There are lots of websites with low-cost computer components. The best of these are very, very good. The worst of these are the stuff nightmares are made of. I will list sites I purchase from frequently or consult frequently. It's been Amazon (or sellers via Amazon) in the last couple of years. Before that, it was Amazon and Newegg. I also find deals at B&H Photo Video reasonably often, but usually when I'm in the market for home entertainment components and cameras. I have purchased a couple of monitors from them. Less occasionally, I pick up an item from Best Buy, but that usually consists of smaller items like cables. I've also been buying a few components directly from the manufacturers. 

I used to use Amazon or Newegg pretty evenly as sources for computer components. Before I became an Amazon Prime member, I favored Newegg. I purchased my first item - a book - from Amazon in 2000 and my first item from Newegg in 2001. However, before Amazon Prime, I bought less than a dozen things from them yearly. Newegg has diluted its concentration from computer components by selling other things like appliances and car parts, and they added 3rd-party sellers - some of which have been less than reliable and honest.

Newegg and Amazon have fantastic order tracking and a complete, searchable order history of my purchases. If I revisit a product page of an item I've purchased before, Amazon puts a link at the top saying when I bought it with a link to the order. That's something Newegg doesn't do, and it's pretty handy. Amazon has reasonable product search functionality, but Newegg has them beat by far. I often do product research on Newegg and buy from Amazon. Amazon's prices are usually the same or cheaper, but the free Prime shipping usually tips the scale.

Recently, Amazon started offering Sunday deliveries in addition to Saturday deliveries. On some occasions, I need something for work on Monday, and this is quite handy. I don't know the exact number of orders I have had with Amazon, but it's somewhere in the hundreds. I've returned a few items; one was lost during shipping. I had no hassles getting my money back.

Newegg was one of my favorite websites from which to buy computer components. At last check, I have placed over 100 orders with them ranging from $7 to $1400. How do I know this for sure? Like Amazon, every order I've placed with them is available in my account order history on their website. This includes a complete listing of everything I've purchased and how much I purchased it for. I've used this several times to check what products I put in which build. It's quicker to look this up online than to look through my files or pop off the side of a machine. It also makes it very easy to buy another item of the same item and put it in a different machine or recommend it to someone. My first purchase from Newegg was a Leadtek TI200/TDH GeForce3 Ti200 64MB AGP 4X Video Card, which I bought in October 2001 for $229. I'm sure it was a bargain at the time.

Newegg's Guided and Advanced Search are good at whittling down items, but the Power Search is the real winner. In mere seconds, I can reduce hundreds or thousands of potential components to the dozen or two that fit my build. No other site has search capabilities this broad. 

Newegg also has daily "Shellshocker" deals. That at least gets me to look at the site once a day during the week. (On the weekends, the deals tend to be on things other than computer-related items.) I've purchased several of the deals, and they are good—sometimes fantastic deals. Newegg also has a mobile app that features one special mobile-only deal a day, and that one usually is a very good deal.

I used to be such a Newegg fan I practically shopped nowhere else, however, in the last couple years, there have been a few chinks in the armor. It used to be that all orders I placed with Newegg arrived in two or three days - most of those with free shipping. Newegg has added "Super Saver" and "Standard" shipping options, which are often the only way to get free shipping nowadays. That's fine if the price is really good, and/or I'm OK if the item doesn't arrive for five to seven days. They've also started using the US Post Office for the Super Saver shipping. I get complete email tracking of when the order is accepted and charged and another (with tracking numbers) when it is shipped - until the USPS gets it. Then, I often get no tracking info until the item is delivered. That I am not happy with. I generally try to make sure to get the two to three-day shipping. If I can't get it that way from Newegg, I generally can get it from Amazon.

The second chink in the armor is that Newegg now allows other dealers to be listed in their searches and sell products through Newegg. In theory, that should be fine except that (at least for the things I am looking for), the prices of the other dealers are bad. Sometimes to the point of being laughable. The times when their other dealer's prices align with Newegg (or Amazon) are so few that I find their addition in the search results unwelcome noise. Oddly, having other sources like this is something Amazon has always done, but it doesn't bother me with them. There are several reasons why this is so, but at least I can check the Amazon Prime checkbox, which eliminates anyone who doesn't ship it for free and guarantees two-day shipping.

I've yet for Newegg to get an order wrong, but I have had to return a few items I bought, and RMAs are easy to request online. One item was a video capture card that refused to work with one motherboard. (I had purchased that video card before and had no issues with it.) I received refunds in about a week to two weeks. They charge a restocking fee, which I wasn't overly pleased with, but since they would have to sell the card (for less) as an open box item, it was not a great situation for anyone. It's not their fault the card was incompatible. (Not mine either.)

Even though I might have issues with Newegg, I've ordered hundreds of items since 2001. I wouldn't hesitate to ramp that up. They've yet to make a mistake on an order or be late shipping an order. My returns were handled fairly and efficiently. I've recommended Newegg to many friends, and those who purchased from them have the same experiences that I have. Very few companies online, or otherwise, run with this sort of quality.

Micro Center is my CPU and motherboard store. ... Next section.

No, that pretty much sums it up. If you are lucky enough to live near a Micro Center store, which I do, you can take advantage of their fantastic deals on CPUs. Depending on the CPU model, they are consistently $40 - $100 cheaper. You can get another $20-40 off a CPU/motherboard bundle if you aren't set on a specific motherboard. The motherboards offered in the bundle are pretty good ones, too. The catch is that these prices are in-store only; you have to go there and buy them in person. Of course, they hope to get you to buy other things (or everything) while in the store. They sometimes succeed, too. You must pay sales tax, but Amazon now collects that anyway, so that's not a factor. Every gaming PC I've made in the last 3-4 years has a CPU from Micro Center and often a CPU/Motherboard bundle.

B&H Photo Video is my first thought whenever I need audio or video equipment - especially cameras, projectors, A/V receivers, speakers, etc. Their catalogs - yes, they still mail out catalogs - are adult toy catalogs. In addition to all things audio and video-related, they sell computer components. While their prices are generally competitive, their selection is smaller than that of Amazon or Newegg, as components are not their focus. When I recently decided to upgrade to a higher-resolution monitor, I checked at B&H Photo Video since video-editing systems (and, therefore, monitors) are right up their alley. I found that B&H Photo Video had the monitor I was looking for, which was cheaper than Newegg and Amazon and had free shipping. (They didn't charge sales tax at the time, either.) They previously had a video card I was looking for that was cheaper, too.

PC Part Picker is not a place you can buy things from directly as it's not a store. However, it helps assemble a list of components with the least cost. The prices it quotes are the lowest of those taken from several stores it knows about. (The user can choose the store regardless of the cost.) The downside is that it doesn't have data about every single store. It has major ones like Newegg, Amazon, B&H Photo Video, and Micro Center. It also covers countries besides the US, like the UK, Australia, Spain, Germany, and Italy. I can't vouch for how good of a job it does for countries other than the US.

PC Part Picker tries very hard to ensure the components you put together when picking the parts for a system build are compatible. If you pick an Intel LGA 1700 socket CPU, the only motherboards offered later are those with an LGA 1700 socket. The memory offered will work with the motherboard, etc. It's getting pretty good at cross-checking. While picking each component, several filters are available that are specific to the component. They also have warnings, such as if a motherboard might need a BIOS update to be compatible with a CPU.

I often hear the same rumors or half-truths when helping someone build their first PC. They read X is better than Y in some article or blog; now, it's stuck in their brain. I have certain brands I tend to like above others, but I've been building these things long enough to see trends change. Today's "facts" become tomorrow's untruths fairly regularly. The following are some things I've heard or discussed directly or through forums with some patently wrong people. Try to avoid these when putting together the components for your build.

This is a rumor that toggles between true and false. At the high end in August 2024, AMD's recently released R9 9950X beats the Intel i9 14900K by a decent amount in high-performance applications like Blender and Photoshop. For gaming, the AMD 7800X3D still yields higher frames per second (FPS) results. When the 9800X3D comes out (if it does), that will probably supplant the 7800X3D. This is one of the rare times that AMD has both the performance and gaming CPU crowns. It doesn't help that Intel acknowledged issues feeding too much voltage to the cores in its 13th and 14th-generation processors. The "fix" for that is a microcode patch in the process of being distributed by BIOS patches from various board makers.

The best approach is to determine the maximum you're willing to spend and then figure out the best CPU - Intel or AMD - within that budget. This marks one of the rare times AMD leads in gaming and production application performance (depending on which CPU we are talking about).

My favorite CPU and motherboard testing review sites are the YouTube channels Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed. They cover other types of hardware in more depth than anyone else; it's all they do. As the CPU dictates what motherboards you can get, I pick that component first.

This is a rumor that I wish I felt was more of a rumor. In sheer number-crunching, Nvidia and AMD have done a pretty good job slotting their video cards into a line of price/performance - except at the very high end where the RTX 4090 is priced higher than it should be (in my opinion) because it has no competition. It should be as simple as figuring out your budget and buying whichever manufacturer's card you can get within that range. The truth - for me, at least - isn't that simple. If the "correct" choice is an AMD card, I balk. I'll choose Nvidia every time if it's in the budget to bump to the next highest Nvidia card from that initial choice. Why? The answers are video drivers and build quality.

I still have at least one AMD card in one of my systems. It is not, however, a gaming system. It's a Linux box with an AMD card typically used for home theater PCs. My last "gaming" AMD card was an ATI Radeon (R300) 9700 (from 2002). It had to be replaced because of bad capacitors, resulting in the display of the pink checkerboard of death when trying to play a game. I got it directly from ATI, so I had to ship it to Canada for replacement. I remember this because Canada wanted me to pay an import tax for the declared value on a card I was returning for warranty work.

Later, a friend tried to use a card made by MSI based on an AMD R9 290X GPU. It was the correct card for his budget, and the R9 290X had decent reviews. His first card booted fine but would lock up whenever he tried a game. Any manufacturer can have an occasional build issue, so he got a replacement. The second one had the same issue. This time, we installed it in my gaming rig, thinking it might be some issue specific to his system. It got a little farther, but running 3DMark locked the system up within a minute. Eventually, that one died so bad that I couldn't even get back into Windows long enough to uninstall it. The AMD Catalyst drivers are so bad that I blue-screened when I tried to put my actual video card (by Nvidia) back into the system. I had to nuke and pave my OS to get the system working again. This could have been an MSI issue with AMD cards, perhaps. We replaced that card with an MSI card based on the Nvidia 970 GTX. It cost more, but now, there are no problems with it in his system. That leaves me somewhat soured on AMD cards.

The bottom line is, technically, you shouldn't necessarily pick Nvidia or AMD as always being the best. Look and see what makes sense for the budget available. My favorite GPU testing review sites are (again) the YouTube channels Gamers Nexus and Hardware Unboxed. Like CPUs, they cover GPU testing in more depth than anyone else.

This is a question I've answered online on more than one occasion. I have taken the liberty of copying myself. I'll sue myself for infringement later.

Computer power supply units (PSUs) are on-demand current draw devices. That is, they only supply as much power on the various voltage lines (3.3 V, 5V, 12V, etc.) as the components in your PC require. As such, if you were to replace your current power supply with a larger rated one (without changing any other components in your system), the difference in the current draw should be negligible. More than that, if you replace an old, poorly-designed 300W PSU with a new, more efficient 550W model, it's even possible the current draw will be decreased, not increased, due to increased efficiency. Efficiency is the ratio of power consumption from the wall socket compared to the power delivered to the computer components. A loss of efficiency manifests itself as heat generation. A PSU that is 85% efficient wastes less electricity in the form of heat than a 70% efficient PSU.

Power supplies operate most efficiently when driven at 50 - 75% of their rated maximum load. Let's say you've been adding hard drives over time (even external ones if the USB port powers them) and have also upgraded your video card. The 550W power supply was fine when you first got your system, but now, let's say you use 460W as a worst case. (It won't always draw that much, but when playing a video game driving the graphics card and the CPU hard, it may stay at that draw for extended periods.) Your 550W PSU is operating at 84% of its rated max. An 800W PSU, on the other hand, would only be operating at 58% of its rated max. The 550W power supply is affected by the loss of efficiency in converting 120V AC to 3.3V, 5V, 12V, etc. DC, and when loaded above 75%, it may pull more current from the wall to deliver 460W than the 800W supply would require. (It's more complicated than this because it matters how much current is needed by each voltage "rail," such as 12V compared to 3.3V, rather than just the total power. I've also ignored talking about thermal design power altogether.)

That said, it's a good idea to check the output of an existing PSU and upgrade it when adding components with a higher current draw. Some of the very high-end graphics cards now require 350-400W or more when they are running full blast. Pair that with a CPU pulling nearly 250-300W, and you see why 1000W supplies are needed. If you upgrade your graphics card, you will probably draw more current from the wall. Purchase a cheap Kill-A-Watt power meter to verify or measure the power requirements. Remeasure after upgrading a component to ensure the PSU is operating within safe margins.