How to build a gaming PC for beginners: Putting it all together

A few months ago, Tom’s Guide put together the first part of its “How to build a gaming PC” guide. In How to Assemble a Gaming Computer that article, we covered which parts you’ll need to construct a machine as well as how to select them.

Assuming you’ve got the parts you need (and good luck with that; it’s a tough time to buy a GPU), all you need to do now is put them together.

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PC-building enthusiasts liken this to constructing a complex Lego set, and that’s somewhat accurate — if the Lego set didn’t come with instructions, and every piece had the potential to break while you snapped it into the next one.

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Before this project, I hadn’t built a PC for 10 years, and I have some good news and bad news about the process. Good news: It is, indeed, much easier now to build a PC now than it was a decade ago. Bad news: The process can still be pretty confusing if you’re starting from scratch and working by yourself.

Here’s how I put together the new Tom’s Guide test rig, and some of the pitfalls I encountered along the way.

Once again, this should not be taken as PC construction gospel — both PC Gamer and Tom’s Hardware have more thorough guides available for that — but hopefully, it will help other neophyte builders navigate a few common hazards and go from dreaming about a new PC to actually building one.

1. Take stock of your parts.
   As a reminder, to build a gaming PC, you’ll need (at minimum) a motherboard, a CPU, a GPU, some RAM, a storage device, a power supply and a case. As we predicted in our original article, we had to modify a few of our proposed parts based on what vendors had in stock.
2. Clean your workspace
   This is perhaps one of those “goes without saying” steps, but wherever you intend to build your PC, give the area a good cleaning first. Long, flat wooden surfaces are ideal, although wood can get scratched, so take care when dealing with heavy or sharp components.
3. Get Windows ready
   This is one of those steps that’s easy to overlook, but which might be much harder to do later on. Make a Windows 10 bootable USB drive.

I won’t go into the process of getting a license and installing Windows, since there are a lot of variables involved there, but without some version of Windows, you’ll be stuck staring at the BIOS. And there’s not much to do there.

4. Install the CPU
   Like a lot of PC-building steps, the process of installing a CPU can vary somewhat depending on your parts — what kind of motherboard you have, as well as whether you’re using an AMD or an Intel chip.

Generally speaking, though, you’ll find a CPU socket on the upper part of your motherboard. Simply lift the latch, fit the CPU into place (it’s designed to fit only one way; if it’s not flush, something is wrong), then replace the latch.

5. Install the CPU cooler
   This was where I ran into my first big issue. Most guides recommend installing the CPU cooler right after the CPU (understandably), but I decided to go with a liquid cooling system instead of a standard CPU fan.

There are pros and cons to this approach, and comparing the two cooling methods would take its own article. Suffice it to say that with a standard CPU fan, you can simply connect it and then move onto the next step. Installing a liquid cooling system requires you to attach a fan and heatsink to your case, which means the motherboard has to already be in place.