Its my first time and im nervous

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Final Destiny

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Ok heres the skinny ladies and gents, Ive done a fair amount of upgrades to my PC's and a few for friends to make them gaming compatible and now I want to make the leap into building one from scratch. I've installed cards, hard drives, memory, and disc drives, but no experience in mobo's, cpu's, or power supplies. being that those are pretty much the easiest to blow up, catch fire, generally screw up badly im a little nervous about the whole thing. But Im hardheaded and against alot of ppl's naysaying im giving it a shot. So, heres a list of what im going to try and put in

CPU: AMD Phenom II 955 Black Edition 3.2
MOBO: Anything AM3 compatible that supports DDR3 memory and is of quality around a 150$ price tag (suggestions more than welcome)
Memory: 4x2gb DDR3 sticks 1333 (again, suggestions would be appreciatted)
Graphics: 2 Radeon 4870's with 1 gig video memory in crossfire (suggestions :D )
Optical Drive: something bluray compatible
Power Supply: I have no idea

Anywho this is generally what im looking to play with. im a pretty hardcore online gamer and i like to play some games double,triple, or quad boxed sometimes. i'd like to establish a nice system for around 1200 that i wont have to worry about for a couple years as far as upgrades so any input, advice, suggestions would be very appreciatted.
 
3 things I see people jack up the most.

1. Standing on carpet. Just dont do it. Ground band or not.

2. Bending pins on the CPU, your going AMD socket AM3 meaning it has 940 pins, dont get shakey. Haha, Dont push on the CPU, just line it up, and let it fall into place, you shouldnt have to push on it hardly at all.

3. DONT FORGET THE STANDOFF'S on your case. My God, I cannot believe one of my friends did this. Can you say short circuit? That mobo was toast in about a second

My wisdom :)

EDIT AM3 is 938 pins, my fault, was thinking AM2
 
I've never had a problem with standing on carpet.
I have bent a couple of pins in my time - not while inserting but instead while taking the cooler off, managed to carefully bend them back into place though. CPUs are pretty resilient.
 
So generally speaking, the mobo, cpu, and power supply are just follow-the-instructions-and-your-fine type deal? and i suppose if i have any difficulties with anything i could always take pic, post here with my predicament : )
ok well with that outta the way, any suggestions on components?
 
frankly pc's are so easy to put together today it's really a no brainer. just go slow, think of yourself as a giant three toed sloth & know what your doing and how your going to do it before you do it. when you get the blank case, you'll be putting in spacer from the case to the motherboard. just look at where the holes in the case match the holes in the motherboard and only put the spaces in those places. don;t grab or lift anything by its heat sink or weak points, and of course don't jam anything in that isnt fitting (course you know most of this stuff from replacing stuff for your friends.) also if you do not have enough spacers to support all areas of the board, like under the power supply block, when you put plug into that block put something under it to support it until you get it in/etc.
 
The hardest parts IMO are:
1) The rear IO shield - usually this is a tinny piece of junk that makes motherboard installation a PITA
2) The front panel pins - fiddly and annoying depending on the case and mobo

Parts that are tricky first time only
1) Getting the spacers in the correct holes - depends on the case, motherboard etc
2) Getting the correct amount of TIM onto the CPU - I put a blob about the size of a pea in the middle of the CPU and let the pressure from the heatsink base spread it out, different people do this different ways
3) Heatsink installation (particularly on 775) - it should be a tight fit which can make it can be a bit fiddly and unnerving
 
IMO If I can do it...anybody can.
Build my first one about a month ago. Worst I did was over analyzing things... I asked stupid questions before I got started, but once you start building every plug, every screw will make sense.
Took me a couple of hours to build my first from scratch. [but I did read the mobo instructions a day before]
Took me 30 minutes to take my kids gateway apart, put it back together in another 30 minutes...after realizing I had the wrong mobo for the wrong case. Took me one hour to build my kids computer.

Ok, my times maybe are off, but it felt like it didn't take long at all. The biggest "problem" for ME was the heatsink on the 775. It was very tight, and I was worried breaking something.
 
ok, so you said you want to build your system for around 1200 dollars? pounds? are you also including other things like a monitor, keyboard + mouse, OS?
 
thats just the tower, i have a nice 20" HD monitor i got for my bday, and all my gaming controls i have already. as far as OS im going 7 64 bit to maximize efficiency (i think)
 
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