Introduction

Building a new computer can be a daunting task (I know I have done it several times). There is a lot of research that has to be done to determine your budget, and then to find all the best parts that fit in that budget. I recently built a new mid-range gaming computer and I thought I would share the process with you. Hopefully my pain can help you make better decisions.

Before I go over the components, lets talk about what the goal is. What you plan on doing with the computer determines what parts you are going to need. If your goal is to surf the internet, write papers, and possibly do a little casual gaming then you can save yourself a lot of money by buying a lower end CPU and Graphics card. However, if you want to play current games at their highest settings then you are going to need a high quality graphics card and a fast CPU. My goal, as I stated in the title, is to build a mid-range gaming computer. This means I don’t need the best graphics card and CPU, but I am going to need good ones. In fact, whenever someone asks me how much they should spend on a new computer I always recommend about $1500. So that is where I have set my own budget.

Let’s look at the components. First, keep in mind that component prices are constantly changing. It takes a few weeks to put together a review like this so the price of the parts will have changed. I also looked far and wide for sales and discounts. Some of the parts even came with rebates, but the prices below do not reflect any rebates.

Here is my parts list:

On the next few pages we are going to analyze each part and talk about why I picked them.