Welcome to this video which will serve as a tour of the PCPartPicker website. You can get to PCPartPicker by visiting pcppartpicker.com. While this is not a required tool to use for this module activity, it is very helpful and there's no cost to using the tool for our conceptual computer system built here. It's my tool of choice as we build our computer system here. I'll briefly walk you through how to use PCPartPicker. We'll talk about some of the search options that are available to us and a little bit of how I would go about selecting various components to build out a conceptual computer system here. One thing to note as you go through and build out a system here, you will get real-time pricing and options to purchase your computer components through the website. There's no expectation to actually execute these purchases while simply using this tool to build a conceptual computer system that we know all of the components would function together and be compatible with each other. For the purpose of this assignment, there's really no spending limit or minimum spending amount that you need to meet. You just need to ensure that you've selected all of the required components and that those components are compatible. Often the dollar amount tied to a specific computer system is highly dependent on the needs or the requirements of that computer system. For example, if we were building a Gaming PC, there's a requirement to have a significant graphics processing unit or GPU in that system. That's going to be very expensive and something that is usually not needed for a home PC, and so the spending amount will be significantly different. So we're really just looking at what's required in this build, why are those things required and are those components compatible with each other. The way we'll use this website is when we browse to pcpartpicker.com in our favorite browser. Then we'll click on the menu option here for system builder. You can see on this page we get a unique link that will allow people to see our particular build that we've created. You can see here in this example, I've already built one, but I can start a new one on the right-hand side here. I'll click Start New so we get a fresh page. This is how it will look if you've never used the tool before. As we scroll down, you can see each of the components that are discussed throughout the module, and we can select here the CPU, the cooler that we want for the CPU, the motherboard, memory, etc. We can go down, select all the components of our computer system. Rather than use one of the four scenarios that are available to you for this assignment or this activity, I'll provide a different similar example. Let's pretend that I'm a graphic designer and I need to build a new Windows-based computer to run one of the most popular tools in graphic design, and that is Adobe Creative Cloud. As a graphic designer, knowing my industry, I know that I need tools like Photoshop, After Effects and Premiere Pro, so I need to know what are the system requirements before I start building this computer system out. I'll open a new tab in my browser, and let me search system requirements, Adobe Creative Cloud. You remember that many of the components are going to be selected based on requirements that I have of the system. What software do I need to drive it, how much intensive resources will be needed to perform the tasks that I'm looking to perform with this machine? You can see here, I have a system requirements page from Adobe, so let me visit that page. These are going to be specific requirements for each of the applications here. We'll find Photoshop, I'll open that up in a new tab, and then I also mentioned Premiere Pro and I mentioned After Effects, so let me open all three of those. I would look here, what are the minimum requirements. I'm going to use Windows as the operating system, so I need to look in this section, the processor, I'm looking at Intel or AMD processor was 64-bit support, two gigahertz or faster. That's for Photoshop. For Premier Pro, similar but a little bit less stringent on my processor. After Effects just says it's even more generic and multi-core Intel processor, so this one does not mention AMD. That tells me I need to focus in on Intel-based processors. If I go back to PCPartPicker and I click on choose a CPU, now on this page, notice there's a checkbox here for compatibility filter. We always want to make sure that's turned on because it will ensure that our components are compatible with each other and it won't allow us to select something that's not going to work. Down the left-hand side, we get lots of filters. I know based on those requirements, I just saw that I have to have an Intel processor. Let me change that filter, now I only get Intel processors back. I know that Photoshop said it has to be two gigahertz or faster. Here's our core clock speed. Let me increase this to a minimum of two. There we go. I can start to really drive down into what I'm looking for and not have to look at so many options. I also know that I need a multi-core processor, so one won't work. Had a minimum of two I believe, I'm going to go minimum of eight just to give me plenty of room processing power. You can see there are still lots and lots of options to choose from in the results set here. One of the determining factors is going to be that price, so you have to keep that in mind. Obviously, I may not want to spend $7,000 on a processor, but around $300 or $400 is pretty standard these days for that processor. I may be looking at an Intel core i9-9900K here, which is 3.6 gigahertz in the clock speed, with a boost to five gigahertz, and the power consumption is 95 watts, so that's pretty good. It also has some integrated graphics which will bolster with a GPU, so I'll just hit the Add button here, and that adds my CPU to my computer built. That's essentially how the website works. In the next video, I'll finish building this out to show you a completed example.
