I've personally always built using
PC part picker but don't buy the parts there. The site is a great service, but their prices include affiliate bullshit and I've saved hundreds by just using different sources for parts or waiting for sales. As an added bonus, people can share the links to their lists and show what they're putting into their PC builds. Kinda convenient if you're building for
Pippa someone else.
I'm going to keep reusing my old case, a ten year old Fractal Design full tower. This'll be my third build using it, but honestly it's almost perfect for me. Just a big black box that can fit almost anything inside. Unless you're really strapped for space I would always recommend a full tower when you buy a PC case, it lets you do pretty much anything and makes for much easier space management.
For CPUs, I'm weighing options right now. The last I had heard, AMD's 7k chips are pretty much blowing Intel out of the water at this point. They run cooler than Intel and are much better for games. However, I'd kind of like to get some savings by using DDR4 RAM, and the AMD chips can only use DDR5
or DDR4 whereas top of the line Intel chips seem to support both types. I'm also not sure if Intel would be better for things like rendering video and running extraneous programs. Like, say, Vtube Studio or something. Does anyone here know if any v-tubers have come out and said what parts of their build are the most important for streaming/running their model/playing games at the same time?
For motherboards, it seems like the latest generations for both AMD and Intel are out now but I'm not going to drop 1k and wait six months for the board to get here. Whichever CPU brand I decide on, I'll use the corresponding Taichi (or Taichi Lite if they have one for it). ASRock has never let me down, and you can get some surprising price points on those boards for what you get in performance.
GPUs are fucked. This is fucking stupid. 4090s are still king, good luck getting one. I'm probably going to pivot to a Radeon chipset for the extra VRAM, the AI people are buying up everything Nvidia and I'm not particularly interested in AI myself.
For PSUs, go big or go home. I still have my old Corsair 1500i and it still can run anything. Still under warranty, too. Cost me an arm and a leg when I bought it, but not having to buy a new one now that I'm upgrading is a big deal.
CPU coolers, I'm probably going to cheap out this time and get an air cooler. I have the space to run a big liquid cooler but fans have gotten so much better recently I don't want to pay for it anymore. I also don't really want to overclock anymore, It let me get away with cheaper CPUs in the past but I think it probably shortened the lifespan of my current build.
Everything else is small potatoes. RAM right now kind of depends on your CPU choice, though DDR5 is better; but I'd rather go budget with DDR4 if I can get a future-proofed CPU/Mobo that will run it. I'm just going to slap all my old drives and shit in my "new" PC build, but if someone had
multiple dead PCs lying around for some reason they could rip those apart and make a bunch of zombie storage for backup drives and the like. If that someone were to have a particularly PC-savvy friend help them and they had a big enough case, you could set up a RAID system and an independent backup inside their PC without having to have a big external setup or anything (that's what I have, a RAID 6 backup inside my case along with an independent array of drives for daily use). Again, if you have the space for a full tower, get that bitch, it lets you do SO much you couldn't do otherwise.