Building your first gaming PC.?

So I am thinking about building my first PC. Previously, the only thing I have done inside of a computer is upgrading/changing the power supply, ram, and graphics card (over 8 years ago!). How much of a leap would it be to build the whole thing? I mean something like going to amazon.com or tigerdirect.com and buying a CPU, motherboard, etc.



Recommended sites and books? I'm always afraid articles and books are out of date since these things change so fast.Building your first gaming PC.?
The only thing that may be slightly complicated (we don't want all the shiny new goodies to burn and fizzle, right?) is the motherboard and to a slighly lesser degree; the CPU. Check out the following how-to sites, they have very detailed articles about system building with pictures and videos.



Online stores:

www.newegg.com

www.zipzoomfly.com



How-to sites:

www.tomshardware.com

www.anandtech.com



Help Forum:

www.hardwareanalysis.comBuilding your first gaming PC.?
I would recommend 100% newegg.com Their customer service is beyond all others, A+ on it in every way. And all you need to really know is your spending limit. The first thing you need to pick is a motherboard. Motherboards support specific kinds and series of processors, so pick one that supports the kind of processor you want ( they are listed in the specs section of the motherboards on newegg) Once you have a motherboard picked, find a cpu that matches it. After that use your motherboard specs to determine the speed/type of ram you want, harddrives and cd-drives (hds and cds will both be sata cabling now.) Find a graphics card, which will inevitably be 16x pci express slot, and whatever components you want. Once you have all those core parts picked, add up power requirements, find a decent power supply. and presto you are done. Place the cpu in the board and using the perfect amount of thermal grease is the trickiest part in my opinion. You should find an online tutorial using google for the thermal greasing if you have never done it before, it makes a huge difference. Also, I would suggest a water cooling system if you can afford it for the cpu/graphics card. They work much better and it is cool to just say, %26quot;Yeah, my computer is liquid cooled.%26quot;