As you may or may not know, I built my first custom gaming computer back in 2016. For the longest time, I’ve been gaming on a basic Dell home computer. One day, I went on it and discovered that it wouldn’t power on. Instead of trying to fix it, I decided to trash it and get myself a proper gaming computer.

So I spent a few days to learn how to research the parts and picked the parts that I thought would be a good. It took me a few days to completely build it but result was completely worth it! And to this day I still don’t know if I built it correctly, but I haven’t seen smoke come out of my rig so everything is still good…

Knowing what I know now and looking back, there were a lot of mistakes I made when I went through the process of building my first computer. So today, I’m going to share the top mistakes I made when I was built my first gaming computer.

Future-Proofing My Rig

The first mistake I made was not thinking long term and minimizing the effects of future parts being released making my parts obsolete. When I chose the parts for my first gaming computer, the graphics card I chose was the GeForce GT 740. I picked that card because it met the recommended specifications for Counter Strike: Global Offensive, which was the game I mainly played back then.

Later on, I received a 144Hz monitor from my brother as a birthday gift, but what I didn’t know was that DisplayPort was required to set the monitor to 144Hz and the 740 didn’t have it. So I was forced to upgrade my graphics card to the GeForce GTX 1060.

Choosing Price Over Performance

When I was researching my parts, the main thing I kept in mind was how much the total cost would be. Not that I was cheap, but the fact that the cost was coming out of my dad’s pocket, I was being considerate of his money, so I tried to keep the budget as low as possible. Because I cared more about the total cost, I didn’t think much about the performance so my first build was not as fast and powerful as it could’ve been.

However, at the time it made sense to me because I thought I was going to be playing Counter Strike majority of the time. That is until newer games started coming out like Fortnite Battle Royale….and I was stuck playing that game with Minecraft looking graphics until I upgraded my GPU. 

For example, I chose to buy a WD Blue 1TB HDD as my storage instead of an SSD. I also could’ve bought a more efficient power supply unit (80 Plus Bronze or Silver), instead I decided to choose a regular 80 Plus PSU. And like I mentioned above, I could’ve invested in a better graphics card.

Balancing the Parts

This is a mistake I made due to lack of knowledge. A couple of months ago, I found out about the concept of bottlenecking between the CPU and GPU and the fact that both parts have to be equal in power for them both to run at an optimal rate. You can learn more about CPU and GPU bottlenecking here.

According to the bottleneck calculator, my CPU, the Intel i5 4590, was bottlenecking my first GPU, the GeForce GT 740. My CPU’s processing power and speed was too fast for my GPU to keep up with. So I had to switch out the card for a stronger one.

So my point I’m getting across to you is to plan long term with as much computer knowledge as possible, which I’m here for! Doing so will minimize your risk of future expenses; investing in a custom gaming computer is already expensive as it is so why build it in a way that’ll make it more costly for you later on?

Regardless, the end result is completely worth it! It’s a great feeling to have a beautiful, powerful  computer that you built by yourself.

If you found this article useful, be sure to share this with people you know who might be interested! Now go out there and build!

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