Data sources and assumptions

Specifications

Product specifications are transcribed from public manufacturer product pages and stored in structured fields that are validated against a schema per category. Every product carries a verification status. At the moment all catalog entries are marked unverified: they have not been re-checked against a datasheet by a human. If a value matters for your purchase, confirm it on the manufacturer's site. Confidence scores are editorial.

Prices

All prices shown are illustrative examples in euro for the Netherlands and are flagged as such in the database (isSample = true). They are not live retailer prices and may differ from what shops charge today. The data model supports retailers, countries, currencies and dated price observations so that verified feeds can be added without changing the application.

Benchmarks

Gaming frame rates, relative performance indices and LLM tokens-per-second figures are imported from public review pages and community benchmark tables. Each record stores its source and URL, the settings used and the test context where the source stated it. BuildYourSystem has not re-measured any of them. Figures from different sources use different test systems and presets and are not directly comparable. Where no measurement exists for a combination, the interface says so rather than showing an estimate.

Compatibility checks

A deterministic rules engine evaluates socket and generation support, memory type, slot count, capacity and speed, cooler socket, height, radiator fit and rated capacity, graphics card length, PCIe generation and power connectors, PSU wattage, connectors, form factor and length, motherboard form factor, M.2 and SATA slots, drive bays and fan mounts. Every check returns compatible, warning, incompatible or unknown. Unknown means the catalog lacks the data to decide; it is never treated as a pass.

Power estimate

Typical load is the sustained gaming or inference draw; peak adds the CPU turbo power limit to full GPU board power. The recommended PSU wattage is peak plus 30 percent, rounded up to 50 W, with a 450 W floor.

Model memory calculator

Weight memory is parameters times bytes per weight for the chosen quantization (including scale overhead for GGUF formats). KV cache is 2 x layers x KV heads x head dimension x bytes x context tokens x concurrent sequences. Runtime overhead depends on the engine and model size, and a display reserve is subtracted from VRAM. The bandwidth-bound tokens-per-second figure is a theoretical ceiling, not a measurement.

Performance tiers

CPUs and GPUs carry an editorial tier from 1 to 10 used for sorting and the guided recommender. It is a rough ordering, not a benchmark, and is labelled wherever it appears.

Assembly guide

Generic instructions apply to any build. Model-specific notes are generated from catalog fields such as socket, form factor and connector counts. Header locations and pinouts are never generated; the guide points to the manufacturer manual instead.