There are vast amounts of guides out there that try to explain how to choose a gaming PC. I have found that 99% are either out of date of complete rubbish. The idea of this article is to set the record straight for 2010.

To help guide you though this we are going to follow an example throughout the guide based on a few requirements, you should also have a few MEGAGAME requirements for your build.

Our requirements are;

Fast Gaming PC

Offers Value

Upgradeable

Looks Good

The CPU
This is one of the first choices you will make to decide the technology to base your custom PC around. The best way to describe it would be the brain of a PC. There are two players in this field, Intel and AMD. As its stands, Intel own the high end CPU market, the result is a very clear choice when choosing a CPU with most gaming PC builds being based around an Intel i5 or i7 CPU with the latter being the fastest. AMD’s Phenom II CPU is sometimes used but they are more commonly found in budget computer builds. Each technology has multiple choices, so study the specs of each CPU carefully.

We need to pick a CPU for our example, from our original requirements we can match the top three requirements with an i5 Processor which currently come in several flavours;

650 3.20GHz 4MB cache LGA1156

750 2.66GHz 8MB cache LGA1156