> They don't tell you that closing the CPU guard feels like you're breaking hundreds of dollars worth of equipment 100 percent of the time.
I had a brief summer job as a 17 year old, assembling computers. Even after over 100, I still had that feeling of imminent destruction of expensive electronics.
When I built my PC, I learned about this beforehand, so when I heard the "crunch" I wasn't worried. Until the thing wouldn't boot.
I took the CPU out, and sure enough, I'd bent a few of the pins in one corner. Fuck. I then spent the next couple of hours with a tiny magnifying glass and tweezers, painstakingly trying to bend the pins to where it would boot again. 20 min of bending, stick the CPU back in, try to boot... nothing. Several times.
Finally it booted, miraculously. I'm never taking that CPU out again.
After a decade doing embedded development for bleeding-edge SoCs and working with devkits with sockets for interchangeable chips... I was kinda shocked when I once again built a gaming PC two years ago...
These are antiquated connectors!
Then again, I hear the sockets we use for the BGA chips I work with cost in the thousands of dollars (because custom-desiged), so I can kind of understand that the razor-thin margins the custom PC industry works with stays with cheap old connectors.
>Then again, I hear the sockets we use for the BGA chips I work with cost in the thousands of dollars (because custom-desiged), so I can kind of understand that the razor-thin margins the custom PC industry works with stays with cheap old connectors.
BGA means 'ball-grid array' - meaning it's an array of solder balls, meaning that ouside of testing, it will be soldered to the board... no socket required.
Your sockets for testing are super expensive because they are taking a chip that was never meant to be socketed... and socketing it, which is pretty useful when you are testing the things.
Really? the last opteron I saw with a zif pga socket was an opteron 940, which was obsolete a decade ago. I haven't worked with the gaming amd sockets, but I bought a tonne of 2000 series opterons, socket F is LGA, and a few c32 and G34 opterons, all LGA.
You can still fuck up the connector on the motherboard, and consequently, the CPU. I'm speaking from experience: I had to replace a motherboard and a CPU. I still have the useless i7-870 as a sort of trophy of my ignorance of those pin-less CPUs (it was my first). Edit: actually, I remember now that the initial motherboard had a manufacturing problem on its socket, but as that was my first, I didn't know, and that led me to try and fail blatantly, killing both the motherboard and the CPU ; I only realized when seeing the new motherboard with a non-busted socket.
This has been my method for a while, but the last 2 PC's I've build have had fan/power connectors in places that I simply can't get my hand too once the board is installed, leading to me either pulling out case fans, or even CPU coolers, just to connect a 4 pin CPU power lead.
Double check your hand will fit in the thing first!
Use a credit card!
I helped a friend build a PC, but when the parts came in he eagerly attempted to put the CPU in the mobo and then proceeded to crush 1/3 of the pins.
We used tweezers to "unmash" the pins, and a credit card to fully align them.
Worked like a charm.
I had to use a credit card to fix one of these builds... :-)
Actually, your credit-card suggestion is useful. My last bent-pin disater was fortunately a mostly-obsolete PGA Pentium 4 CPU, tweezers and careful, repeated re-insertions into the socket sorted it out. Given that the CPU could be had for about $5, it wasn't worth the effort, but I was trying to help a friend and I felt stupid for dropping the CPU.
Oh God you've brought back some memories from when I assembled my PC.
I also bent a pin. Now, the pins in my case were on the motherboard (my understanding is that this used to be reversed, and they used to be on the CPU. Frankly, I am quite happy that they're on the mobo, since that's the cheaper part) and IIRC they don't point straight up (they're slanted, and just kinda graze these contact points on the bottom of the CPU).
It turns out that, for my particular motherboard, ASRock's manual's instructions and images describe a different piece of hardware than the one I actually had. Same model number though, IIRC. As best I can tell, at some point, there was some sort of hardware change, but like so much tech, the docs were never updated. It was only after scrutinizing the manual very closely that I discovered the error, but it was already too late and the damage was done.
I contacted ASRock about it, sent them images detailing the differences and obviously laying out the problem. The representative essentially just sent me the same bad instructions back. Finally caved and had it repaired, which they did not cover under warranty (which I consider a violation of the warranty). (I also finally figured out the correct procedure, which I had to figure out in order to send the motherboard back to them for repairs, as they claimed they would refuse it if I shipped it with the pins exposed, which is extremely frustrating when they also can't tell you how to actually accomplish that.)
The next motherboard I buy will not be from them.
Finally got it all back, and now, equipped with the knowledge of how not to screw it up, got it all assembled. Still didn't boot. Got a friend with a working machine to swap parts with until we could isolate the failure; turned out to be our first guess, the PSU. But it was somewhat surprising at the time, as we thought the PSU was good. You can short two of the leads on the main plug from a PSU with a paper clip, and that is essentially the signal to "turn on" and start supplying power. We did this, and it would start right up, but it never started when hooked up to the motherboard itself. Beyond that, IDK. (and since you have to short the two contacts w/ a paper clip, the plug isn't attached to the mobo at that time, so you only really power things like the DVD drive, the fans, and the HDD, which mostly then go into loops b/c they can't find the motherboard.)
Finally, it booted. I'm never taking that CPU out again, either.
Pssssh... you don't know fear until you've tried to put a spring clip cooler on an Athlon XP or Pentium III without rocking it. Even after they added those foam circles to the corners it didn't add much comfort.
Nothing makes you sicker than the sound of a corner of your CPU die crunching.
We had one of the sockets on one of those fail. Never figured a real reason for it, just one day all the sudden with the computer on there was a big snap, the cooler fell off and the CPU cooked itself. Was well outside any kind of warranty but it was certainly a unique failure.
At the beige box retailer I worked for, about a decade ago, we got a couple of the local high school's computers in for repairs. They told us the systems just wouldn't boot, and they "smelled funny."
Took the case off, and behold! The Intel fan had seized, melted, and caught fire. It wasn't a particularly old system so I'm not sure how the thermal protection didn't kick in, but that had happened on two near-identical systems. No saving those boards.
For a couple of years, 2007-2009, I kept encountering budget-build AMD boxes with cooked thermal compund. The first time a client brought in a comouter with the heatsink rolling around loose on the bottom of the case, I thought it was rough treatment, customer error. But then two more, Dell instead of eMachines or Compaq... weird.
That's not surprising. Towards the end of the Mhz Wars the heatsinks had become pretty ungainly but they were still using the flimsy spring clip instead of the more modern 4 post or gantry type systems used today (sorry I'm sure they have proper names but damned if I know what they are).
I had a solid copper heatsink that was easily 5lbs for my Athlon XP system. I held onto it for the longest time after I got rid of the system because I knew the metal was easily worth $20.
Oh, great memories. Those were absolutely terrifying, but luckily I never broke one and only had one instance of a friend breaking one. The absolute worst was when I (being a more experienced PC builder) was helping a friend with his first build, and the friend insists that I install the cooler.
I destroyed my 600MHz Pentium III while fiddling with the cooler. A corner of the chip broke off.
I used the same motherboard and bought an adapter which allowed an upgrade to a 1,3GHz PIII Tualatin. It had a proper headspreader so the installation was a breeze in comparison.
The horror ensued on my next upgrade to an AMD Athlon XP 2800+ which again had the die exposed, but thankfully I never managed to destroy it.
Heh. I've built a bunch of systems over the years (including updating and moving motherboards around), and I'm always nervous when I power it up the first time.
Especially my latest, when I updated my main rig to a Ryzen 7/32 GB ECC/250 GB NVMe setup. About $1000 worth of new hardware, and the POST delay nearly gave me a heart attack. I shouldn't have worried, though, it worked on the first boot. wipes sweat from brow
CPU cooler installation always seems to be the worst part of it, and there just doesn't seem to be a way around that, since lots of force is needed to squash the cooler down and insure good contact. Still, I like the screw-down setup on the Ryzen far better than the older spring-clip designs, or the spring-loaded pegs on Intel coolers.
I just put a threadripper build together and was surprised with an extremely difficult and finicky foxconn socket.
Takes a while for my monitor to wake up and was sure I had killed it on first boot with the stream of cryptic messages from the motherboard, but it was fine.
"Tinting" the cleaned surface of the CPU with thermal compund, mostly removed with a credit card or thin plastic scraper... and then applying the pea...
Could it be that there is some merit to the "thin layer all over" message? But yes, easy to mis-communicate. I had not considered the problem of bubbles.
I think those damn intel fans with the four corner press-n-rotate "screws" were the worst; every time it felt like you were going to crack the mobo in half...
I just replaced a cooler like that yesterday morning (with another one with the same screws)! Pretty annoying to work with.
Funnily, those screws also sort of fit into the grid on the back of my computer case, so I mounted the old cooler externally, and it helps draw the hot air out. No reason to throw away a good PWM-controlled fan if you have a free connector on the motherboard, after all.
And after a few minutes of trying you've forgot in what direction you are supposed to screw them ...
If you're doing it for the first time, try a few times without the thermal paste so you get the feeling of it. Then the pins will also go down easier when you do it for real.
Yes, replacing capacitors on Pentium 4 mainboards that are controlling equipment that the university cannot replace the license for is still lucrative.
Wasn't saying CPU is hard just nerve wracking as it crunches. Heatsinks are annoying as fuck. The first time I did a CoolerMaster H212 EVO I botched install... Had to pull it off which is a careful exercise in and of itself as you sort of wiggle slide it off the top of the CPU which is glued to it with thermal paste at this point and seated to the motherboard.
I can't believe they left out the blood sacrifice on sharp parts of the case. Always different/unexpected parts of the case, and always miraculously sharp. (Less so now with higher end modern cases, but was definitely this way with 80s/90s/early-00s cases.)
Those old cases were so sharp. One time I was fishing a screw out of a channel formed by some bends along the bottom of a computer case, and I felt the ragged sheet metal edge slide deep into the flesh of my fingertip. Ouch.
Building PCs is plenty of fun IRL too -- at least that was the case before the year began, at least.
Yeah, cable management might suck, but for the most part fitting together all of these complicated pieces of silicon to create a working machine is incredibly rewarding.
Now, what we have is a monopoly of those same pieces of hardware by miners, leaving much of the fun of building a PC gone, replaced by scrounging around for deals on Amazon and Newegg to see if you can find a GPU at less than 400% markup. It's taken a huge bite out of PC gaming and left the RAM and GPU market in shambles.
Proof of work is an environmental disaster, and an economic one as well. Crypto needs to get its shit together and switch to proof of stake as soon as possible, because this type of gold rush helps nobody except a small few and hurts the people who use PCs for science and personal entertainment, who are a far larger chunk of the PC userbase.
DRAM and NAND shortages aren't new - the current supply problems started in 2016 and got progressively worse throughout 2017. The smartphone market is to blame - or rather, its consumers who upgrade/replace their phone every damn year. Apple alone drains the entire supply chain every time they ramp up for the next iPhone; add to that all the Android manufacturers, and there's just nothing left for desktop.
If more people kept their phones for 2-4 years instead of expecting an upgrade every 9-12 months, we wouldn't have this problem.
I've found the older article 'PC Gaming Is Still Way Too Hard' to be quite amusing, but not very similar to my experience (although I only built two PC's).
In my experience, the process of checking compatibility of the parts, and getting the parts can be a bit tedious (I had to wait multiple months for some parts). I did order DDR3 memory for a mobo that only supports DDR4 and bought a powersupply that was way too big for the small form factor case I was using (luckily I could return it).
I found the actual build to be, by far, the easiest part of the process. Everything was basically plug and play (in the sense that the colors, annotations and connectors made everything very obvious to me). I also never experienced a crunch when I mounted the CPU.
To be fair I didn't really use the manuals. If I would have broken something I would have a very different story.
Windows only! I was excited at first because I always wanted to learn how to do this. But if it only runs on an OS I can't run that turns it into a chicken-and-egg problem...
Fun. Lately I have a growing pile of RasPis and SD cards everywhere. I guess I built enough PCs in the 00s and now they’re $50 so why not build clusters/etc? Back then PC games were around $60 or upgrades $200, now weekend projects with whole computers are too. I dig the idea still, would probably play before my next build which will surely be of expensive gear (eg. big Swarm/k8s nodes).
While doing a bench build for a friend, when motherboards became really small, I put an AGP card in a PCI slot backwards because the port side wasn't constrained anymore. Thankfully only non-magic smoke came out.
He complains that PC gaming is too hard, but I'm pretty sure you can find companies that put together custom PCs with a warranty. In Australia there are dozens of well known places that do it.
Saying that, you _can_ build a PC if you hop along to reddit /r/buildapc, they seem pretty happy to help you out if you can be bothered with the effort.
I love building my PCs, haven't done it in a while due to it not being economically worthwhile, so now I just browse the parts for fun!
Yes I read his original article and he should have bought a assembled and shipped gaming machine.
Kinda like complaining it's difficult to build a fast car with zero domain knowledge and looking up a few websites. Either put in the time to learn or just go buy a performance package Mustang GT/Camaro/Challenger/etc.
I think it's one of those things that's super easy when everything goes right and requiring some pretty arcane tricks when they go wrong.
I just recently put together a new PC and I was getting close to done. I plugged everything in before putting the side panels on, hit the power button and...nothing. No fans, no beeps, nada.
Okay, I'll just disconnect the ATX power cable from the motherboard and short PS_ON to ground and see if the PSU fan will spin a bit...nothing again.
Hmm. Maybe the modular cable is bad? Google the pinout for Corsair's "Type 4" PSU to make sure it's what I assume it is, drop my bit of wire down the correct pins directly on the PSU, jam my multimeter probes down a 12v + ground and...hell yeah, getting 11.something volts.
Okay, bad ATX power cable, call Corsair, wait a week, problem solved. My wife was watching me do all this on the breakfast bar and kept asking "how did you know to try that?" and I really didn't have a good answer other than "been doing this or watching my dad do this since I was 8".
I'm not sure I've ever assembled a computer without 1. exhaustively searching the internet about all the components and their interactions, finding no red flags 2. buying and assembling all the components 3. discovering some critical problem that requires some arcane setting to fix that probably downgrades performance 4. searching the internet for this particular problem and getting dozens of hits now that I have a specific symptom to go with my hardware.
Clearly step 1 is going wrong somehow, but, I mean, I'm a fairly typical HN poster, you know, I've got at least intermediate-level search skills, you know?
Certainly there are things that can easily trip up an occasional PC builder.
One of the things I always do these days is look up the memory compatibility for the motherboard I've selected, and then only buy off of that list. There are so many variations in just DDR4 2400 memory, and matching up all the parameters (timing, latency, etc.) is a hassle.
Had my PC for about 15 years built from scratch. Over the years I've gutted and added new parts to the point that I have no original components anymore.
Theres two things I hate dealing with the most when it comes to PC building. Those are (1) building a PC from scratch from all new components (2) debugging a PC when a part died
This is because diagnosing the problem and identifying what was wrong could be so many possible things. Back then as well we also didnt have these nice tools like pcpartpicker.com, all of these great youtube tutorials, just a bunch of forums to debug issues.
PC not turning on? Maybe the power supply is not working.
Or maybe its the power button itself is having a problem, the switch might have disconnected. Or maybe the wall power outlet is having issues, and maybe can't handle the load. Maybe you changed out a part recently and didnt connect the pins correctly, or during transportation something disconnected. Have to manually check every wire. Are the fans spinning at least?
Is the OS not booting? Okay, is BIOs at least running? Before that, can you hook up a keyboard into the PC? Is that even registering? Does it need an adapter (older PCs didnt use USB 2.0 ports for keyboard mouse). Do you have compatibility issues with hardware components?
Is the computer registering the RAM? Did you check if you slotted it in correctly, by shoving the pins far enough in and latching it? Its possiblethe RAM you recieved was dead on arrival. Try swapping the outlets and see if anything registers
When you changed the CPU did you make sure you didnt bend any pins? If you did your SOL. Maybe you put too much thermal compound between the fan and CPU.
Between all of these steps, did you make sure to ground yourself and prevent static charge from frying your motherboard?
Is your OS booting but your having software issues? Run safemode and find the culprit.
The list goes on and on and it just never ends. Narrowing down the specific issue was always a PITA.
I remember realizing I could reassemble my dad's 386 out of the parts I had stopped using.
I used to go to a screwdriver shop (in Federal Way?) that had some memory and a power supply sitting around at the counter. They would POST a new CPU and board in front of you before you take them home. Less stress than ordering from some random in the Computer Shopper phonebook.
Ugh, this brings back bad memories. I had a new PC that wouldn't power up, and I couldn't figure out why for 2 or 3 days. Eventually I took the motherboard out of the case and then put it back in. Suddenly everything worked. The best guess I've got is that somehow the motherboard was touching the case in a way that was causing it to short out.
Had the same thing happen to me! Built it on desk, worked, moved to case, didn't work. Rebuilt on desk, worked, moved to case, worked! Whatever, sure.
Had it happen again a couple years later but that time it turns out the motherboard was just DOA. But yeah the time spent confirming that the motherboard was the culprit sucked, and required another PC to swap parts with.
I just built a PC recently and thought the CPU fan header was dead until I got into the BIOS (with no fan spinning) and found that the default fan curve had the fan at -30% from 25C to 75C.
It kind of straddles the worst line between easy and hard.
It's pretty straightforward and easy to do, so you don't get any bragging rights when you finish, but there also aren't a ton of safety nets in case you do something stupid to keep you from ruining an expensive component.
When I put together my computer, I dropped a CPU at an angle and bent one of the pins on the motherboard, then spent 3 hours flicking it with a needle to get it to realign.
It's like doing taxes - not really an accomplishment, so big whoop if you do it right, but just dangerous enough to mean you have to pay attention and take it seriously.
When working with electronics, I use the CS vs EE analogy.
CS person: grabs part by hand, shuffles across the floor in socks, brushes dust off a pin, presses part into place
EE person: stares in horror, a grounding strap dangling from their hand
CS: "What?"
EE: "You know you're supposed to ground yourself to prevent static discharge from frying parts?"
CS: "Bah, it worked fine the last time I did it this way."
Point being there's a difference between something that works 99/100 times, and something that works 60/100 times. And when failure means a dead part, probably best to go the extra mile.
Being one of those "EE persons" specialized in semiconductors seeing lack of ESD protection drives me insane. I used to work on an electronics factory production floor where it was required of me to take a certification course of proper handling procedures and in the use of ESD arresting equipment.
Your PC build didn't boot? Probably shocked it. It's blue screening or kernel panicking? Probably shocked it.
As someone who rebuilt a couple dozens PCs for a charity from dumpster parts, boards in plastic bags while wearing mostly synthetic clothes, I'd say you underestimate the ruggedness of those things.
Drivers and OS are much more likely to be the cause of quirks and weird behaviour.
Whether you're likely to experience ESD problems depends very much on the environment; if the ambient humidity is high enough and you're not wearing rubber soled shoes on a synthetic floor, it can be very low.
Is it really that hard to find them? I'm not that familiar with the current lineup of cards (still rocking a GTX 770 myself), but Amazon seems to have several 1050-1080 model cards in stock from various vendors. The prices do look a bit inflated, though.
Having done the process a few times over the last, oh, two decades, I can say that some things have gotten easier while others have gotten a bit worse.
Assembly a PC is pretty easy these days, most of the parts go together pretty easily, and your chances of everything working on the first try are pretty high. This is way different from ye olden days when it might take hours just to get a PC put together correctly unless you were lucky, hardware is a lot less fiddly these days than it used to be.
But buying all the components for a PC is more challenging for novices. This can be hard for techies to understand because we just assume that everyone knows what we know. But your J. Average prospective computer building may not know whether a Core i7 8700 is better than a Core 2 Quad or vice versa. They also may not know what the heck an 8th generation Core i7 is. There are so many generations of components now and so many gradations within each generation that it can become and informational overload. If you try to go at the problem directly by just heading to newegg or amazon and browsing for parts without doing the research you're going to have a bad time.
There are a zillion different socket formats, there are a zillion different motherboard form factors, there are a zillion different GPU lines and each one has a zillion different variations. How do you know which are compatible? How do you know which ones are the best? Or just the best for the price? Are higher numbers better? Worse? Not important? Is LGA 2066 better than LGA 1151? Is a GeForce 9800 better than a GTX 1080? There are a zillion of these little questions. Already knowing most of the answers makes navigating the problem vastly easier, having to find an answer for each and every one of them can be exhausting. You absolutely need some sort of guide or hand holding to get started on this problem from scratch but if you don't have any pre-existing knowledge you don't know where to go. (Personally, my favorite is http://www.logicalincrements.com but there are others.) You need someone to help you narrow the scope of the decision problem to a manageable level, otherwise you'll drown in choices and questions until you run out of will power to continue.
Excellent comment! Graphics card naming schemes are the worst of the lot. Without being an enthusiast and keeping up with benchmark reporting it's impossible to tell say, if an AMD RX560 is faster than an RX480. I mean 560 is a bigger number which means it's faster, right?
Having just done this recently, and still being fairly plugged in on what's hot vs. what's not, the worst part has been picking a motherboard. There is an infinity of different enthusiast/gaming motherboards, all of them almost, but not quite, functionally the same. And damned near every single one has an average 4 out of 5 star rating on newegg, so you have to spend eternity wading through reviews trying to decide whether or not motherboard makers are just bad or gamers are just fussy assholes (or both).
I think folks here are missing something. It isn't assembling a gaming PC that's difficult, it's the process of building the rig; specifying parts and confirming that they're compatible can be a daunting task, much less sourcing them and recognizing the appropriate prices.
It's a really big matrix of possibilities that can be pretty opaque to people who don't keep up with it.
There are sites now [1] that let you select components and will tell you if your CPU/motherboard/RAM are compatible. It will even tell you if your power supply can handle the amount of power of all the components. When you select components it will give you links to multiple places to purchase them.
I don't keep up with current events in custom PCs and when I built a PC last year [2] I thought it was incredibly straight forward.
Which CPU family and which series? Once you finish THAT, everything gets a lot more straightforward.
That list is terrible. At least order the families/series chronologically.
If I'm a reasonably informed random, I know to click a handful of things with "lake" in the name and a handful of things with "zen" in the name and that's about it. Except you can't do that with the chooser as it gives you zero choices, since -zen is a series and -lake is a family and those are disjoint (I should be able to union those).
As a noob, I would miss any of the "gaming value" choices with that heuristic (Haswell/Broadwell that are quite nice).
I don't see any EPYC in that list, so I'm scratching my head (yes, I know it's a server but a random person won't) and I would miss the Threadripper choice (why doesn't it have Ryzen next to it).
The problem isn't assembling a PC. It's the fact that PC knowledge has a half-life of like 6 months, and you really can't trust review sites or web searches on this topic anymore.
I suspect most newbies to building a PC wouldn't just go to the individual part list and start picking a processor. They'd go to the build guides(https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/) and look at builds in their price range. A bunch of the build guides on that site have start-to-finish youtube videos of the entire build as well.
Maybe that particular filter on that particular part isn't that easy to use but I think sites like this make building a PC extremely approachable, even for someone who has never built a PC before.
Used to be daunting, but for my last few builds I have used some combination of PC Part Picker and the selections from the seasonal TechReport.com guides. Much easier than a couple decades ago when I was a teenager.
Should also be mentioned that the manuals that come with things like motherboards and cases are much more detailed than they used to be.
Yeah I'm not saying it's hard for me, but I've built a few (using pcpartpicker) and do a lot of electronic design work, so I'm comfortable handling PCB's.
For others, even just pcpartpicker can present an overload of information.
There are several sites that help with that. I built one of them: https://www.pc-kombo.com/ - it gives you the best cpu + gpu for your budget, based on benchmarks, with fitting parts around that. The most known is https://pcpartpicker.com/, which gives you a broad selection of parts and checks compatibility as well.
That's a great concept, I always wondered why "best X for the money" (like the columns on tomshardware) weren't just automated, given the availability of crowdsourced benchmarks (http://www.userbenchmark.com).
I wish I could specify other specific priorities, like video conversion or compression or data management, so it would trade off between CPU, SSD speed, SSD storage space, or RAM in slightly different ways (though maybe that level of optimization is overkill).
> I wish I could specify other specific priorities
I tend to think that's overkill :) But one can toggle between a gamer setup and a mainly more more cpu heavy app focus, it's in the advanced menu under the recommend button. Switching between gpu and cpu heavy builds catches a lot of those different usecases.
One problem with those is that they are often based on artificial benchmarks, which is most of the time not what you want. I use benchmark results from professional publications instead. The problem then moves to ordering, but that's manageable with enough data.
> > I wish I could specify other specific priorities
> I tend to think that's overkill :)
Yeah, I think you're right. It's like that old Knuth quote. Programmers waste enormous amounts of time worrying about the speed of noncritical parts of programs.
> I use benchmark results from professional publications instead.
Yeah, I generally do that too, I just thought userbenchmarks would be easier to API and be more comprehensive.
Though thinking about it now, I'm not sure why I distrust UB so much. In a sense I'm just choosing different biases. Even if I find a reliable reviewer that personally buys each part at a retailer to avoid "reviewer binning," the best case, I still risk a sampling error due to the small numbers (typically n = 1) tested. The bell curves on two different CPUs might overlap considerably. So buying a marginally better rated processor might only give you better performance in 51% of purchases.
No professional reviewer could afford the cost or time to individually buy and test a statistically significant number of devices to determine its variance in operation.
On the other hand, the errors in judgment that might creep in from variance due to small samples are almost certainly washed out completely by the leaps between generations, right? So trustworthy reviewers are probably "good enough" and worrying about that issue is another form of unnecessary optimization, as much overkill as my first idea.
I'm open to that possibility.
Though we might go further down this line... Maybe the performance exaggerations due to conformance to published benchmarks aren't much of an issue either. As long as we're talking about ranking cards for real world usage, the odds that a card will perform noticeably better at benchmarks but noticeably worse at tasks I care about is... Well it's nonzero, but small. Smaller still if we upgrade our threshold from "noticeably" to "significantly" or "substantially."
I mean, it's your own call where you pull your data from because no data is perfect, and we probably pull from the same places. But you really got me running thinking everything is needless optimization and now I can't stop. :)
I wanted to write "the problem is less the unprofessionalism of the benchmarkers, but the kind of benchmarks they are running. Not being real games they won't accurately reflect performance in them." Ofc, that is kind of the bias I work with, gaming performance is the most important factor, it's the default profile. But actually, the average benchmark position of gpus is pretty good. It looks like they were very careful in selecting synthetic benchmarks that reflect gaming performance accurately. Did that change?
I now look at cpus again.... yeah, there it would not work, that is too far off of what I see in gaming performance. But cpus are hard, with single and multi/threaded performance differing so much and having different effects in each game you look at.
So imho one could only use the gpu ranking, but the gpus are not hard to rank anyway :)
But now I wonder whether that would not be a good data source for SSD and HDD performance. Maybe even for RAM...
Thanks for your thoughts, you made me take a second look on something I had discarded earlier!
pc-kombo doesn't seem to have a way to disable buying Windows. It screws the calculations, because it picks one among several versions of different prices.
Hey, thanks for the feedback. You can click on the minus sign at the top right of the box to disable windows (or any other component category) - and it does not pick Windows when building a new recommendation list, one has to do that manually.
That probably got missed by not being able to remove windows just by using the arrows at the left of the box, right?
I’ve actually had the opposite experience. Figuring out what parts to use is pretty easy, just takes a little time and attention to detail. Actually getting everything assembled can be a huge pain in the ass, I feel like it’s all designed for people with tiny hands.
I've only built a couple of PCs but my method has been to find a PC for sale that is outside my price range - check for Linux compatibility by searching for problems - and then source the parts that match the spec. I can modify as I go, double up on RAM or whatever.
I just did this part a week ago. All I did was keep the motherboard specs open in one window, and narrow down choices based off that. Wasn’t really hard in any respect, just detail orientated.
Pick a processor, that determines the motherboard socket. The motherboard and CPU arch will determine the memory type. The wattage of the CPU and video card determines your PSU lower bounds.
The only odd thing was the addition of SSDs on a stick, but the motherboard determines the options there too.
PCPartPicker will not let you pick parts that aren't compatible with each other, and even keeps a tally of your wattages. I think they even use the measurements of your case to tell you if your GPU or cooler might be too big.
My point was not that I'm better than tooling, but that it's a very possible task even without extra tooling. And that task isn't hard, just detail orientated.
The last computer I built required soldering and Digi-Key. As I found out after lots of trial and error, I got a bad molex-to-sata power adapter, and it took killing two hard drives before I narrowed it down to that cable. The SATA end was too narrow to get a multimeter in. I suspect the 12v and 5v lines were crossed.
Long story short, a couple of resistors and diodes later my WD Blues were spinning up again, but it was a pain in the ass.
I've heard people say that before they actually put a PC together. Afterwards every one of them said "Oh, that wasn't so bad!" At least, in the last 15 years... The days of AGP and PCI-X and sharp-edged rolled-steel cases were a little more fraught.
AGP/PCI-X wasn't really any more difficult to work with than today's PCI Express etc.
You really have to rewind to mid 90's pre-Windows 95 in the days before Plug 'n' Play when manually assigning IRQs etc was a thing before the process of building your own PC meaningfully changes in my opinion.
Still, all a skill set of experience that has it's uses today and when it comes to IRQ sharing and all those years the golden leason is read the motherboard documentation and don't assume shipping defaults jumpers/setting can be wrong.
Still, before AGP we had VESA, also around the time of MCA and IBM's attempt to capture some copyright patent control back from the expanding PC market and BIOS clones ("Halt and Catch Fire" Season one well worth a watch if you missed that era in life).
Yes pre Windows 95 was a fine art, from tweaking DOS memory, to optimising windows .ini files and then the fun of having to dial up Microsoft's patch BBS for a TCP/IP stack.
But top-end gaming PC's back then, sure made less noise.
Sounds like you skipped over the phase where Plug 'n' Play was mandatory, but didn't work reliably past maybe 1.5 expansion cards, and required even more arcane ways of configuring hardware than the IRQ days.
Or possibly you had money to buy higher quality components than I did at the time.
Right, but you had to match all the parts you were buying. It's easier now that everything is ATX and PCI-e. And before Amazon and Newegg, return policies were patchy.
> And before Amazon and Newegg, return policies were patchy.
OTOH, before the main consumer storefronts were the kind of flea markets of no-name sellers that used to roll into county fairgrounds every couple months, you could actually find good retailers with not only strong return policies, but also focussed on quality parts with a high S/N ratio in their catalog, that even offered added value (including, e.g., mounting CPU and memory when bought with a motherboard.)
Some of those same places survived, but they don't do consumer retail anymore.
That's true, and they would proactively look out for compatibility issues if they knew what your project was. Amazon can check car parts for compatibility, but as far as I know, they don't have anything like that for PC parts.
Shit, I’ve done it before (years ago) and did it again somewhat recently.
It’s nerve-wracking as hell. Closing the swingarm to hold the CPU in place feels like—as the article’s author points out—you’re 100% about to destroy a really expensive piece of hardware. Installing the CPU cooler was surprisingly difficult, and I only noticed that the pins holding it attached weren’t fully seated because I checked and rechecked the mounting. Every time you plug a cable in there’s a moment of doubt if it’s the right cable or if you’re about to overvolt something and melt it. Even when you’re done plugging everything in there’s anxiety around whether or not you’ve missed something like a fan cable, that will eventually result in an expensive piece of hardware overheating and taking out the entire machine.
The act of pressing the power button when you’re all done isn’t an exciting and satisfying one. It’s a massive surge of anxiety followed by a wave of relief, followed by more nagging anxiety that gradually fades.
Even then you’re not done. After fiddling around in the BIOS for an hour to set things up, I ran a benchmark and discovered that I hadn’t used the right profile for my RAM, and it was only using half of its performance potential. Apparently many other people did this too, because the benchmark showed a graph of others’ performance in comparison and it had two equal-sized peaks: one where it was misconfigured to a slower (but presumably safe for all configurations) speed, and one where it was operating at its published speed. It took a few hours of research to discover something called XMP—which I still have no idea what it is—that apparently allows my motherboard to detect RAM timings in a way that unlocks this performance. I never would have noticed this without the benchmark.
I also noticed that my new NVMe SSD wasn’t performing well. Turns out the heat spreader my motherboard uses actually worsens performance for whatever reason. Simple fix: open the box back up, disconnect cables until I can get to the m.2 slot, and remove the heat spreader. More anxiety follows: am I just killing this expensive SSD?
Every step of the way is like this. I am not a naturally anxious person. I am financially well-off, and easily able to eat the cost of any mistakes. I am extremely technically inclined. Expecting nontechnical people to do this with limited budgets and expensive components is nuts.
Almost all of those fears you enumerate are unfounded. You won't kill a processor through overheating if you forget to plug in a fan. Not properly securing your CPU heatsink only really poses a risk to the GPU that it could fall onto. Likewise for your concerns about the SSD's temperature: it'll throttle itself and shutdown if necessary, but the latter won't happen even if you're blowing 85°C air from a GPU directly onto the SSD—I've tested that with most of the M.2 NVMe SSDs on the market. There are essentially zero connectors inside the PC that allow for the mechanical possibility of connecting dangerous voltages to the expensive components.
Whether or not those fears are well-founded is beside the point. I know that components will undergo a safe thermal shutdown. I know that power cables mostly can't go anywhere they shouldn't go. And I still get anxiety around it, even as a person who doesn't get much anxiety. Expecting a nontechnical novice to feel comfortable doing these things is asking a lot.
Plus, there's still a lot that actually can go wrong. Crappy PSUs and built up static electricity have killed uncountable motherboards and GPUs. Misconfiguring your BIOS can actually kill your components, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.
Thermal shutdown was added fairly early in the P4 days. I recall a Tom's Hardware video showing removing the heatsink from a P4 while it was running Quake 3 and the framerate tanking but no crash, while the Athlon (XP?) next to it went up in smoke when the heatsink was removed.
That was for AMDs, and I believe by the time of Pentium 4, even Athlons had thermal safeties. I remember quick testing (see if it powers on) Pentium 3s, Celerons and P4s without the heatsink - they even managed to boot Windows before shutting down lol. Same for GPUs.
I managed to melt one by incorrectly applying a heatsink. Years later we did some "experiments" on an old P4 to test the cooling capabilities of scotch. It's not effective FYI.
Funnily enough, a friend of mine had his GPU die due to heat yesterday. He'd been mucking about with performance settings, and apparently set his MSI card to use too much power and not enough fan.
GPU hit > 95˚C and is now a several hundred dollar paperweight.
I just wanted to say you did a great job of bundling up all those nerves, anxiety, and feelings about getting your own rig up and running. Great comment.
On my latest Asus motherboard, an Asus Strix Gaming, choosing XMP timings with an otherwise mild overclock overvolted the 6850k in a voltage setting I wasn't even aware of (not vcore) in such a way that the CPU died over time - my last build was a 2600k, which is now son's computer (OCed, and working fine).
This happened twice. Computer shop couldn't figure it out and replaced the CPU on warranty. Not Intel's fault, yet they copped it. I should have insisted on a new motherboard as well, very frustrating.
Fortunately I somehow discovered the hyper aggressive setting not too far into my third. I know it is at least a bit degraded, but oh well...
The whole point of XMP is that it overvolts the RAM, which in turn increases the voltage the on-CPU memory controller runs at. That's why the XMP timings are faster than the stock timings. So it's probably kind of Intel's fault, since XMP is their invention.
Hmm. I've always thought it was exciting and fun, even when I didn't have the money to replace parts in a potentially-botched installation. I can see where you could get a feeling of anxiety from, but that was never my experience.
The scary part is actually not building it but looking up a dozen components with weird detailled descriptions and figuring out what that stuff actually means. Then getting back at it two years later and finding most names completely changed.
The problem with Motherboard is the way they talk about hardware. The pessimistic voice makes it seem not worth the trouble. They aren't even trying to spark curiosity in their readers and it's a disservice.
It certainly can be daunting at first, I generally just get a bit frustrated when people assert a task is too hard when all it really requires is some concentration and research.
If the argument were "I have other things I prefer to spend time on" then I would completely understand, but rejecting it as too hard seems somewhat lazy unless I'm just overestimating the average person's ability.
Two of my friends build bicycles from scratch, but they find building a PC difficult. I argue that their hobby is ten times more complex than building a PC nowadays, as everything is mostly plug-in-play and idiot-proof. Installing the CPU in a mobo is a walk-in-the-park compared to truing your wheel or overhaul a hub.
I disagree on being 10x harder. Bicycles are the same concept just older. There is a frame (computer case/mobo) and you bolt on compatible parts like brakes, cranks, forks, wheels, etc. (cpu/memory/gpu/psu)
I'm sure if you talk to someone working at a bike shop they could take your comment, flip it, and still have it be accurate:
Two of my friends build PCs from scratch, but they find building a bicycle difficult. I argue that their hobby is ten times more complex than building a bicycle nowadays, as everything is mostly plug-in-play and idiot-proof. Truing your wheel or overhaul a hub is a walk-in-the-park compared to installing the CPU.
It can get arcane getting the right socket mobo for your processor, getting the correct timings on the RAM, figuring out how much power supply you need to buy...
And then there's those poorly documented nonstandardized fiddly little wire connectors for all of the front panel functions, plus another set for the USB ports and so on. To this day I'm never sure which way to plug in the LEDs, and even when I think I have it down I'll run into a mobo that does it the opposite way. And then your case has a three pin power switch (outer two wired up), but the motherboard only has two pins for it...
I think your comment is, what, a decade out of date?
First of all, pcpartpicker and logicalincrements will help you choosing the right CPU with the right motherboard. Correct timings on RAM hasn't been a thing for many, many years, they work, at worst it won't use the maximum possibility the module offers. The PSU is hardly a problem, unless you are spending an extraordinary amount of money, the smallest PSU you can realistically buy is an overkill (CPU is 65W typically, very few GPUs go above 150W, and you can't even get a below 350W PSU really unless you have some office prebuilt from HP or Dell).
I used to think this way until recently. I literally have an engineering degree in electronics and it takes me hours to research a compatible set of components. A lay person stands no chance!
A couple of examples off the top of my head: AMD RX480 power draw exceeds the pci-express current limit specification and bricked motherboards, hence I bought/overclocked an RX470 instead. Intel 6700k overclocking. Wow. Reading and understanding the thermal and power envelopes described in the 300 page datasheet difficult for me, it would be impossible for a lay person to comprehend.
Meh, "gaming" is the operative word in that sentence. It's not just building a PC, it's knowing what components are required to run today's games, while leaving enough room for future-proofing against next {year|month|week}'s games.
To me, almost anything that can be completed in a fixed amount of time with high probability isn't hard; it's tedious at most. But if it can be completed within one hour it's not even tedious, it's (IMO) 'easy'.
For something to be 'hard', there should be a reasonable chance of failure with associated non-trivial costs.
> a reasonable chance of failure with associated non-trivial costs.
Any single part of a computer is a non-trivial cost if broken, and it's not too difficult to imagine the situations where that might happen: bending a pin on a CPU, giving a static shock to a component, misapplying thermal paste.
Even for enthusiasts, this is a task they do perhaps every 3 years, and every time with different components.
> bending a pin on a CPU, giving a static shock to a component, misapplying thermal paste.
Pins are in the socket now and very small, pretty much impossible to bend without negligence. Thermal paste is also usually pre-applied to the stock cooler, and you won't need to apply your own unless you're using an aftermarket cooler and overclocking.
Static shock is probably the only real concern but honestly I've built at least 20 PCs, at least 5 while wearing socks on a carpet. I've just never seen it be an issue or even met someone in real life who shocked hardware.
Parts are also much more durable than you'd initially believe. I competed in a PC building race (weird, right?) and most builds took 2 minutes or less (some stuff was pre-assembled). Hardware was slammed into motherboards as fast as possible, clumsily dropped on the floor, no regard for static. No attendee had any hardware issues.
> Even for enthusiasts, this is a task they do perhaps every 3 years, and every time with different components.
Nah, for those of us who love it, we'll gladly build your PC for free (for friends) if you buy the parts, I'll even double check the build first. Though I do try to haggle a six pack of beer out of the deal.
I did this back in highschool as well. We actually did have a team one year who broke a computer but that's because they were bleeding all over everything. There's a surprising amount of blood in these competitions when you're racing to put components into a completely unknown case with sharp edges all over.
Most CPUs these days don't have pins to be bent. Killing a PC component with static shock is more difficult than you imagine and is pretty hard to do even if you aren't taking serious precautions like using anti-static wrist straps. Misapplying thermal past won't kill anything unless you use so much that it oozes out from the CPU-heatsink joint and short-circuits stuff on the motherboard (and that's assuming that your heatsink doesn't have thermal compound pre-applied, and that the aftermarket thermal compound you're using is actually electrically conductive).
It takes willful ignorance and disregard for the simple instructions included with each component to even have a chance at breaking the expensive things.
> Killing a PC component with static shock is more difficult than you imagine and is pretty hard to do even if you aren't taking serious precautions like using anti-static wrist straps
Can confirm, got a little lazy and put spare components together into a working system on the carpet this past weekend. Everything still works well enough. :)
I haven’t built many machines over the years, but to me it’s less like ‘hard’ and more like ‘scary’. The line about locking down CPUs feeling like breaking hundreds of dollars of hardware 100% of the time is a very real thing.
Otherwise it’s the usual dread of whether the damn thing will actually boot. These days, though, they’re much better at booting than they are at not booting, so most of that nail biting is gone.
Honestly, it's mostly just detail-oriented. Some people might not pick it up easily, while others will. All the hardware-building forums and such make it easier than it used to be.
Frankly i find the "problem" to be modern Windows.
The 9x series had little trouble being moved around between motherboards and such, but the NT based ones seems to error at the drop of a pin (never mind how ornery Microsoft has become about copyright).
You might want to try Linux. As long as you don't compile your system with options optimized for your CPU and stay away from binary graphics drivers, you can pretty much boot it on every desktop PC hardware you like without any need for a new installation.
Just don't expect everything to be perfect. Linux has its own set of weaknesses, but being picky about changing the hardware isn't one of them.
I moved a Windows 7 installation between computers several times now - just clone and go. There's some whining and drivers on first boot, but otherwise it's fine. I really need to reinstall it, but can't be bothered right now, it works fine :D
Microsoft's bootloader is hilariously fragile, but once you fix that I haven't had much trouble migrating drives between fairly different systems (eg. quad-core consumer desktop and a dual-socket rackmount server).
I had a brief summer job as a 17 year old, assembling computers. Even after over 100, I still had that feeling of imminent destruction of expensive electronics.