Processor, motherboard, storage, graphics, power, and memory. Once you’ve got it in your head to build your own gaming PC with custom parts, it can be easy to get carried away. You can blow all of your savings in a single go, only to realize you overspent in the wrong areas.

Don’t Include Peripherals in Your Budget

Most of us have a point of reference for what kind of build we want, and it’s often based on someone else’s awesome build. Make sure you’re not getting distracted by any cool peripherals your friends have. You can worry about wireless speakers and illuminated keyboards later.

Not convinced? Whether it’s budget or high-end, ready-built gaming PCs with custom parts focus on performance, not peripherals. Those extras, which typically cost less than the necessary components, are mostly just personal touches. In fact, you may even want to defer purchasing a case for now.

Where to Spend

Let’s assume you want to spend $500-$800 on your custom build. It’s imperative that you know where to allocate the majority of this budget. For most, the really important parts to invest in will be the motherboard and graphics card.

After all, the whole goal is to have fun with your PC. Your motherboard runs the show, and your graphics card presents optimum texture and movement in a game, so you get that fully immersive experience.

The motherboard takes priority for fairly obvious reasons. All of your key components will run through this one vital piece of equipment. If you spend less on other components, they’ll still do their best when hooked into a solid, decent motherboard. If the motherboard is so budget that it tanks when pushed, the whole ship goes down.

Besides, a good motherboard is serviceable. After a while, you can add upgrades to the areas where you skimped during your original build. This is always preferable to getting the itch to rebuild from the ground up.

As a general rule, a good graphics card isn’t cheap. This is one reason why you shouldn’t try to get around investing a good portion of your budget in graphics. However, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with buying last year’s best graphics card; it should still be able to carry the load provided by a newly-released game.

Where You Must Sacrifice – For Now

Having a custom gaming PC budget under $800 might make getting a quad-core processor pretty difficult, if not impossible. If you have to settle for a dual core, Intel is the way to go.

But by and large, the absolute biggest waste of money for your new custom build is extra RAM. Do not make the mistake of sinking funds into large quantities of extra space that you don’t need.

We all have to start somewhere. But building your first gaming PC with custom parts doesn’t have to produce the kind of negative outcomes too many novices deal with. Spend wisely on the essentials, and your build won’t come out seeming so budget after all.