Looking for advice on building my first gaming PC?

[sidiq]

Not to say I haven't had a PC before. But this would be my first time building one. I want this to be a gaming PC, but slightly different than most. I'm really only interested in playing indie games. I don't need something that will run Crysis 3, Battlefield 4, or Skyrim. Just the smaller indie games. Minecraft, Kerbal Space Program, and stuff like that.

I've never built a PC before and I don't really know parts that well, but I'm fairly tech savvy. Any insight, tips, or straight up builds would be super appreciated. Also, I'm on a fairly tight budge

t and want to spend $500 bucks or less. Though the possibility of upgrading in the future would be possible.

[Tweety]

I don't know what the market is like in your country but certainly here in the UK towards the cheaper end on the pc market its more bang for your buck buying one already built. I haven't built one in a couple of years now and naturally pcs have moved on MASSIVELY, BUT its actually really simple. You want a PSU, Motherboard, RAM, HDD (preferably SSD if you can afford it) Processor (AMD have some have with the motherboard combined have some decent graphics built in(its what i use for >300 part ships in KSP)) and some peripherals.

Inside the case on the Motherboard its mostly labeled from what i remember. So You will have a SATA cable from your HDD that will plug into the SATA socket on the motherboard for example. All the little doodads and cables are normally labeled too so someone who is able to put together an airfix can build a pc pretty much.

Hopefully someone else can chime in on more detailed info since i have been out of the game (computer building) for some time now.

Tweety

[dharak1]

A bit more on storage. If you store a lot of data you would want an HDD I used to do recording and I have an HDD because I need lots of storage and HDD's offer the best price per GB. If you want fast boot times and games to load fast you would want to go with something like a 256 Gb - 512 Gb SSD depending on the size of your library.

[Kenobi McCormick]

Step 1 through 9: Buy used parts. $500 will get you a rig that'll run BF4 if you're not ridiculously afraid of used parts like a lot of people seem to be. Also, stay away from huge power supplies. A high quality 600 watt unit is ideal. Enough power to run anything a sensible gaming rig has, with enough headroom to live long, all while not being stupidly expensive.

[cantab]

There are plenty of resources on how to build a cheap gaming PC. The "tweak" I would make for an indie gaming bent would be to take a bit of money out of the graphics card and put it into the CPU. Most indie titles aren't graphically-intensive but some (especially KSP!) are CPU heavy.

[Javster]

The Corsair 300R is the case I used. It's pretty big by my standards, but probably not that big really. Slight issue with headphone port, otherwise great.

I would recommend it.

And make sure you check your PSU has enough DAMN PCI-E CABLES TO POWER THE GPU!!!!!!!!!! Not that you should get a GPU for a low-end PC.