The PC

It took me many hours to figure out which parts I needed to make the best PC for my budget. This was the most important step, because without the proper parts that work together, the entire PC wouldn’t work. I was incredibly meticulous with finding the right parts. I had to change what we were planning on doing many times, based off reviews, our criterion, and my cousin’s advice. There were no major problems with this stage, due to the fact that it mainly consisted of looking at the web for hours. My final, and now completed part list is linked below. Once three years have passed, the most critical parts will be replaced, like the CPU and GPU to newer models. Three years is regarded as the mid life upgrade time for a gaming PC. Another two or three years after that, it is time for a new PC. This allows for the best gaming experience possible.

https://pcpartpicker.com/list/4hJXq4

Processor- AMD Ryzen 5 2600. It is a great mid range processor, and fine for 1080p graphics and rendering. It is cheaper than relative intel processors, while also being to run most games on medium-high graphics settings.

Video Card- MSI Radeon RX 570 8gb. It is a solid video card, it is good for 1080p gaming. It can run almost every game. While not as powerful as many others, it is priced much cheaper compared to other video cards, especially Nvidia GPUs.

Power Supply- Corsair CX 500w. It is from the most reputable PSU company and has more possible wattage than I need. My computer runs at roughly 300 watts, so it is clearly capable. It was priced very well even without the sale I got.

Motherboard- MSI B-450 A Pro ATX. The motherboard has enough slots for everything I need, the only downside being it only had ethernet connection, which works for us so that wasn’t a problem.

Memory- G.Skill Aegis 8gb DDR-4 3000. This is something I kind of skimped on, I ideally should have at least 16 gbs of memory, but due to my budget I couldn’t get more than 8 gbs of memory, however this was priced well.

Storage- Kingston A400 240gb. They were extremely cheap, especially for the storage space.The SSD has a great boot times and works well, especially with its cheap price.

Monitor- Acer SBO 220Q Bi 21.5. This was the best monitor for under $100, and it has 1920x1080 resolution, and a 4 ms response time which is good, especially for only $90. The 75hz IPS display along with AMD freesync makes everything smooth.

Keyboard- Rosewill k51B neon. One of the cheapest RGB keyboards I could find. Works perfectly with 8 RGB modes.

Mouse- Logitech G502 Proteus Spectrum. One of the best gaming mice, with many buttons placed ergonomically throughout the mouse.

Installing the processor was relatively straightforward. I installed it with only a few issues. The first was figuring out which way the processor attached to the motherboard. It was not clear on my motherboard which orientation the processor attached, I figured it out by looking at the individual pins on the CPU and motherboard. The second issue was with attaching the CPU fan to the motherboard. I had difficulty attaching the screws to the motherboard without them slipping. However, I had no other problems with plugging in the power for the fan or CPU.

This was very easy, and probably the easiest step overall. There were no problems, however I had trouble with putting it in because I didn’t put enough force into it. It was simple, only slotting it into a RAM slot and putting down two latches to keep it in place.

I successfully installed the power supply without any major issues.

The video card was relatively easy, all I had to do was plug it into the motherboard and then screw it in to the case. It works perfectly and the dual fans cool it very well. There were no problems with the installation

The ssd install was pretty easy and uncomplicated. I took out one of the internal bays of the computer, screwed the ssd into the frame, and placed back into the computer.

Wiring

This was the second most frustrating step. It took me quite a while to properly wire the parts together. I had trouble finding where the SATA cables went and how to plug them in. This step was extremely complicated for me. You can damage and even break equipment with even the smallest mistake. One thing to make sure of is to to wear when touching the motherboard or processor, This might sound ridiculous, but static electricity can fry sensitive parts of the PC. This was the most complicated part. Some things were obviously labeled and marked, but other inserts were hard to find and the only way to look was the shape of both sides. The usb and sata cables were glaringly obvious, but the difference between the cpu and the gpu power cables was difficult to find, but I found it through some helpful websites. The RGB headers and connectors weren’t hard for me, because my case has a built in header/control board.

This step was horrible for me. It took me almost fifteen hours to properly make his hard drive bootable. I first just tried to change the boot order in BIOS (Built In Operating System), but that wasn’t even close to all I had to do. I tried five different partitions on my hard drive in multiple different formats. It took me hours to find out how to properly partition the hard drive and even more to figure out which read/write format I needed, in the end FAT32 was the way to go instead of the NFTI that I had thought it would be. Then I had to figure out how to download the boot OS. Once I finally did this, with the correct formatting of his hard drive so the OS loaded onto the drive. Then he entered the activation code for windows 10 Home, and it worked. After that all I had to do was set up my preferences and my PC was completed.