What percentage of a budget should be spent on each component in a build?

[BrandonClag]

So when I was starting out with building my first pc, I picked a budget first and then tried to make the best build from that budget. But I found it hard to get started because I wasn't sure how much was reasonable to spend on a Motherboard or a power supply without needlessly eating into my budget. Assuming a build with a primary focus for gaming, given $X, how much of your budget should you spend on each part? Obviously there's no set answer or exact numbers, but as a guideline, what do you guys think should be prioritized over other parts? Also, for simplicity, assuming no peripherals are being bought with the budget. Only the PC itself will be bought. 

[Blackhole890]

depending what are you going to do, its very relative... What you must not ever cheap out is on your psu

[Droidbot]

just don't overspend on a mobo or PSU. it's a trap many first time builders fall into, and half the time they could have gotten a better performing system for their money if they dropped the mobo

 

[tlink]

its not so much based on percentage as on sorting pcpartpicker for cheapest part with desired minimum specs . prices vary pretty wildly per month so setting a fixed percentage to it doesn't make sense on a pretty unstable market.

[Mooshi]

PSU tier list is a good quick ref, but any well received psu will be fine. Overly expensive PSUs are only worth it if A) your power is expensive enough and the PSU efficiency helps or B) you needed high level wattage for a multi gpu setup. (having more wattage than needed is still better than not having enough and sales are your best friend)

 

Everything else is relative to what you do and this effects your CPU choice, the ram choice, motherboard ect. Of all the parts, the case is the most subjective since the cardboard box your motherboard came in is sufficient, but some people would rather have an art piece of a case.

[Mira Yurizaki]

13 minutes ago, BrandonClag said:

So when I was starting out with building my first pc, I picked a budget first and then tried to make the best build from that budget. But I found it hard to get started because I wasn't sure how much was reasonable to spend on a Motherboard or a power supply without needlessly eating into my budget. Assuming a build with a primary focus for gaming, given $X, how much of your budget should you spend on each part? Obviously there's no set answer or exact numbers, but as a guideline, what do you guys think should be prioritized over other parts? Also, for simplicity, assuming no peripherals are being bought with the budget. Only the PC itself will be bought. 

If gaming, more of the budget should be given to the GPU, then the CPU.

 

Everything else I usually just go with "the cheapest thing that satisfies all of my requirements", though my requirements are bit more thought out so that advice is probably terrible for a newbie.

[porina]

I'd separate it into two camps, let's call it structure components, and performance components.

 

Structure would include case, PSU, cooling, maybe storage and mobo. You need these to be good enough, but not necessarily scale with performance. Maybe a weak scaling, for example if you go SLI you're going to need a better PSU than could be adequate for single GPU systems. If you go for a high end CPU, you might want a higher end mobo to not hinder its performance.

 

Performance items would be things like ram, CPU, GPU. Here you could argue there is some kind of scaling, but it isn't constant. For a gaming system, I'd argue you'd spend more on the CPU than the ram, and more on the GPU than CPU. 

[JJVGaming]

21 minutes ago, BrandonClag said:

So when I was starting out with building my first pc, I picked a budget first and then tried to make the best build from that budget. But I found it hard to get started because I wasn't sure how much was reasonable to spend on a Motherboard or a power supply without needlessly eating into my budget. Assuming a build with a primary focus for gaming, given $X, how much of your budget should you spend on each part? Obviously there's no set answer or exact numbers, but as a guideline, what do you guys think should be prioritized over other parts? Also, for simplicity, assuming no peripherals are being bought with the budget. Only the PC itself will be bought. 

Lets say the gaming build is aprox $1050, and that  $1050 = 100%

 

GPU = 35% to 40% $400
CPU = 20% to 25% $200

MOBO = 8% to 10% $95

RAM = 8% to 10% too $105

STORAGE (Including HDD and SSD) = 10% to 12% $130

Case = 6% to 8% $70

PSU = 6% to 8% too $60

 

You can see that the bulk of your money is mainly spent on both processors, and other things after this is usually 8% to 10% of the budget. 

[HKZeroFive]

Again, it depends on the intended use cases of the PC.

 

A good rule of thumb is to spend roughly a third of your budget on your GPU.

[BrandonClag]

1 minute ago, JJVGaming said:

Lets say the build is aprox $1050, and that  $1050 = 100%

 

GPU = 35% to 40% $400
CPU = 20% to 25% $200

MOBO = 8% to 10% $95

RAM = 8% to 10% too $105

STORAGE (Including HDD and SSD) = 10% to 12% $130

Case = 6% to 8% $70

PSU = 6% to 8% too $60

 

You can see that the bulk of your money is mainly spent on both processors, and other things after this is usually 8% to 10% of the budget. 

This I think is a great answer! It gives people actual dollar amounts to get started with. 

[Scruffy90]

37 minutes ago, Droidbot said:

just don't overspend on a mobo or PSU. it's a trap many first time builders fall into, and half the time they could have gotten a better performing system for their money if they dropped the mobo

 

Also spend more money on your case. I and many others I knew used the bulk of their budget on their components and had a cheapo case with poor airflow to go with it.

[yathis]

Depends on what you want.

You can increase the gpu price, decrease the psu price, up the ram price, down the cpu price.

All depends on what you want.