5 PC building mistakes you need to avoid
When I built my first fully custom gaming PC in 2017, I was a broke college student trying to get the best bang for my buck.
Unfortunately, my money-saving approach led me to take too many shortcuts, and looking back, I wish I had saved just another $50-100 to build a proper PC. Regardless of your current situation, I have made a few mistakes that you should avoid repeating.
Get the cheapest RAM on the market
This PC release took place in 2018, and even though DDR4 was starting to become mainstream, it still held a significant premium over DDR3, which isn’t much different from the RAM apocalypse we’re currently experiencing. I thought I was being smart in going with cheap DDR4, as its speed was still dwarfed by that of DDR3, which still performed very well in games of that era.
The end result? Two 8GB USB sticks of the worst green-colored 2400MHz CL17 RAM that didn’t look like they belonged on any consumer PC, let alone a gaming computer. The lousy RAM also didn’t have a heatsink to improve performance, so it was pretty bad.
The reason this slow 2400MHz was a problem is because I was building an AMD PC. Ryzen AM4 processors are known for their preference for high-speed, low-latency RAM. In hindsight, I should have gone with the “standard” 3200MHz RAM that many PC builders were opting for at the time.
Fortunately, I was able to overclock the RAM to 2933 MHz by increasing the voltage to 1.35 V and relaxing the timings slightly, which significantly improved performance. But to this day, I’m convinced that I’ve had a choppy experience in some games due to the slow RAM, with lows of 1% often hurting performance.
You might be tempted to buy the cheapest, slowest RAM possible due to the current price hike, but I urge you to think twice before doing so. If getting faster RAM only means spending $20-30 more, trust me, you won’t miss that money as much as the performance.
Buy only a 500 GB NVMe drive
I only installed NVMe on my PC in 2021, after getting tired of struggling with the 120GB SATA SSD I’d been using since 2018. When I finally decided to buy one, I opted for the cheapest 500GB NVMe on the market, a decision I regretted almost immediately. Remember that 500 GB is not actually 500 GB; after formatting it is only about 465 GB.
It was just enough space for my operating system, a few programs, and two or three games before it got too full. As games got bigger, even over a short period of time, the problem only got worse.
Unfortunately, NVMe was still quite expensive back then, just like it is today, but you should still avoid compromising on capacity. Now that my new PC has 2TB NVMe, I have plenty of storage space for gaming, with a few hundred gigabytes left over for optimal performance and long-term SSD health.
We generally recommend avoiding 1TB NVMe if you can, as they only have enough space for your OS, a few critical apps, some files, and a handful of AAA games before being more than 80% full. That said, with the new NVMe price hike, you may have to settle for 1TB for now.
Choosing an underpowered, non-modular power supply
Here’s one particular mistake I ended up repeating in my new PC I built earlier this year: buying the cheapest “decent” PSU I could find.
Both my previous build’s old PSU and this one had just enough power to meet the system requirements. This lack of headroom makes future upgrades more difficult, and even something like overclocking the graphics card can cause stability issues as a direct result of insufficient power.
Another big mistake was not paying a few dollars more for a modular unit. Modular power supplies feature detachable cables, making PC building and cable management much easier. This also reduces bulk, making it easier to close the side panel of the case.
- Brand
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Chiller Master
- To go out
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750W
The Cooler Master MWE Gold 750 V2 is a 750W modular power supply with an 80Plus Gold energy efficiency rating. It strikes the perfect balance between price and power delivery, and the added convenience of being modular makes it the ideal power supply for most PC builds.
Rely on the included case fans
Unless you’re buying a case from a reputable manufacturer like ASUS, Corsair, or NZXT, you shouldn’t expect much from the fans that come with it. Most often, they are included just so the case can be marketed as having “fans included”, and their performance is generally poor.
Unfortunately, I fell for this trick while choosing a case for my old PC and ended up buying a counterfeit Chinese case simply because it advertised three fans included for just under $60.
As expected, these fans were so bad that my PC frequently overheated in the summer. I ended up purchasing a five-pack of Arctic P12 fans to upgrade the rear exhaust, two top fans, and even my CPU cooler to a push-pull configuration.
- Brand
-
Arctic
- Dimensions
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120mm
The Arctic P12 Pro PST fans are one of the best budget PC case fans. They offer PWM speed control, spin up to 3,000 RPM and are precisely tuned for optimal performance with minimal vibration for less noise.
This was a bit of an excessive setup for a PC that didn’t exceed 300W at full load, but as you can probably guess, it instantly solved my airflow issues.
Get the cheapest motherboard in its tier
The cheapest AM4 motherboards available when I was building my previous PC were the A320 boards, an entry level with VRMs so low that any form of overclocking was ruled out. Many of them also only come with two RAM slots. This was not the motherboard I ended up purchasing, however.
Because the A320 was so limiting, I thought I’d be smart by choosing the cheapest B450 motherboard I could find: the Gigabyte B450M DS3H. The B450 chipset supported overclocking, and the board even had four RAM slots and an M.2 slot, so I figured I’d at least get some future-proofing out of it.
It was actually quite okay for what it was. I expected a lot more from a motherboard that just wasn’t designed for DIYers like me. I could overclock my CPU or my RAM, but not both at the same time. I could at least enable the PBO, although I doubt the board has the VRM headroom needed to make much use of it.
Do you have an AMD processor and you don’t use PBO? You’re missing something
Give your processor a little boost in performance.
Looking back, while none of these errors completely ruined my PC build, they made the overall experience worse than it should have been. I was able to work around some of them, but the cheap RAM was this PC’s Achilles heel and the one mistake I really wish I had avoided.
