blueprints unwrapped

Zak Storey tells you what you need to know when planning your next build

BUILDING SYSTEMS is what we do here at Maximum PC. It’s the bread and butter of what makes this publication what it is. Over the years, we’ve built a whole host of systems, targeting every concept, budget, and product you can imagine—all in an attempt to keep things fresh, topical, and up to date.

With that comes knowledge—buckets of the stuff. It almost becomes intuitive, knowing what components will fit where, how much a chassis can take, how best to take advantage of cooling in a case, which hardware to pick to make life easy, and what components represent the best bang for the buck. But it’s perhaps something that we’ve often taken for granted.

In our February issue, we had a great community question on page 95. Blake Wells suggested we take a step back from the long-form build features and blueprints, and explain just how we go about picking the parts we do. How do you avoid compatibility issues? Will your CPU be fast enough not to bottleneck your GPU? And how do you future-proof your rig, ensuring it’s trouble-free and simple to build, too? These are all fantastic questions, and ones that we’re going to dive into right now.

ANSWERING THE PIVOTAL QUESTIONS

It might be dull, but this is without a doubt the most important part of any build process, even the ones we piece together here

ALL GOOD BUILDS START WITH good research. For us in particular, it’s pivotal that we create systems that not only represent good value, but are logical as well. They have to meet a certain budget, and often be aligned correctly with one another, avoiding bottlenecks, cooling disasters, power deliver y issues, and other maladies (no point pairing a Core i3, with an RTX 5090, with a 450W PSU in a case with no airflow, after all). There are occasions where we deviate from that, of course, usually to try out a random piece of hardware, to answer a question or satisfy a curiosity, but that’s almost always at the forefront of our mind when building out a parts list.

All that aside, regardless of whether you’re tech media or not, it’s research that’s the saving grace of any good system build. Answer some basic questions about what you’re trying to achieve, and then heavily research the components that you have in mind.

To get started, there are a few key elements we need to pin down; categories of questions that need answering. You can hyper-fixate on the detail here, or just have a rough idea, but these are generally the best places to start.

All good builds start with a few good questions.

1: WHAT’S YOUR BUDGET?

This is vitally important, perhaps more so than anything else, as it’ll determine how to best allocate the finances you have. For instance, a $1,500 budget is far more ‘valuable’ than a $3,000 one. That might sound counterintuitive, but the less you have to spend, the more precise you need to be with your allocation.

If you pin money on a Ryzen 5 when you could have gotten a Ryzen 7, and saved a bit of cash on a lower-spec GPU instead (opting for a reference card instead of an overclocked Hyper Super Nova Deluxe OC X card), you’ll be leaving performance on the table for more computationally heavy tasks.

Similarly, there’s no point spending $400 on a graphics card if your $100 CPU becomes the bottleneck. So understanding what the budget is, whether it can stretch, and what you can do to mitigate cost, is a big one. Think about what components you can bring over to the new system, and if you need to buy it all in one go. Do you care about aesthetics? Can you get away with a cheaper motherboard? All of this can dramatically reduce costs and improve performance in the process.

Identifying what games you play, and what res/ frame rate you’re after, can save you some serious cash.

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2: WHAT DO YOU WANT IT TO DO?

You also need to establish exactly what it is you’re doing with your build. Are you a gamer? Are you looking to render on it? Trying to build a machine that can browse the internet smoothly and dabble in office work and desktop applications? Do you need it to be super-reliable, on for days and days at a time? What’s your environment like? HVAC home office, or dust-filled workspace? Are there size requirements? Does it need to be a small, portable thing instead?