Hello, and now a question to start!

To whoever is reading this, I hope you are doing safe during these unprecedented times.

I have always been an admirer of PC's, especially small form factor pcs. I've been wanting to build my own PC for almost 7 years at this point and I feel like now is the perfect time. To people's shock, I am studying computer science but I don't have my own gaming desktop, and I miss gaming. Now that my short introduction is over, I have a question. Where do I start? I know what case I want, but don't know how to navigate to make my PC look like what I dream for it to be. If this question is not the most general question, I don't think I did my job correct then.

 

[rfarmer]

Having a case is a good place to start because it tells you a lot about what you can do with your build. You now know the limits on things like the CPU cooler, PSU size limits, GPU size limits (important) and number and location of internal drives. Next thing to ask is what is your computers use? Mainly gaming, only gaming, any type of workload? If gaming at what resolution? Once you decide on those you can start to pick parts with the CPU, GPU and motherboard. Knowing what those will be tells you which PSU to choose. Search SFF, search Reddit, search PC Partpicker and search Google for builds in the case you choose and decide what type of setup you want.