my heavy read/write usage for it, my drive health is high and it looks like the difference is negligible. They just tend to have slower read/write speeds, and the Caviar Black can have much higher.

Try to stick to SATA connections inside. As long as your hardware supports it, the higher the version, the better.

I have an ECS motherboard, a good model from two years, I think, back that has plenty of SATA 2 ports and can support upwards of 32 GB memory and socket AM2/3. It's one that should have a fairly decent life in my computer. I don't honestly know much about motherboards... But I can say that my box had an awesome picture of a dragon on it. I FUCKING LOVE DRAGONS.


If you want to overclock, look for black-series things. They tend to unlock BIOS options and such that allow you to manually adjust voltage, etc... Basically giving you uninhibited overclocking potential, but also allowing you to fuck things up badly.

The most important general principle to use throughout the process is to know what you need and want your personal computer to do. Applications you want to run effectively such as CAD/CAM, 3D rendering, graphics processing, software developer suites, games, web applications, office applications, and network services will determine how much computing power you are looking to buy. Energy efficiency, cost, and physical system portability are things to think about also.

Next, do some research: http://www.tomshardware.com/

There are other sites out there, Tom's is just the one I happen to prefer. Tom's hardware has over a decade of experience producing hardware reviews and benchmarks that are as free from personal bias and business influence as it gets in the industry. I remember when Intel was the clear leader in the competition between the Pentium 1 & 2 against the K-5 & K-6, when AMD started kicking Intel's butt in the competition between Pentium 3 & 4 against the Athalon series, and now Intel has taken back the throne with the Nahalem and Sandy Bridge against the Phenom. Each time Tom's Hardware Guide was there, telling consumers which CPUs were better and why.

Silvershot10 brings up a good point. A new line of CPUs will be released soon, which always puts downward pressure on prices of existing products. Plus with the Christmas season approaching it may be a good time to price out what you want now and wait a few months for prices to drop. Also look for seasonal deals, sometimes there are steep cuts in prices around the holidays. By pricing out now you will have an advantage when evaluating which deals are truly good.

So, a breakdown on hardware components:
CPUs pretty much come down to AMD vs Intel for the PC (ARM is a good choice for tablets where low power consumption is more important than blazing performance). Basically, they both produce good products that are likely to meet your computing needs. But Sandy Bridge i5 and i7 CPUs are the pretty clear performance leader, just at a higher price.

Memory is essentially a commodity now. Most of the name brands just buy from a few Asian manufacturers and slap their brand on there. Look at product reviews and avoid particular product lines with an unusually high rate of failure. Also make sure your memory is the correct type for your motherboard, and that you buy the correct number of DIMMS (sticks). There are dual and triple channel memory systems on the market right now and you want to buy doubles and triples for each type respectively.

The Graphics Processing Unit (GPU, sometimes called graphics card or graphics adapter) pretty much come down to ATI (owned by AMD), and Nvidia. They both manufacture quality products. Look at some benchmarks and product features, get a short list of GPUs that you want based on that, then compare prices. You should find the GPU that's right for you that way. I recommend against SLI and Crossfire (working two GPUs together). You increase cost significantly for what usually turns out to not be a very significant difference in graphics performance.

Motherboards can influence the performance of your system, but usually not much. You are looking first for the motherboard that will correctly support your CPU, and next you are looking at features and price. Features include on-board sound (pretty standard these days), gigabit Ethernet (also pretty standard), number and speed of SATA connectors, number and speed of PCIe slots, maximum supported memory, number and version of USB connectors (USB 3.0 is relatively recent), and existence of other connections that you may or may not need (if you have specific hardware needs you probably already know what you're looking for).

Disc storage is also a commodity component these days. You may consider buying a solid state drive if fast OS and application load times are important to you. Either HDD or SDD the principles are the same though, look out for products with high failure rates as indicated by negative customer reviews. I like to look at a selection of drives at various storage levels (i.e. 1 TB, 2 TB, 3 TB) and calculate on a spreadsheet how much I'm paying per Gigabyte for a few different models. You usually find that one of the storage levels is in a "sweet spot" where you're paying less money per unit of storage than all the others.

Optical drives are commodity products. Look for one that's decent quality with generally good customer reviews and a good price.

Cases are also commodity products. Use reviews and price when making a buying decision.

Power supplies really aren't as important as people make them out to be. This is the result of an advertising campaign that encouraged people to buy more expensive high-watt rating power supplies. It is prudent to calculate the power consumption of your system. Buying a power supply right at or below that level will cause problems. But unless you're running a high number of power hungry parts you should find that your standard 400-600 watt power supplies will do just fine.

You probably don't need to buy an audio adapter, since good audio adapters with six channels and S/PDIF connectors are built into many modern motherboards. But if you absolutely have to have 3D sound enhanced games then go for it.

Okay, so I've basically written a short essay here. I hope you find the contents illuminating. I'm fairly confident I'll have some replies with dissenting opinions, it's the nature of opinions. It's also possible some of my information is out of date. It's been about two years since I actually built a PC, though I do keep up to some extent with what's new in hardware.

Last thing I'm going to leave you with is a short list of the more mainstream hardware suppliers. You can always look for bargains on e-bay and Google's shopping search.
http://www.newegg.com/
http://www.tigerdirect.com/
http://www.frys.com/