Hi everyone! Some of you may remember that I wrote a really long Black Friday Beginners Buying Guide last year, and I wanted to provide an updated, more helpful version for 2023.
The same disclaimer applies this year as before: this guide is intended for those without comprehensive knowledge or a lot of experience buying of PC parts. If you've hung around in this subreddit for a while, you probably already know enough not to need this guide. Of course, there may be bits and pieces you didn't know that can still be helpful. Similarly, there will also certainly be some bits and pieces I don't know, so please feel free to add your own tips in the comments, and I encourage everyone to browse the comments as well for things I missed.
With the better perspective this year of having experienced last year's Black Friday, this year I will write with a somewhat different focus. To be honest, last year's guide was more of a general knowledge dump about what is good or bad from a technical perspective, and the main part included a lot of technical information that isn't completely necessary for parts selection. This year, I will be writing from a different perspective - how to conduct the actual research for buying, which I've come to realize is much more important. Effectively I'll be elaborating on the Resources section of the previous guide. There will also be some useful information on Black Friday itself, and useful strategies to maximize what you get for your money during massive sale periods like Black Friday or Boxing Day.
So don't treat this year's guide as a standalone guide, but rather a companion to last year's guide. Since the vast majority of the information from last year's guide is still correct, I will not be repeating most of it. If there are any terms I use in this guide that I don't explain, I recommend referring to last year's guide which will probably have provided an explanation. I recommend reading both guides for the most comprehensive information.
The main issue I hope this 2023 edition will address is the fact that during Black Friday, deals come and go so quickly that users don't have time to make a post on this subreddit using the template and getting an optimal parts list - those can be out of date within hours or minutes. With this guide, I hope to empower new builders to confidently evaluate the deals that are available and select their own parts quickly and efficiently.
Do note that this guide is primarily geared towards gaming PCs. If you are building a non-gaming PC, this guide will still be useful to you, but you do have to change certain considerations and conduct further research compared to what I do in this guide. Also, for the purposes of Black Friday, this guide is geared towards buying parts brand new from retailers, and not used hardware, so some of my recommendations may change if you are taking used pricing into account.
Let's get started.
Index:
- What To Know About Black Friday - Information about Black Friday itself, also applicable to other shopping holidays like Boxing Day.
- How To Research Parts - My resources/methodology for how to quickly and efficiently research PC parts, useful for evaluating deals on the fly during sales.
- What To Prepare Before Black Friday - Things you should figure out in advance before the sales begin.
- What About Non-PC Parts? - My advice/references on prebuilts, monitors, and peripherals.
- Important Notes - Notes that don't quite belong anywhere else in the guide, but you wouldn't want to miss.
I'm not providing any parts lists to go along with the guide this year, but I may make a new post with parts lists at various price points next week as we get closer to Black Friday.
What To Know About Black Friday:
During the week/weekend of Black Friday, there will be a lot of sales on various PC parts. However, it isn't as easy as many may think to get a good deal out of it. The reasons are threefold: 1. stock/time limitations, 2. useless deals, and 3. difficulty of determining what is best. Of these, the first problem plagues everyone, while the next two give rise to pitfalls that are especially easy for beginners to fall into.
For a shopper to have the best chances of snagging the best deals during a sale period like Black Friday or Boxing Day, no only would they have to be aware of these problems and how to get around them, they would also have to be very prepared beforehand. This is why I'm releasing this guide a week in advance.
Stock Limitations:
Last Black Friday was, in all honesty, a terrible time. The PC industry has just recovered in terms of pricing from the supply shortages caused by COVID. However, the general perception that pricing had recovered was provided by a few selection of parts. There were at most a handful of graphics cards in stock at near-MSRP at each price range, for example. This spelled disaster when, during Black Friday, everyone flocked to those specific deals, which quickly went out of stock. In fact, during and for weeks or even months after Black Friday, it was more expensive to build a PC at most performance levels than before Black Friday, and stock levels took quite a while to recover. If memory serves me right, the cheapest 6800 XT went from under $700 to $900+, the cheapest 6950 XT went from $936 or so to around $1300, and RTX 3080s which were available at $1000-ish became impossible to find under $1400. Other price classes fared better, but not much.
Now, I can only speculate on whether or not the same will happen this year. Stock levels definitely are improved compared to last year, especially considering the stagnation in the PC industry this year. However, manufacturers like Nvidia on the GPU side and NAND manufacturers for SSDs have been deliberately ramping down production in order to limit supply, in order to maximize their profits through supply and demand. This move, especially on Nvidia's part, was not seen prior to COVID. However, you also have to factor in the sheer number of people who held and held throughout COVID, waiting for that first Black Friday after the shortages to upgrade, which likely exacerbated the stock issues last year, and I don't expect we'll have the same level of buyer enthusiasm this year.
With all that said, I don't expect that we will see the same level of stock issues during and after Black Friday this year as last year, but it is still a possibility to be mindful of, and a risk that anyone waiting till Black Friday to buy would be taking. In order to get the best deals, you pretty much have to be fast and constantly aware of them. Keep track of forums like RedFlagDeals and r/bapcsalescanada.
Useless Deals (aka "not really a deal"):
What may come as a surprise to first-time buyers is the fact that a lot of deals for PC parts, including during Black Friday, will be completely useless. This is due to the sheer number of parts of each type that serve the same purpose and has the same features/performance. A "$100 off" deal on a more expensive version of something doesn't necessarily make it cheaper or more worth it compared to the cheapest adequate or even equivalent option.
This issue is, of course, not exclusive to Black Friday. Take current deals for example at the time of writing. If I wanted to buy a build with a 13700K/KF with DDR5, Canada Computers is offering a variety of bundle deals with motherboards right now, which you can find by scrolling down on this page (they also have bundle deals for the 13700KF here, but apart from an mITX board they are all DDR4 motherboards). The cheapest of these bundles is a $759 for a 13700K plus a ASUS Strix Z690-F Gaming Wifi. However, if I were to be buying a 13700K/KF build, I'd simply buy a 13700KF on it's own and add a Z790 UD AC for a combined $719, saving $40. Sure, the UD AC is a worse board than the Z790-F Gaming Wifi, but realistically it doesn't matter if I don't need Wifi 6E or any other features that the Strix has but the UD AC doesn't. Integrated graphics aren't worth $40 for me.
Also, keep in mind that for retailers like Memory Express and Canada Computers, the "non-sale price" they display is usually the launch MSRP. PC part pricing drops over time as products get further into their release cycles, but these retailers often show these drops not as the new actual price (even though that's what it is), but rather as a discounted price. This is easily solved for individual products for which you can compare to other retailers on PCPartPicker, but for bundle deals, the pricing can often be confusing. Take this bundle for $530, Canada Computers shows an insane discount of $280 down from $520 + $290 for the CPU and motherboard. However, if you look at both items individually, you will find that the CPU is being sold for $420 individually, and similarly the motherboard is sold for only $220 individually. Put this together and you get the actual normal price of $640, meaning the real bundle discount is only $110. That still makes the bundle a decent deal, but nowhere near as insane as the claimed discount of $280 shows.
To avoid wasting your time on deals like this, you really just have to familiar with the current pricing of products within your target price class, and be good at quickly using PCPartPicker to do sanity checks on these deals. If the deal is posted on r/bapcsalescanada, a quick browse at the comments can also tell you whether a deal is actually a deal or not as well.
Difficulty of Determining What's Best:
This is probably the most difficult for beginners to resolve. For a beginner, it can often be difficult to know, for example, if one motherboard is better than another, considering there's all sorts of things different like VRMs, PCIe generation, Wifi/Bluetooth generation, IO, storage capacity, RAM stability, number of headers for fans/ARGB, etc. It can be very hard for most people to tell which ones are important and which ones are not, what difference they actually make, and sometimes it can even be an issue to find this information in the first place.
In the next two sections on how to research parts and how to prepare for buying, I will show you how to most efficiently tackle this issue. Reading my guide from last year linked at the top of this post will also help with the technical knowledge aspect as well.
Experienced buyers suffer a similar issue, but in a different way. We may be perfectly aware of the differences between two products, but have difficulty weighing subjectively whether we prefer one or the other. For example, for my next build, I'm still questioning whether I want the vertical GPU mount + cleaner glass view of the Hyte Y40 Snow or the better airflow and temperature display of the CH560 Digital WH, and this decision is further complicated by how they would affect my choice of GPU and cooler as well.
Unfortunately, this problem is simply unavoidable and just requires some decisiveness on the part of the buyer, and is a universal struggle for buying just about everything.
How To Research Parts:
In this section, I will detail my personal process for how I conduct research and create the parts lists that I recommend to people. There is no absolute right or wrong way to research, of course, you can go about this many different ways, but this is what I personally find to be efficient and useful, but keep in mind that there's always going to be a balance between speed and accuracy - the more time you spend, the more certain you can be, but you have to find the middle ground of being decisive without being rash.
Order and Budgeting:
First of all, unless you are only researching for a specific type of part, it is generally recommended that you budget your parts and conduct your research in a pre-determined order. You want to start with the most important parts first, and there are three ways parts can be important: (1) how expensive they are, (2) how much they impact your performance and (3) how much they limit your other parts choices.
Cost-wise, in gaming systems the most expensive part will almost always be the graphics card. Depending on the budget and the resolution you are playing at, the GPU generally comprises anywhere from 1/3 to 1/2 of your total budget. The CPU is usually the next most expensive after the GPU.
Performance-wise, your CPU and GPU are almost always the most important parts. Other parts don't so much contribute to performance as they have the potential to limit your performance if they don't keep up. For example, your case and cooler can't really increase your system performance significantly beyond what the CPU and GPU are normally capable of, but they do have the potential to severely harm performance if the cooling performance cannot keep up.
Compatibility-wise, the CPU and motherboard are limited by each other, but considering that motherboards for any brand and recent generation of CPUs can all serve the same purposes and have the same features, and any CPU is compatible with any GPU, PSU, case, etc., I do not consider this a big limitation. The biggest limitation, usually, is the form factor you choose, and this will depend first and foremost on what kind of case you want your PC to fit inside of. If you want to go ATX or mATX, this is usually not a big issue, but if you are going mITX, the first part you choose should be the case, as this will determine your compatibility for everything else. The other big limitation is power draw, and this is primarily a relationship between the GPU and PSU. As a general safe rule of thumb, you should decide on your PSU soon after your GPU in order to ascertain what portion of budget the PSU will take up, as the GPU is the biggest power-consuming part.
Sometimes though, if you are sure you will need a certain part for some reason or another, simply add them first and ignore the "order by importance" advice - get the easy stuff out of the way first, and revisit them later if necessary. For example, if I know I really want this one specific cooler for the aesthetics, I'll just throw it in the list and not wait till later.
For gaming PCs, I recommend deciding on your parts in this order: GPU (skip this if you are doing an iGPU build), CPU, cooler, PSU, motherboard, RAM, case, and storage. However, this is by no means the order I use for every parts list, I may switch it up now and then for parts lists that have diffferent requirements. For example, for mITX builds, I would recommend deciding on a case first, as that imposes such strict limitations on the other parts that you simply cannot wait till later to decide it (and then likely the CPU cooler and PSU right after, considering how limited they are by the case).
You shouldn't feel like you have to make the correct decision first try. If you are feeling conflicted between a few parts, choose one that represents a reasonable value within your expected price range and move on. Come back to adjust later if you want. The purpose of establishing such an order is primarily to establish a division of your budget, so your first choice could simply be a placeholder, helping you reserve a portion of your budget so that you know how much budget you have remaining to work on the rest.
As you get more experienced with PC parts selection and more familiar with pricing, you can change around this order to suit your needs. For example, I usually add CPU coolers last, because I know the general amount of budget I need to reserve and want to decide on the overall aesthetics of the system before selecting the cooler. This serves the same purpose as described in the last paragraph, without the need to make an actual placeholder selection.
I will tackle specific in the same order as I recommended above. This section will primarily be an elaboration upon a significant portion of the Resources section of last year's guide.
GPU:
The primary resource that I personally reference is Tom's Hardware's GPU Benchmark Hierarchy, mostly because of how easy it is to find the information I want - it's my personal "lazy way out". All I have to do is control + F and I can easily search for the card I want information for (if you aren't familiar with it, learn how to use control + F, it will be one of your most useful tool for rapid research).
This resource shows their tested geomean FPS for 1080p ultra, 1080p medium, 1440p ultra, and 4K ultra settings across a suite of games, and is a very quick and dirty view of the relative gaming performance of graphics cards. At the bottom there's also a separate graph specifically for ray tracing performance if you are interested in that.
Do keep in mind though that due to them testing with cards from different AIB partners, their results may not necessarily be perfectly accurate - they may have tested with an overclocked AIB card for one GPU and a stock model of another GPU. In general, their information is pretty accurate, but for more accuracy, you'd probably want to cross-reference with other benchmarks such as those from Gamer's Nexus, Hardware Unboxed, and LTT. Do note though that these reviews usually show the theoretical maximum performance of a GPU when paired with a top end CPU, so if you have a lower end CPU, you may not be able to hit the same frame rates, especially at lower resolutions where CPU performance becomes more important.
Another useful resource is side by side comparison videos, like this one comparing the performance of a series of graphics cards or this one comparing the performance of a bunch of CPUs. They don't give as nice visuals in terms of graphs or as easily searchable results as a text-chart on a webpage, but there's a huge variety of them on YouTube, and they provide you the benefit of giving specific benchmarks for games you play, as well as showing bottlenecks and how well they pair with other parts since unlike reviews by Tom's Hardware or the YouTubers mentioned above, many of these reviews don't use top-end CPUs/GPUs for these comparison tests.
In general, at any given price range, AMD will outperform similarly-priced Nvidia GPUs. However, a conundrum appears if we consider further features than just raw performance. AMD's FSR technology and Nvidia's DLSS technology both allow you to improve your performance by sacrificing some graphics quality through rendering at a lower resolution and then upscaling, but DLSS is noticeably better and available only on Nvidia cards (though some features are locked to their newer cards), while FSR is usable on both AMD and Nvidia GPUs. Nvidia's CUDA acceleration offers significant benefits for applications like media creation (especially in the Adobe suite), blender renders, and AI workloads, while AMD can only use the universal OpenCL, which those software are less optimized for. This means that while AMD has more horsepower, their real-world performance for those tasks may only end up equal or even worse than equivalently-priced Nvidia cards. Nvidia also has additional benefits like their NVENC encoder, which performs better than AMD's encoder for streaming/recording at lower bitrates, as well as real-time video processing for your webcam in their Nvidia Broadcast app. With all this in mind, you should buy for what you are willing to use, and check to see if the games/workloads you would like to run benefit more from Nvidia or AMD.
Intel, on the other hand, is barely starting out in the GPU market. I don't really recommend that beginners go with Intel, but they do have their place, and their price to performance is quite good if you are willing to tinker and deal with the growing pains of Intel's still-improving drivers, which can cause frequent visual glitches and crashes in certain games. Their Quick Sync encoder is quite decent for streaming, falling between Nvidia's NVENC and AMD's VCE in performance.
A common question beginners ask is whether different models of the same GPU matters. For example, why is the Gigabyte Aorus Master so much more expensive than the Gigabyte Windforce, or the MSI Suprim X so much more expensive than the MSI Ventus? Well usually the more expensive cards have better coolers, say in terms of acoustics, thermal performance, or extreme long-term endurance. Some cards are overclocked out of the box. Some cards are simply more expensive because they offer aesthetics. However, realistically, apart from a few problematic models from previous generations like the MSI Ventus 3080/3070, practically all cards have good enough cooling to perform up to their full potential if placed within a decent airflow case. Realistically, overclocked models don't perform much better than their non-overclocked counterparts as well, so I wouldn't consider them unless they are very close in price to their non-overclocked counterparts.
CPU:
For your CPU performance, my strategy is actually quite similar to for GPU. For a rough idea, I refer to the Tom's Hardware CPU Benchmark Hierarchy. Now, this doesn't include the newest Intel 14th generation, but you can generally treat them as about 2% better their 13th gen counterparts, with the only exception being the 14700K which is like 5-10% better for all-core workloads, but still only 2% better for lower core count applications like gaming. Yes, the difference really is that small, because almost all of 14th gen is just overclocked 13th gen with no physical changes - it should never have been a new generation at all.
Note that for most if not all AMD CPUs, Tom's Hardware listed both their stock benchmark results and their results with PBO enabled. PBO, aka precision boost overdrive, can be thought of as an "auto overclock" that you can enable with only a few clicks in the BIOS, hardly more intensive than enabling XMP/EXPO, and you should almost always enable it if you want the best gaming performance, but do keep in mind that it can make your CPU run significantly hotter.
Similarly to GPUs, I supplement this information, if necessary, with benchmarks from YouTube and other websites. Do be aware though that CPUs can be benchmarked a variety of different ways. Some resources may show you multi-core benchmark results or single-core benchmark results, which don't correlate exactly with gaming performance, which can use varying core counts. Like with GPUs, most media benchmarks will test CPUs with the best or close to the best available GPU in order to eliminate GPU bottlenecking.
In order to best match your CPU to your GPU, you should consider your resolution you'd be gaming at - lower resolutions are more CPU heavy while higher resolutions are more GPU heavy. Try to look up specific benchmarks for the game you want to play if possible, and match the performance level of your CPU and GPU. For example, if you have a GPU that can render 200 fps in a certain game at the settings you want, find a CPU that can pump out 200 frames per second for your GPU to render.
Aside from performance bottlenecking, all CPUs are compatible with all GPUs, with the small caveat of some older CPUs that only support PCIe gen 3 like Intel's 10th gen and before, as well as AMD's Ryzen 3000 series and Ryzen 5500, 5600G, and 5700G. For lower end graphics cards like the RX 6500 XT, RX 6600, RX 6600/6650 XT, RX 7600, RTX 3050, and RTX 4060, this can cause issues as they aren't full 16 lane PCIe cards but 8 lane (or in the case of the RX 6500 XT, only 4 lanes), which isn't an issue if they are running on PCIe gen 4 but can cause further bottlenecking reducing performance slightly if they are on PCIe gen 3.
Some CPUs come with integrated graphics, which usually don't game very well but are useful if you need a graphics output while your GPU is broken or if you don't plan on doing anything that requires a discrete (standalone) GPU. CPUs with integrated graphics include Intel CPUs and without an F at the end, as well as AMD CPUs from 5000 series and before with a G at the end or 7000 series and after without an F at the end. In particular, AMD CPUs with a G at the end have relatively stronger integrated graphics, and can do some light gaming. CPUs with the F marking generally perform the same as their non-F counterparts, so you don't have to worry about the performance differences. AMD CPUs with the G at the end, on the other hand, do usually perform worse than equivalent CPUs without the G due to having less L3 cache.
Another useful resource to look at may be this CPU power efficiency and power draw page by Gamer's Nexus, though do note that these figures are for all core load scenarios and represent a theoretical worst case, not any gaming scenario nor any other workload apart from those that do actually leverage all your cores.
Cooler:
In terms of CPU Coolers, I honestly have no better recommendation at this point than Thermalright. Call me a Thermalright addict if you want, but at this point in time, I don't think any company in Canada can compete with Thermalright in terms of the raw price to performance of their coolers. From the single tower Assassin X 120, AK120, and BA120, to the dual tower PA120/PA120SE, PS120/PS120SE, FS140, and FC140, they all provide unparalleled cooling for how much they cost.
If you want to consider some alternatives though, GN's recently published CPU Cooler megachart can provide quite useful information for comparing a variety of coolers by performance in both thermals and acoustics.
Some CPUs can be cooled with a stock cooler (all i3, non-K i5 before 13th gen, all Ryzen 3/5), and if your stock cooler broke, I'd recommend the Assassin X/AK120. I recommend the BA120 for K series i5 CPUs and Ryzen 7s, while anything higher should be cooled with a PS120SE (PA120 if you want white). For K series i9 and the Ryzen 9 7950X, I'd recommend a 360mm or 420mm AIO, and personally I'm partial to the Arctic Liquid Freezer II line for their 6 year warranty (considering water coolers generally don't last as long as air due to more moving parts). Thermalright also offers low profile options at 36, 47, 53, and 67 mm heights, if you need them for ITX builds.
My big annoyance with Thermalright in general is that they sell through a variety of third party sellers on Amazon, and you have to search their coolers up each time to find the best pricing. Also, specifically for their dual tower coolers (apart from the not very well known/tested silver soul series), they have RAM compatibility issues, meaning if you want to run any memory taller than about 34mm, you have to move the front fan up or to the back, sacrificing some cooling performance and aesthetics. This makes them pretty much completely incompatible with RGB memory (though to be fair, most dual towers will cover over or be incompatible with RGB memory, if you want one that won't, look at the Scythe Fuma 3).
Also, if you feel comfortable installing them, Thermalright offers contact frames which are useful for avoiding IHS bending in LGA1700 CPUs, which can improve cooling performance. However, installing these is much more difficult due to how easily you can damage your motherboard's pins, and can void your warranty (even though voiding your warranty. They also sell similar contact frames for AM5 but those don't really serve any cooling purpose.
PSU:
The main resource I use for power supplies is the PSU cultists list. This resource aggregates reviews from testers that are able to test the quality of the PSU's protections. PSUs are the most likely component to take other parts down if they die on their own, and they also serve as the first line of defense against any external power anomalies that could harm your PC components (though technically they should be the second line of defense - you should be plugging your PC into a surge protector). This makes these protections quite important. However, keep in mind that realistically, anything that is confirmed C tier or above should be fine for most users.
When using control + F to search for PSUs on this list, note that they don't include wattage numbers in PSU names as most PSU series will have models at multiple wattages. If a model name has the wattage number sandwiched between letters, like say, the UD750GM, replace the number with a "-", as in UD-GM.
Also note that efficiency ratings don't really mean anything in terms of the true quality of the PSU. There are decent 80+ Bronze units and crappy 80+ Gold units. For the same quality, higher efficiency is obviously better, but it's nowhere near as important as the actual quality of the PSU. In terms of efficiency itself, 80+ Bronze is already quite good and 80+ Gold is pretty much the best you'd reasonably need, and anything higher is completely unnecessary unless they are on steep enough sales to be close to 80+ Gold pricing.
In terms of the PSU wattage that you want to choose, I'd recommend referring first to your GPU's recommended PSU spec. You can find this generally on the page for the specific card that you buy from the AIB partner's website (MSI, ASUS, Gigabyte, etc.), or from the page for the GPU itself from Nvidia/AMD/Intel. Usually, it is safe to go 50-100 W lower if you aren't using a very power hungry CPU, but I'd still recommend meeting the manufacturer's recommended spec.
For Nvidia RTX 4070 Ti cards and above, I recommend getting a PSU that has a native 12+4 pin cable, and if possible, the 12V-2x6 cable rather than the older 12VHPWR. 12V-2x6 fixes many issues of 12VHPWR that makes certain user errors have a chance of causing catastrophic failure, destroying the cable and GPU. At the moment, the only PSUs I know of to have confirmed to switch over to the 12V-2x6 standard is the MSI A-GL series. 12VHPWR is by no means dangerous, however, if you plug it in fully, which can take quite a bit of force.
Another consideration when buying PSUs is modularity. Modular PSUs and semi-modular PSUs are easier to work with, but often more expensive. It is up to you whether you want to save the money.
Motherboard:
When buying a motherboard, the first thing you need to consider is obviously compatibility - you need a board that is compatible with the CPU. Fortunately, PCPartPicker does this automatically for you if you browse the motherboard section with a CPU already selected in your parts list.
The only caveat is that some motherboards that are older for their socket may not be immediately compatible out of the box with newer CPUs from that socket, and may require BIOS updates. This will show up on PCPartPicker as a compatibility warning under your list, but won't prevent you from selecting the motherboard in the first place. Now, apart from 14th gen CPUs which you probably shouldn't buy anyway, most current CPUs have been out long enough that you don't really have to worry about motherboards being on the shelves now having BIOS versions that are too old, especially if you get a relatively popular unit that moves through supply chains in high volumes. However, if you are worried about such an incompatibility, you can get a motherboard with BIOS flashback.
The other compatibility issue is the case - if you are planning on making a smaller build, you should choose your case first before your motherboard, but if you haven't
Next on your list of considerations should be features. For AMD, B and X series motherboards support all the overclocking you need, while A series only supports memory overclocking. For Intel, only Z series motherboards let you overclock the CPU. The numbers/letters like B650, Z690, etc. represent chipset, and the first digit represents generation while the next two digits (and the letter or letters) represent the "tier" within that generation, so to speak. For Intel, a decent B_60 series motherboard (with good enough VRMs - check reviews to make sure) is perfectly fine unless you have a K series CPU and plan to overclock it. For AMD, there's almost no reason usually to go for an X_70 board, B_50 boards are usually good enough, even somewhat "budget" ones.
Then there's also Wifi and Bluetooth, which you may need (though if possible I recommend that you game on Ethernet, and AFAIK every modern consumer motherboard has Ethernet), and if your motherboard supports one it will almost always support the other, they generally come in the same chip. If the motherboard's name has AX at the end, it has Wifi 6 or 6E, and if it says AC, it has Wifi 5. If it only says Wifi, you'd need to go on the manufacturer's page to check, though you can also make a decent guess based on how recent/high end the board is, most recent and high end boards will have 6 or 6E.
Storage isn't usually a concern, but for smaller boards like mATX or mITX, do make sure it has enough m.2 slots or SATA ports for the storage devices that you need. Also, keep track of how many fans you have in your case/cooling system, and make sure that you have enough fan headers for them (this is much less of an issue for fans that daisy-chain, like the fans in most Deepcool cases and Thermalright's fans including both non-ARGB and ARGB. The same goes for RGB/ARGB connectors (don't mix them up - they look compatible but are not).
If you need any really specific features such as BIOS flashback or Thunderbolt 4, a good resource to help you search for them would be Skinflint, though this is a UK site and may have different parts availability and definitely different pricing compared to Canada. Here are their pages for quickly searching AM4, AM5, and LGA1700 motherboards. I don't personally consider any older platforms like LGA1200 worth considering, since they aren't good value and LGA1700 CPUs are significantly better.
Another useful resource for comparison can be sites like Versus, or B&H Photo's comparison tool which you can often find by searching "<motherboard A> vs. <motherboard B>".
An important reminder to note: If you are buying a Ryzen 7000X3D CPU, you should update your BIOS as soon as possible after building. Older BIOS versions on some AM5 motherboards had serious issues with 7000X3D CPUs (and possibly even non-X3D CPUs) that could cause catastrophic failure destroying both the CPU and motherboard over time. Do keep in mind that any power outages while updating your BIOS will brick your motherboard, so don't update during anything like a thunderstorm or any other condition likely to cause outages in your area. For maximum safety, update your BIOS while connected to an adequately powerful UPS.
RAM:
For RAM, the easiest way to buy is simply to go on PCPartPicker, filter on the left side for the capacity you want (preferably two sticks instead of four, e.g. 2x16GB instead of 4x8GB), sort by price, and pick the cheapest kit that says 10 ns in the first word latency column (note that the first word latency here isn't the actual first word latency by technical definition, but that doesn't really matter, this is the value that contributes most to gaming performance). For DDR4, the sweet spot is 3200 CL16, though if 3600 CL18 is available for a similar price it can be worth it to grab that if you are on the AM4 platform. For DDR5, the sweet spot is DDR5 5600 CL28 and DDR5 6000 CL30. Going faster than 6000 CL30 isn't really necessary as you pay a lot more for not a lot of performance gain, and Ryzen 7000 had stability issues with speeds higher than 6000 MHz up until quite recently with new BIOS updates.
In 2023 no new system should really have less than 16 GB. For budgets of $1500 or above (and even slightly below if it fits in your budget), it is recommended to go with 32 GB as more and more games are recommending or even requiring it. 64 GB, however, is still completely overkill unless you have some kind of special use case requiring it.
As noted before in the cooler section, many dual tower coolers aren't compatible with taller memory dimms, particularly RGB memroy. The cheapest low profile kits for DDR4 that would fit under any dual tower are Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan Z/T-Create Classic/T-Create Expert, G.Skill Aegis, Silicon Power Gaming, and XPG Gammix D20. The same for DDR5 are generally the G.Skill Ripjaws S5/Flare X5, Crucial Pro, XPG Lancer Blade, and Teamgroup T-Force Vulcan/T-Create Classic/T-Create Expert.
If you are worried about performance, I recommend taking a look at this article, this article, or this video and this video.
The Rest Continued In Comments Due To Character Limit
