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If you can do it after a 15 minute youtube video, it's not that hard. Its easy in the context of most reasonable DIY projects. You can't go to a nerd site and have them give you an amazon list with everything you need to build your deck. Its basically Ikea furniture.
There are at minimum 6 parts you must install in an easily described order. All you need to do is pay attention to how things line up and not jam things in.
I feel like a dick typing this but its the most basic mechanical aptitude. You have every resource possible on your phone to answer questions, you basically read or describe what you're unsure about and ask google a vague question, and narrow down the search till you have your answer. This isn't something you have to practice and read books to understand. Theory is hard, music is hard, rebuilding an engine or renovating a house is hard. Building a computer is only hard if you go in not wanting to learn.
Now picking parts for a computer? fuck that there's a reason my desktop is 6 years old. Everything else is only designed to fit in one place, besides the case button pins, those are annoying without rtfm.
thing i hate is if you want to upgrade a part of your pc, say cpu for example, all the other technologies have moved on so much you also need a whole new motherboard and then maybe psu and ram etc as well
I only ever buy mid-range stuff, but the only things I've ever really upgraded were graphics card and adding more hard drives over the life of a PC. Previously I would build one, replace the graphics card after 3-4 years if necessary, then replace the whole PC in another 3-4 years. My gaming tastes have swung hard towards less demanding indie games in the last few years, so my next build may never get a GPU upgrade.
Also AFAIK the newer graphics cards tend to be more energy efficient.
Thats why I don't upgrade unless i find slightly shinier trash that fits. For about 4-5 years, my windows install was on a shitty old laptop HDD, I ran windows 8.1 embedded that I got for free. Finally bought a cheap SSD and used a windows 10 education license I also got for free.
Unless you're doing actual work on the machine, ie 3d rendering, photo work, building kernels, etc, you're set for 7-8 years with a CPU thats 1-2 below whats considered high-end.
Bought a middle of the road i5 and I can honestly say it ran every game perfect up until cyberpunk. Glad I pirated it just to play it once and delete it.
I haven't even bothered to look. I built it initially with 8GB ram and when my roommate from 3 years ago built a new machine, I did him a favor in exchange for his old 8gb of ram. So I have two sets of mismatched 8GB that occasionally cause a bluescreen. Basically a mechanics special at this point.
The 4770k/4790k are sought after by overclockers. It's wild how much they still go for.
I think rather they mean "the knowledge of how to do it is readily accessible, and it's not impossible to do without any specialized tools or training" which is true.
I hear what you say, but I think redditors are really more like: "Its easy I've done it often" and forget aforementioned points. Besides I built 30+ computers / servers and still have to spend up to 20 hours to build another one from scratch - and then it isn't always the best choice and utility. For the last one I got a bricked GPU or I did brick the GPU, that is a thing which leads to panic for people doing it the first time. For me it was annoyance, but manageable since I just sent the card back and got a new one.
People should be required to show a picture of their cable management before they are allowed to say building a computer is easy.
If your SSD isn't limply hanging in the void by it's cable you are trying too hard.
How have we moved away from CD drives, moved to smaller form factor HDDs, yet even big, fancy looking cases have fewer HDD slots than the big stamped aluminum manilla box I've been using since the 90s I found lying next to a dumpster 20ish years ago?
ATX Motherboards often have 8 or so sata connections, why wouldn't ATX case manufacturers expect users might want to use them?
Yeah, you aren't a professional unless you're just stuffing it in there, behind the back because you can't be arsed to do something no one will see anyway because the client will never open it up after the job is done and the computer works like it supposed to. Ever seen pre-builds? lmao!!
You're not allowed to look inside my case until at least the third date.
Cable management for my own PC is always the worst, since I often change out stuff. Bad example!
I can not resist making it flawless. Too much time spent!
The hardware engineer at work also get annoyed because I am the same perfectionist there... (*/_＼)
Plus he's like, vaguely self aware of his status as an avatar of consumerist excess so any guilt over being a passive participant is reduced by as much as a percent
$300-500 if you build on a budget. $1000 if you care about building something current, and most of that is going to be the graphics card.
You can very easily build a machine for under $100/component.
Sure. But it's like any home improvement project. If I try to do my own plumbing to save a few hundred bucks, I run the risk of flooding my house.
When people talk about building PCs they don't typically mean laptops. I have a spare laptop that I wouldn't dare open
I meant like completely disassembling your laptop, compared to that most PC parts are like Duplos
Mine has a relatively easily accessible hard drive bay thing, but if you want to perform any kind of deep cleaning you'd have to pop off the keyboard and hope you don't break some pins in the process
In short I’d really like redditors to shut the fuck up.
you're in the right place then
I've built over a dozen computers and I still cringe every time I seat a CPU. The thermal paste thing is true too, last one I built I turned it on and the CPU temp jumped to 94c, so that was fucking scary.
Ryzen is Pin Grid Array, like every AMD processor. It felt good to have a processor just slot into place without having to put a concerning amount of pressure on a little lever that hopefully aligns a bunch of little pads.
Just don't bend any pins.
that sound will haunt every pc builder's dreams for the rest of their lives. lmao.
Once I bent the entire corner of an i7. Bent it back on my desk, has been running fine for years
Also, thermal paste usually comes pre-applied to the heatsink nowadays, no? Unless youre fucking with watercooling, why even bother with your own paste
Imagine being such a modern person that watching a 10 minute video and then having to use your hands in a precise manner qualified as difficult.
I also think it can be difficult and a little daunting for folks who have never worked with computer hardware before and don't really understand what each part of their computer does. Tech people can get a little condescending with this stuff, but I'd suggest that they imagine they're dealing with something that's completely out of their element to the extent that basic terminology is meaningless to them.
Watching a youtube video is one thing, but if you don't understand what you're doing and you don't have the exact same setup as the video, it's easy to be afraid of destroying your expensive hardware and there are ways to do that (e.g. forgetting standoffs, slotting CPU incorrectly, etc).
I agree with this. But to me, building a PC is a reason to illuminate the black box rather than complain that the box is black
I understand, but at the same time I think it's worth remembering that not everyone's brains are wired the same way.
Case in point: go to any bike community online and people will tell you how painfully easy it is to dissemble and reassemble a bike. I had issues with my derailleurs and having bought repair tools and parts and watching youtube videos, I could not figure out how to repair my bike. I felt so lost and frustrated that I just gave up. Take it to a shop and the person might repair it in five minutes.
Now put a computer in front of me and I can assemble it no problem. Maybe the bike repair person gets confused and watching a 10 minute youtube video of someone putting together different hardware doesn't instill them with more confidence. Maybe they just feel more comfortable having someone else build it for them.
Now, someone might say to me that I should strive to "illuminate the black box" instead of complain when it comes to repairing my bike. In a sense, that's true, it would be very useful if I could repair my bike myself. But like, also, I really tried to do it. I watched multiple videos. Just nothing directly applied to my bike and I didn't entirely understand the function of all the screws and bolts on the derailleur.
So are a million other hobbies. It's entirely possible to buy an off the shelf computer- in the scheme of fiddly hobbies, its hard to argue that building a PC is some grand challenge. People build wrist watches from sheet metal for goodness sake.
All of the above is accurate, but OP's falling into that trap of counterjerking a reactionary culture and missing the target.
Being able to perform basic repairs/component installation can be the difference between a paperweight and a functional computer for the folks who don't have the privileges you list.
Whereas those that do will never need to learn the skill, the worst case is they spend an extra $500 on a machine they could've built themselves. And let's be real, nowadays most of those folks are just gonna buy a laptop instead.
The actual substantive critique for the pcpartpicker/buildapc/tomshardware/whatever culture is that it's peak fucking consumerist and there's absolutely no god damn emphasis on re-using the absolute fucking mountain of silicon gathering dust in tech recycler/reseller outlets across the country. The exact opposite, in fact.
You can walk into one of those resellers right now and buy an optiplex for ~$100, some components for another ~$100 and a monitor for ~$25 and have a computer that's equipped to handle the chromium-based apps and 5 MB javascript bundles that comprise modern desktop computing (another tech culture target worthy of critique) and run most games except the latest ones. Shit if you get a job there they'll probably let you take home all that for free.
But no one watches content about that shit, they just wanna see linus put 128 $5000 nvidia gpus into a massive chassis or someone run benchmarks on the latest piece of silicon (whose manufacturers have a vested interest in folks buying a new one every ~2 years).
peak peertube content would be a video series where they visit a reseller and build random boxes and then do cool shit with those boxes
don't get me started on rpi/microcontroller culture either that shit's just as problematic for most of the same reasons
Probably because they actually use them as microcontrollers instead of general purpose arm servers
It's like Legos if every lego was $200 and doing it wrong means you've poured a small fortune into a goofy looking paper weight.
That said, computer components are modular and assembly is easy enough that a 12-year-old could figure it out twenty years ago. If you have the time and the interest, it's a great way to build something better than you could find at Best Buy for half the cost. But if you're just looking to web surf, just buy a refurbished Dell laptop. They work fine, they'll run you a few hundred bucks, and they'll last you five years easy.
I've built lots of computers, I would never touch a laptop without lots of extra research. I agree about the redditors though.
