Help building a PC

[ChaosYoshi]

Most GPUs have cooling components built into them. There are the ones that overclock (which of course get hot), but it also depends on how old the GPU is. An older one is going to have a bit of trouble rendering newer games, which can amount to overheating if you're not careful.

Also, Stoneheart, what do you mean that the CPU is not that important? It's the part that does all the calculations (GPU aside), and last time I checked it never beeped. There's a separate device that allows for troubleshooting the motherboard that beeps code, but that's all I can think of.

[Bogdan]

Bump because not really worth starting another thread for one component.
Would you guys say an SSHD (Solid-State Hard-Drive hybrid) would be worth over an actual SSD + HDD combo? I build my new rig and I currently use my busted's laptop HDD, which is relatively ok and has decent ammount of space (464 GB). I don't like that it's too small for the case and it's free to go all around the place and gets pretty hot. Been thinking about getting a 1TB 7200RPM Western Digital hard drive which is about $65 and later get an 120GB SSD which is around the same price. Then I noticed there is a Seagate SSHD 1TB for about $88. People say it's considerably faster than a normal HDD, so is it worth getting and forgetting about the combo? 1TB is a crazy ammount of space (at least for me) and personally wouldn't feel like reinstalling windows on a new drive 3 times.

Got an 8GB DDR3 Gigabyte H97-HD3 i5 rig if you care <3

[ChaosYoshi]

I'm not too familiar with SSDs, as I've only had an HDD on this computer, but if you already have the HDD, then I think that you should be just fine with getting an SSD right now. If you want to upgrade further, then I would probably suggest getting your hybrid, as long as it has good reviews and all that.

[Doram]

SSD is really nice for one reason: durability. Regular hard drives have an arm, held in place by magnets, floating over a delicately magnetized disk. You drop your computer, that thing bashes the disk, data loss. Possibly minor, possibly fatal. SSD is literally nothing but a bunch of chips. Unless you chuck the entire computer in a shredder, it's VERY hard to do enough damage to make that not work.

Not on a laptop? Well, there is one other major benefit to SSD: seek time. Regular hard drives have to find where the information is, move that floating arm, and then read the information. That takes time (fractions of a second, but time nonetheless, and computers doing many things at once tends to multiply that time until it's noticeable..). SSD? Read address from chip, done. MUCH less time. This is shaving seconds off of any data intensive process from starting and shutting down the computer to writing and reading large files like movies.

SSD's only real drawback is that they are not quite as long lived as traditional drives. There have been a LOT of improvements on that in recent years, to the point that you don't need to worry about it anywhere near as much as you originally did, but a SSD has a maximum number of writes that you can make to any spot on any chip before it wears out. This is usually numbered in the thousands (and modern stuff, hundreds of thousands), and there's software that's automatic for these things called wear leveling, that keeps that limit from endangering your data, but it's a limit.

Super valuable for laptops. Not so much necessary for desktops, but still nice.