In 1998, Ask Ars was an early feature of the newly launched Ars Technica. Now, as then, it's all about your questions and our community's answers. Each week, we'll dig into our question bag, provide our own take, then tap the wisdom of our readers. To submit your own question, see our helpful tips page.

For Ask Ars, we typically respond to a reader question about some specific tech quandary, but this time around we've got something special. We've put together a new PC-building guide, complete with video selections that both inform and entertain. Our original guide hasn't been updated since the Celeron overclocking era, and many readers wrote in to let us know that it was long in the tooth. So if you've been thinking about building your own, or you're curious about what goes into the build process, this Ask Ars is for you.

This guide is aimed at people who have not built a PC before, but who know the basic ins and outs of DIY life.

In recent years, building your own computer has become more of a niche technophile activity than it was in the earlier part of the decade. Few people see the benefits of expending the effort to figure out how all the different components of a PC fit, screw, and plug together when you can just as easily fill out a customization form at any number of online retailers and have your own custom build arrive in just a matter of weeks.

But we know that there are still good reasons to go the do-it-yourself route. Our System Guides continue to see amazing traffic, and staff members (some, but not all) are still exercising their Type A personalities and building their own PCs. Ars has a long history of supporting PC builders, and this guide is designed to bring first-time and relatively green builders into the fold.

Build vs. buy

Right now, the PC market is flooded with manufacturers who can put a good system in your hands for a decent price. So if you choose to go the DIY route, price likely isn't your primary motivation. Maybe it's intellectual curiosity or a chance to scratch the itch that made your 10-year-old self lust after the Lego Death Star. Whatever the impetus, it's an excellent opportunity to learn about PC components and how they fit together.

On top of that, it's a great way to celebrate your inner Type A child, the one who can't tolerate the low-cost, low-quality parts—not to mention crapware—that often crop up in retail PCs. And some of us know the upsides when it comes to upgrading: a well planned PC can last you many years if you plan for expansion.

To get an idea of how the costs stack up, we'll compare some prebuilt PCs from major OEMs to the Ars System Guide's Budget Box and Hot Rod, leaving out the cost of a monitor and speakers and adding in the cost of Windows Home Premium, since most desktops ship with it installed.

A Dell Inspiron 570 desktop ships with a slightly slower processor (2.9GHz vs. 3.2 GHz), 2GB more RAM, and half the hard drive capacity of the same components in the Ars System Guide Budget Box for $515. The Budget Box minus extras like the monitor and dedicated video card is $485.

If we compare the Hot Rod to retail boxes, the gap widens a little, and it starts to get a bit harder to find manufacturers with individual hardware components as current (Gateway, for instance, currently has no towers equipped with Sandy Bridge processors). A Dell XPS 8300 with the same Sandy Bridge processor as the Hot Rod and a less-capable video card (Radeon HD 5870) is $1,370. If we trade up the Hot Rod's parts to match the Dell in hard drive speed and strip away the solid state drive, it costs $1,179. An iBuyPower PC from Newegg that is slightly beefier, with a larger power supply and slightly better video card is $1,330, though it has a smaller hard drive. Tuning the Hot Rod to match the iBuyPower's oversized power supply and shrunken hard drive brings it to $1,230.

The price difference is still slight, to the point that how much you value your time is a major factor in deciding whether building would actually save you any money. But what is often overlooked in retail PCs is the quality and upgradeability of parts. Dell, iBuyPower and others are not upfront about what kind of motherboard, RAM, or hard drive they use, and these components can be of lesser quality than what you can buy yourself.

Even worse, they are often chosen with cost, not future upgradability, in mind. For instance, a retail PC with 8GB of RAM likely has 4 sticks of 2GB DIMMs filling all the available slots. If you want to upgrade, you're going to end up having to throw away RAM you've paid for.

Now let's look at a manufacturer that uses name brand parts, gives you a high degree of customization, and has a little respect for the customer (that is, will set your RAM up to use only two of four available slots). At Falcon Northwest, you can configure one of their Talon models to almost the exact specifications of the Hot Rod—same version of the Intel Core i5, same RAM configuration with a slightly faster bus speed, a "deluxe" version of the same motherboard, better hard drive, larger power supply, and the alternative video card recommended in the Hot Rod build, a GeForce GTX 560 Ti. If we tweak the Hot Rod to match the Talon on all those counts, without monitor, speakers, and SSD, the imitator comes to $1,341. The actual Talon, fresh from Falcon Northwest's hands, using all the same name brand parts? $2,068.

As someone who hasn't built a computer before, you may not have previously cared what kind of parts are going into your PC, how upgradeable they are, or how new they are to the market. If you want to build your own computer, caring (or wanting to care) about these things are what will make it a valuable experience and skill to master. If you want to be able to make those distinctions, choose your parts and upgrades for yourself, and be more familiar with what's going inside your computer, building a computer is for you.

Ask Ars Computer Building Series, Episode One, Part One: The justifications and safety measures involved in putting together a computer.

Even if you don’t build yourself, knowing how to put in, say, another hard disk, more memory, or a faster graphics card is still useful, if your computer can take them: these upgrades can give an older machine a new lease on life, and the upgrade process is much the same as the build process.

PC building was once a fiddly, time-consuming chore, but these days, with screwless systems and highly integrated motherboards, it’s a much simpler proposition. With parts already chosen, and having only poked around a bit in pre-built computers before, my end-to-end time investment was on the order of nine hours. Physically putting the computer together consumed about five of those hours, and that includes maneuvering of filming equipment for video documentation (which is above and scattered through this article). You'd be hard-pressed to find a more fulfilling weekend project.

Even better, unlike the last time Ars undertook a how-to-build-a-PC guide, there are some good resources on the Internet. There are forums (like our own CPU & Motherboard Technologia) with helpful users that can answer your questions, and all your computer parts will come with instructions and diagrams that are, for the most part, very clear and agree with one another. Moments of Engrish-fueled confusion will generally be at a minimum; at worst, there will be an occasional sense of doubt. Let's put it this way: if you can assemble trendy Swedish flat-pack furniture, you can build a PC.

If you're looking for a system specification, Ars' own System Guides are a great place to start. Here, we are putting together a modified version of our own Hot Rod, with a GeForce GTX 560 video card and a larger solid-state drive swapped in.