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After much trial and tribulation plus help from my coworkers I finally got my new computer fully assembled. Now all I need are some games to play on it. I do know I am never going to assemble my own computer again.

dragon wrote:After much trial and tribulation plus help from my coworkers I finally got my new computer fully assembled. Now all I need are some games to play on it. I do know I am never going to assemble my own computer again.

What were your trials and tribulations? Last time I put a computer together from scratch the only thing was physical assembly, after than install windows 7 and walk away as anything the OS does not take care of ninite does.

Let's see first mother board was defective. I didn't know about the 8 pin power cable being diferent from the 8 pin gpu cable, had system assembled before i had my coworker explain what i did wrong. After fully assembling the computer it would not boot turns out the cpu was not seated properly. I had problems with the RAM and several other issues.

Defective parts, even from quality manufacturers (it happens) is why I always paid a bit more to buy from a local parts distributer. Sure, I had to drive inside the loop, but it's better than waiting days/weeks for an RMA request. I could walk in, say "this part is bad" and walk out with a new one.

Man, I just don't have it in me to build PCs anymore, even if retail didn't become price competitive. I remember getting all kinds of errors back when playing Natural Selection. I trouble-shot fucking everything, for days, still random blue screens, random application crashes. I tested every part over and over, inspected every part, reseated them, checked for bad grounds. Nothing. I finally broke down and bought a new motherboard, only to find a single (semi) blown capacitor hidden by my CPU cooler (no reason to check that as the computer ran and the CPU never got near the redline). Not to say this couldn't happen on a pre-built computer, but at least you know from the start you didn't fuck anything up.

I'm just glad ASUS sells whole PCs now. I loved building a maintaining my old rigs because it was an experience, but it's just not worth the time anymore unless you want to run crazy shit like SLI setups or insane overclocks because... you know... reasons.

I newer did understand the urge to build your own PC from scratch all at once. I did that once, and only once. And have been slowly changing out part after part over the years since. It's just that much easier to troubleshoot your system when you are introducing one component at a time like that.

Purple wrote:I newer did understand the urge to build your own PC from scratch all at once. I did that once, and only once. And have been slowly changing out part after part over the years since. It's just that much easier to troubleshoot your system when you are introducing one component at a time like that.

Cost savings, control over exactly what you get in your machine, the enjoyment of assembling the machine, the ability to use any case you like. Given how easy it is to assemble a PC so long as you have a bit of patience and read the manuals why would you buy from a store and pay extra?

It's an experience and a fun one the first few times. But you reach a point where the gains don't justify the work. You were also building from scratch during most upgrades before stuff like PCI-E and/or when they were throwing everything at the wall concerning RAM, such as certain companies pushing Rambus (which I avoided). Oh, you want a P4 or Athlon? Different form factor, your mainboard is garbage. Oh yea, and your RAM isn't backward compatible.

Really though, troubleshooting isn't generally that hard. I should have parted out a new mainboard the second I started having issues. But that meant (you guessed it ) a new CPU and RAM as the architecture had changed. These days? Very little I can see isn't backwards compatible, making it much easier to upgrade parts, rather than wholesale. That build lasted me until AGP died. Once that happened, my entire rig was pretty much garbage... I should probably toss that thing out sometime.

At this point in my life though, I am more than happy with my pre-built ASUS and just swapping out a video card here and there and popping in 2 SSDs for hilariously fast load times.

Jub wrote:Cost savings, control over exactly what you get in your machine, the enjoyment of assembling the machine, the ability to use any case you like. Given how easy it is to assemble a PC so long as you have a bit of patience and read the manuals why would you buy from a store and pay extra?

You clearly did not read what I wrote. Try again.

I newer said that you should buy a store assembled PC. I said that once you assemble your first PC you should newer go through that torture again and should instead replace one part at a time over time. This saves you a lot of trouble whilst providing all the same benefits you listed. You can enjoy the assembly (if you are into these things) and get the pieces you like just the way you like it. But you also get to troubleshoot and break in each piece at a time.