Choosing the right PC components based on your needs

If you’re considering assembling a new computer, you may have occasionally found yourself overwhelmed with the sheer number of choices. It takes multiple components to bring a computer together and today, we’re spoilt for choice. However, this can also bring with it plenty of confusion, especially when it comes to choosing the right mix of components for your specific needs. We’ve put together a list of configurations available on Amazon for all types of use cases and this is what went into making our choices.

Basic Office Desktop

If your work requires you to shuffle between the suite of Office programs, typing up reports or making presentations while looking for stats in long, complex excel sheets, then you don’t need the beefiest system out there. Even when taking multi-tasking into account, a quad-core processor paired with 8GB RAM is plenty sufficient to let you juggle between your presentation, excel sheets and your favourite music player, all without causing any hiccups in performance. Since most of your time at work is spent swimming through text, a monitor measuring 20 inches diagonally with HD resolution provides plenty of pixels to not stress your eyes. While a good keyboard and mouse do make for a great experience, even the most basic keyboards and optical mice today have become good enough to keep your work sailing smooth. View configuration options here.

Home Desktop

When it comes to a computer that’s going to be used by the family, there are so many things one expects from such a machine. While there’s always aspects of work involved, think kids homework, watching movies, maybe making video calls every now and then. Once again, all these tasks are handled beautifully by a combination of a quad-core processor, 8GB of RAM and an SSD. The SSD helps speed up the time it takes for not just for Windows to load, but also for other programs to start. Since this is going to be a family machine, we recommend a slightly bigger display, perhaps a 22-inch display to meet all your needs. If you are going to watch a lot of movies on this desktop, we would recommend getting a pair of 2.1 speakers as well. View configuration options here.

PC for College Students

As a college student looking to build a PC for their course work or even programming, streaming films or just writing academic papers, you would be surprised how much performance you can get without having to splurge on components. Start with a quad-core AMD Ryzen or Intel processor. While AMD offers a stock cooler with its CPU, you can always upgrade to an aftermarket air cooler to keep these powerful CPUs cool. If you decide to go with an Intel chip, you will need an air cooler as they don’t bundle one in the box. Stocking up with 16GB RAM and a basic GPU helps ensure that any application you run or any piece of code you try to compile, ends up running perfectly fine. In fact, you won’t have to leave your PC idle while it's compiling your latest program. You can stream a movie or a show while the compiling takes place in the background, thanks to the combination of the quad-core processor, adequate RAM and an SSD. View configuration options here.

Casual Gaming PC

This is perhaps one type of desktop that can cause significant confusion in choice of components, so we’re going to choose ours based on casual gaming needs, that is, running games at 1080p while getting 30-60 frames per second. Once again, a decent quad-core processor should handle light gaming with great ease because most games don’t tax the CPU a lot. What they will need is an adequate amount of RAM (16GB for comfortable gaming) along with a decent graphics card (GPU). GPUs like the Nvidia Geforce GTX 1650 and Radeon RX570 both offer 4GB of dedicated memory. A traditional hard drive can mean terribly slow load times, so we recommend a 250GB SSD to speed things up. The choice of monitor is quite easy. Since all monitors today are capable of 60Hz refresh rate, all you need to do is make sure its got a 1080p resolution. A 24-inch monitor would be the ideal size and won’t break the bank. View configuration options here.

Gaming and Content Creator PC

The great thing about being an enthusiast gamer or a content creator is that both of these types of users benefit the most from the same kind of PC specs. Choose between an Intel Core i5-9400 or AMD Ryzen 5 2600 CPU, both of which have 6 cores. More cores are always better, especially if you’re a content creator as rendering can tax the CPU heavily.  As a gamer, if you’re looking to play your games in FHD resolution with the graphics turned to high and still manage 60fps, opt for an Nvidia Geforce GTX 1660 or an AMD Radeon RX580 GPU. These won’t just help your games look stunning, but also aid in making your video (or photo) editing process super smooth by taking the load off the CPU. Both use cases benefit from large amounts of RAM, but we feel that 16GB is the sweet spot. Since we are now using higher-grade components, a 650W power supply is a good choice as it will provide more than enough power to all the components in this configuration, but will also be adequate in case you decide to upgrade to a better CPU or GPU. AN IPS monitor also ensures that you get an accurate colour reproduction, whether its in-game colours or the colours of the video you’re editing. Lastly, you will need not just large amounts of storage, but also fast storage, so we strongly recommend a 256GB NVMe drive as your boot drive, while a 1TB HDD could be where you store your games and other data. View configuration options here.

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