New Computer

In February i am purchasing a new computer. I am planning to build it myself so i looked on youtube for some good gaming rigs underneath £500, preferably cheap. I found this gaming rig which apparently can handle Crysis 2. Here is the link to the website which contains the specs and such. I'm not really a computer builder, being in secondary school at the moment in yr 10. http://teksyndicate.com/videos/kill-your-console-350-gaming-pc-june-2012

For about 400 dollars (USD) I made myself a PC. 4.2GHz Quadcore (AMD FX-4170), 8GB Corsair Vengeance RAM, 650w PSU Corsair Bronze Certified (I think), Sapphire Radeon HD 5450 (My GPU is the only thing that I need to upgrade).etc This rig can handle Wii emulation fairly well. It runs most games full FPS and if there is any game it can't run Full FPS, I can always overclock so it can. So if you're interested in Wii emulation at all, you may want to get a bit stronger CPU, as Dolphin only goes off of two cores, the higher clock rate per core would be optimal for that.

I built my first PC around your age, so you should manage fine

As your in the UK I would use Ebuyer.com or Scan.co.uk to source your parts, both sites are usually the cheapest.

I recently built a PC for my brother which was around £650, i've changed a couple of the components about and got you a nice spec for £500, see attachment.

Thank you very much im sure this is gonna help very much. One thing im quite scared about is the building process since i dont want to break anything.

Building a PC is pretty straight forward. Plenty of resources out there to help and if you get stuck on anything we'll be glad to help you I built my first PC a while a go now and the last one I built was in 2007 which is still my current PC but with a 3 year old graphics card

Think of building a PC like doing a jigsaw, if a part doesn't fit then it either doesn't go there or you have it the wrong way around.

Start with your case, open it up and screw the hard drive / optical drives in. The back of both should face the inside of the case for easy cable access.
Next you want attach the motherboard, be sure to put the backing plate on as you slot it in to the case. You may also have some (dont know the technical name) screws that need to be screwed in to the case that raise the motherboard slightly so the back plate is aligned with the back of the case. This will vary from case to case.

When attatching the processor to the motherboard it will only go one way, remember to put the thermal paste on it between the CPU and heatsink. Likewise for the ram that will only go one way, and you cant really get any PCI expansion cards the wrong way around.

Its just a case of wiring the power, sata, usb, and wires for the power / reset buttons on the case up then. Again all motherboards as different to refer to the manual if you are unsure where to connect the CPU and any case fans to, again you should find its pretty hard to connect the wrong wire to the wrong place.

That's summing it very basically, however if you take your time and dont rush i think it would be pretty hard to mess something up. I'm sure you can find some YouTube videos that will guide you through building a basic pc, have a look at your current pc and try taking the parts out and putting it back together so you have a good idea what your doing.

As Trebor and Dark Scyth say any problems post here and we can try help, it sounds a lot harder than it actually is to build a PC.

I have seen alot of things recommending heat paste or something like that. Unfortuantly i cannot take apart my computer since i run on a laptop

I am thinking of building a PC also, someone tell me. Do these specs look good?

One other point i would like to mention is i need a monitor and keyboard but i dont wanna go over budget (around £500 at the moment) so i want something that cheap but will last a while until i get enough money to upgrade.