how do you choose which parts you will use for your next build?

[NotTheRelaxngEnd]

no, i'm not asking how to buy a pc, i'm wondering, how do you select the specific pieces you will use , by example, my first build had a msi gtx 1060 (i won at a giveaway) , since it's red and black, i had to choose the next parts (like case, motherboard, ram, etc) to match it (as long as they are on a reasonable price).

 so, do you do the same by centering on the piece you want the most and focusing around it? or you either use another straategy or by some reason, in 2018, you just don't care about color matching 

[Crunchy Dragon]

-Moved to General Discussion-

[Amazonsucks]

First i look at the landscape of whats currently available in terms of microarchitecture, memory and storage technology and whats coming out in the future and when itll be out, which is often known years in advance(Skylake was on roadmaps when Sandy Bridge was current).

 

Then i estimate what ill need in terms of overall platform and performance, do a wait time calculation if theres something really good coming out in the near future and decide when to buy and roughly what to buy. For example, i avoided Maxwell GPUs and patiently waited for Pascal.

 

Its also about overall system performance balance for me. I try to build a well balanced system, and add performance or capacity to specifically address specific issues. I knew i would need a big SSD and i wanted to have large enough memory capacity to basically never run out and start paging from the drive. I wouldnt, for example, spend a ton of money on an LGA2066 platform and only put 16GB RAM with it, or have an insane CPU and GPU with a 256GB SSD. I see that kind of stuff too often.

 

When i built my Sandy Bridge PC in 2012 i figured the earliest id upgrade was Skylake. When it came time to do my Skylake build in 2016, RAM,  SSDs and GPUs were cheap so i went bigger than needed(32GB and 1TB). 

 

I knew to avoid CPUs before Skylake since none in the small socket were a significant upgrade from Sandy Bridge and Skylake had DDR4 and working TSX. I also knew to avoid Maxwell GPUs since they were basically Kepler with FP64 stripped out and better compression but still on the 28nm node from 2011 so i knew that id wait for Pascal which was both a node skip and shrink and a new microarchitecture.

 

I look for what is likely going to be the most reliable and high quality, then i pick something that meets the performance requirements and wont need to be upgraded for a long time(which is why i got a 1TB MLC SSD, 1070, 850W PSU). I dont anticipate buying a new GPU until real time ray tracing requires one. Im still waiting for a monitor that supports a real 4K standard like Rec.2020 and Rec.2021 or has 2560x1440 with better than a WLED backlight. At this point id be happy with an accurate sRGB OLED like a smaller version of LG and Sonys TVs, but ill continue to wait on that. ?

 

When building any system, i try to apply a mainframe/HPC mentality to it, building in as much RAS(reliability, availability and servicability) as possible given whatever budget im working with. That extends not only throughout the hardware selection, but software configuration after the thing is actually upand running.

 

For my personal builds, i tend to avoid cases with windows which are all metal for better EMI shielding and always use a UPS.