There are sites now [1] that let you select components and will tell you if your CPU/motherboard/RAM are compatible. It will even tell you if your power supply can handle the amount of power of all the components. When you select components it will give you links to multiple places to purchase them.

I don't keep up with current events in custom PCs and when I built a PC last year [2] I thought it was incredibly straight forward.

[1] pcpartpicker.com

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/b/HgBbt6

Except that you have the problem right off the bat:

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/cpu/

Which CPU family and which series? Once you finish THAT, everything gets a lot more straightforward.

That list is terrible. At least order the families/series chronologically.

If I'm a reasonably informed random, I know to click a handful of things with "lake" in the name and a handful of things with "zen" in the name and that's about it. Except you can't do that with the chooser as it gives you zero choices, since -zen is a series and -lake is a family and those are disjoint (I should be able to union those).

As a noob, I would miss any of the "gaming value" choices with that heuristic (Haswell/Broadwell that are quite nice).

I don't see any EPYC in that list, so I'm scratching my head (yes, I know it's a server but a random person won't) and I would miss the Threadripper choice (why doesn't it have Ryzen next to it).

The problem isn't assembling a PC. It's the fact that PC knowledge has a half-life of like 6 months, and you really can't trust review sites or web searches on this topic anymore.

I suspect most newbies to building a PC wouldn't just go to the individual part list and start picking a processor. They'd go to the build guides(https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/) and look at builds in their price range. A bunch of the build guides on that site have start-to-finish youtube videos of the entire build as well.

Maybe that particular filter on that particular part isn't that easy to use but I think sites like this make building a PC extremely approachable, even for someone who has never built a PC before.

You're not supposed to pick a CPU from the full list. Use the filters on the left to narrow it down.

Did you actually read my comment? I was talking about the choices IN THE FILTERS.

The problem, as a noob, is that you don't even have enough knowledge to use the filters correctly.

Aye. We've got some things in the works to improve that.

Used to be daunting, but for my last few builds I have used some combination of PC Part Picker and the selections from the seasonal TechReport.com guides. Much easier than a couple decades ago when I was a teenager.

Should also be mentioned that the manuals that come with things like motherboards and cases are much more detailed than they used to be.

PCPP is useful to look up if your build or a build similar to yours is gonna have problems or little gotchas.

PCPP is really revolutionary. Building a PC in 2018 should be easy.

The only priblem is a lot of everchanging technologies and acronyms, e.g. NVMe, M.2, etc.

Yeah I'm not saying it's hard for me, but I've built a few (using pcpartpicker) and do a lot of electronic design work, so I'm comfortable handling PCB's.

For others, even just pcpartpicker can present an overload of information.

There are several sites that help with that. I built one of them: https://www.pc-kombo.com/ - it gives you the best cpu + gpu for your budget, based on benchmarks, with fitting parts around that. The most known is https://pcpartpicker.com/, which gives you a broad selection of parts and checks compatibility as well.

That's a great concept, I always wondered why "best X for the money" (like the columns on tomshardware) weren't just automated, given the availability of crowdsourced benchmarks (http://www.userbenchmark.com).

I wish I could specify other specific priorities, like video conversion or compression or data management, so it would trade off between CPU, SSD speed, SSD storage space, or RAM in slightly different ways (though maybe that level of optimization is overkill).

Thanks!

> I wish I could specify other specific priorities

I tend to think that's overkill :) But one can toggle between a gamer setup and a mainly more more cpu heavy app focus, it's in the advanced menu under the recommend button. Switching between gpu and cpu heavy builds catches a lot of those different usecases.

> given the availability of crowdsourced benchmarks (http://www.userbenchmark.com).

One problem with those is that they are often based on artificial benchmarks, which is most of the time not what you want. I use benchmark results from professional publications instead. The problem then moves to ordering, but that's manageable with enough data.

> > I wish I could specify other specific priorities

> I tend to think that's overkill :)

Yeah, I think you're right. It's like that old Knuth quote. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time worrying about the speed of noncritical parts of programs.

> I use benchmark results from professional publications instead.

Yeah, I generally do that too, I just thought userbenchmarks would be easier to API and be more comprehensive.

Though thinking about it now, I'm not sure why I distrust UB so much. In a sense I'm just choosing different biases. Even if I find a reliable reviewer that personally buys each part at a retailer to avoid "reviewer binning," the best case, I still risk a sampling error due to the small numbers (typically n = 1) tested. The bell curves on two different CPUs might overlap considerably. So buying a marginally better rated processor might only give you better performance in 51% of purchases.

No professional reviewer could afford the cost or time to individually buy and test a statistically significant number of devices to determine its variance in operation.

On the other hand, the errors in judgment that might creep in from variance due to small samples are almost certainly washed out completely by the leaps between generations, right? So trustworthy reviewers are probably "good enough" and worrying about that issue is another form of unnecessary optimization, as much overkill as my first idea.

I'm open to that possibility.

Though we might go further down this line... Maybe the performance exaggerations due to conformance to published benchmarks aren't much of an issue either. As long as we're talking about ranking cards for real world usage, the odds that a card will perform noticeably better at benchmarks but noticeably worse at tasks I care about is... Well it's nonzero, but small. Smaller still if we upgrade our threshold from "noticeably" to "significantly" or "substantially."

I mean, it's your own call where you pull your data from because no data is perfect, and we probably pull from the same places. But you really got me running thinking everything is needless optimization and now I can't stop. :)

I wanted to write "the problem is less the unprofessionalism of the benchmarkers, but the kind of benchmarks they are running. Not being real games they won't accurately reflect performance in them." Ofc, that is kind of the bias I work with, gaming performance is the most important factor, it's the default profile. But actually, the average benchmark position of gpus is pretty good. It looks like they were very careful in selecting synthetic benchmarks that reflect gaming performance accurately. Did that change?

I now look at cpus again.... yeah, there it would not work, that is too far off of what I see in gaming performance. But cpus are hard, with single and multi/threaded performance differing so much and having different effects in each game you look at.

So imho one could only use the gpu ranking, but the gpus are not hard to rank anyway :)

But now I wonder whether that would not be a good data source for SSD and HDD performance. Maybe even for RAM...

Thanks for your thoughts, you made me take a second look on something I had discarded earlier!

pc-kombo doesn't seem to have a way to disable buying Windows. It screws the calculations, because it picks one among several versions of different prices.

A shame.

Hey, thanks for the feedback. You can click on the minus sign at the top right of the box to disable windows (or any other component category) - and it does not pick Windows when building a new recommendation list, one has to do that manually.

That probably got missed by not being able to remove windows just by using the arrows at the left of the box, right?

It's confusing.

Now I see there's just a windows logo, but no actual windows pre-picked.

Why not put something else than a windows logo in there, when it's not filled?

Do you have a suggestion? I needed something that says "here is the place for the operating system".

I'm not good at this sort of thing, so all I can do is suggest not using the logo of an actual, specific, operating system.

I’ve actually had the opposite experience. Figuring out what parts to use is pretty easy, just takes a little time and attention to detail. Actually getting everything assembled can be a huge pain in the ass, I feel like it’s all designed for people with tiny hands.

Using a tool like PCPartPicker takes almost all of the effort and uncertainty out of planning a build.

I've only built a couple of PCs but my method has been to find a PC for sale that is outside my price range - check for Linux compatibility by searching for problems - and then source the parts that match the spec. I can modify as I go, double up on RAM or whatever.

I just did this part a week ago. All I did was keep the motherboard specs open in one window, and narrow down choices based off that. Wasn’t really hard in any respect, just detail orientated.

Pick a processor, that determines the motherboard socket. The motherboard and CPU arch will determine the memory type. The wattage of the CPU and video card determines your PSU lower bounds.

The only odd thing was the addition of SSDs on a stick, but the motherboard determines the options there too.

PCPartPicker will not let you pick parts that aren't compatible with each other, and even keeps a tally of your wattages. I think they even use the measurements of your case to tell you if your GPU or cooler might be too big.

My point was not that I'm better than tooling, but that it's a very possible task even without extra tooling. And that task isn't hard, just detail orientated.

http://www.logicalincrements.com/ is your friend even more in the "I didn't keep up" case than pcpartpicker

It's been a while, but I'm pretty sure the shopping is the fun part.

Maybe for some people, but for others it can be a big, risky outlay of a significant amount of money.