I've been PC gaming for around 4 years now, but that has been limited to a laptops (two, to be precise), so when it comes to actually building a proper tower, I'm somewhat empty-handed. I have a very basic understanding of the hardware, and how it works together, but not enough to jump right into constructing something on my own.

I was wondering if anyone knew of any really good resources to help me undertake this project. I wouldn't mind some helpful advice either.

What budget do you have in mind?

Check out the subreddit /r/pcmasterrace. There is a link on the sidebar that is a great introduction to building your own tower. Also use PC Part Picker to find the cheapest place to order your parts from.

For me personally, I'm looking to upgrade to a Core i5-4690K and a GTX 970. Even after all the memory stuff that has come out recently with the 970, I don't plan on 4K gaming yet, so it will be fine for my gaming needs. When I make the switch to 4K I'll get a 980 or whatever is the equivalent at the time.

Check out Tested's build guides (and I'm also recommending looking at LinisTechTips and JayzTwoCents on YouTube for more specific info in CPUs, graphics cards, motherboards, etc.), look at the system specs of the games you'd want to play, and head over to Newegg to price things out with a wishlist or two.

Two things:

• What do you want to do with this machine? (= x)
• How much money are you willing to spend? (= y)

Once you know both of those, it's a simple matter of choosing the best parts that fit within your budget that are most able to do what you need the machine to do. Just Google "x computer for y budget" and you'll find about a bajillion resources and recommendations. Just don't expect 60Hz, 4K on the latest games with a budget of $800 (though you could pretty easily do most current games 60Hz, 1080p with $800, not including monitor.)

http://www.logicalincrements.com/ is a real good basic overview of what is the best in a current price class, and roughly which parts should be together so that you aren't bottlenecking most of the time.

Something that isn't valued equally by everyone but pretty highly by me is the sound production of the system. The combination of a silent cooler, an SSD (no moving parts) system drive and a PSU with a silent fan got me a PC that when not worked hard is so much quieter than any previous experience.

In general I would advice an SSD to anyone, even nongamers. It makes everything snappy and responsive, from booting to opening browsers to loading games. The downside is that with the current size of high end games you sometimes have to do management of disk space. (Move games you play to the SSD, then move them to your other disk when you want to keep it perhaps for MP)

The only 'strange' part of current PC design is that 2 RAM sticks are better than 1 due to how dual channel works. So if you want 8gb of RAM, you want to buy 2x 4gb and put them (usually) in slot 1 and 3.

The only slightly tricky bits of putting a PC together are making sure you aren't staticly charged so you don't damage parts, and the part where you put paste in between the CPU and the heatsink. For the latter just watch a few YouTubes.

All other parts basically only fit in one way, the cables only fit in one way.

@misterdunlap: For actually assembling a PC the best and only resource should be the motherboard manual, from there you can just look up settings you've never heard of on wikipedia.

There are some useful instructions/videos for mounting the CPU cooler, but generally this is the only other manual/leaflet you need to follow.

Also agree with the SanderJK's tips.

Spend at least half your budget on the graphics card.