Most People just purchase a Computer from Dell, Asus, Sony,… and look at the external looks or the basic specifications, like a dual core, 8GB of RAM and a 2TB hard disk. But they pay for the operating system, other software, Motherboard with too much options they never going to use, overkill Power supply,… or they just need a high performance graphics card and pay for a 6 Core Extreme processor or 16GB of ram they don’t need.
Now that’s the beautiful thing about building your own Computer, you just choose whatever you need or want. If you want a super tower case with a huge window and an 8 Core AMD processor on an extreme Motherboard to connect 10 hard drives, you can! Or if you just need a Computer for some daily office work and to browse the internet you can just buy a small case with a simple motherboard and dual core processor and buy a cheap graphics card to look movies. Or maybe you are a gamer? And just want a high performance quad-core system with a 2-Way SLI or CrossfireX GPU configuration to get the maximum out of your games, without having to pay a fortune for a PC with a good graphics card and other useless components you are never going to use.
Building your own PC has other advantages too … The good thing about this, is that you know exactly what is in your computer, and that all the components are good quality and not just the cheap stuff. Take for example, if you buy the lastest PC from Dell or a HP with an Intel Core i5 4670, 8GB of RAM, a 2TB hard disk and a GTX 670 graphics card. It may sound all good, but do you know what brand the motherboard is? or what ram are you going to get … you just don’t know.
And then there’s overclocking, which is basically setting your clock speeds of your processor and memory higher for extra performance without paying more for the performance boost. All you need is a Z77 or Z87 platform motherboard and a K type processor on the Intel side, or a Black edition processor for the AMD side plus a corresponding motherboard to go with that.
So if you want to overclock your PC, it’s better to build your own, because all the hardware inside the PC will heat up pretty quickly, and you will need sufficiently cooling to avoid damage to the hardware. For a good stable overclock, you need to adjust your voltage, mostly by turning it up. More voltage equals more heat, so better cooling is definitely required. In most cases the Intel or AMD stock cooler is good enough for basic users, but aftermarket CPU coolers are always better in terms of cooling and lower noise levels.
The downside about building your own pc is, you have to do some research not all components are compatible with each other for example: an Intel Core i5 4670 Haswell processor is not compatible with a Z77 chipset based motherboard, because the architecture of the CPU is different. And a set of DDR2 memory will not work in a DDR3 slot. You can’t plug in your RAM in a PCIe port or your graphics card in a RAM slot. And so on.
But if you do a bit of research and select compatible components, the building will be no problem.
