Boy, building a PC is easy

[Ackmed]

I had one until we just moved, and I begrudgingly tossed it. I have a hard time letting go for some reason, knowing full well I will never use it again. This is the first build with no optical drive at all. Makes things easier actually, but still feels wrong. Truthfully I haven't used an optical drive in about 4 years though on a home PC.

 

[IronWing]

I'd almost forgotten ZIP drives, they worked in the day I guess, had one for backups on an old 386 at the time.

Meh. This was where it was at.

The last time I saw of my thesis research data and the GIS database I built around it was it was stored on a Bernoulli disk along with data from a bunch of other theses. I suggested to my adviser that he transfer the stuff to newer media before it was too late. I don't know if he ever did.

 

[Leyawiin]

If you can read and use Google its really not that hard "if" you have an interest in building one. Its a lot easier today than 2003 when I built my first... and it wasn't terribly hard back then. I spent about a month learning about the different platforms available (settle on AMD Athlon XP) and then shopping for parts. I had it put together and up and running in a single Friday night.

 

[BurnItDwn]

For those teeny tiny headers and jumpers that are impossible for fat fingered folks to secure .... Tools like these are invaluable ..
http://www.rpelectronics.com/vtp-wire-prong-grabber-tool.html

I ordered a set of these on amazon recently since my plastic ones that came in various PC Repair kits that I have recieved over the last 20 years or so ahave all gottten brittle and broken ...
https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B000RAYGAI/ref=od_aui_detailpages00?ie=UTF8&psc=1

These work great for vintage hard drives and motherboards and some raid or scsi cards ... where you have a million little jumpers ...
also work great for when you drop a tiny little screw and don't want to expose your computer to magnetic pick up tools ... or when you don't want to hold it upside down and shake it ...

Anyhow, it can be a bit of information overload to figure out exactly what to buy, as there are a lot of options ... but pc assembly as a whole has only gotten easier over the years IMO.

 

[rh71]

^ all these tools made for everything imaginable and they still haven't created a nose picker.

 

[Staples]

I've been building ever since Pentium 2 but I've come to realize like 10 years ago that

1) Building will be no cheaper than buying a prebuilt one unless you are going really high end
2) When you find people who give the prices for a complete build, they never include the price of Windows ($120)
3) Building a custom PC hardly gives much of a performance advantage over prebuilt
4) You can usually get a smaller/more attractive case if you buy prebuilt (eg Intel NUC).

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

To clarify, the point here was to help people who are used to this to be reminded what it's like for people who aren't, if you want to tell a friend 'just build your PC'.

But lots of good stories.

No, the point that this started was your snarky attempt to describe how 'hard' to build a PC was. The point of my post was an attempt to shame you, and others, into actually putting some effort into something in this world, and becoming better for it. It's akin to changing your oil at least once, to know you can do it.

Not everyone needs to do this, but if you're mom_of_three who needs to access her yahoo mail, you've probably got a laptop/notebook/whatever anyhow, so none of this matters.

 

[Craig234]

Gez, I went through so much money back then.

I remember finding an incredibly good deal at the time on a 300MB HD (yes, MB) I bought for only $500.

I did just finish a new build, and am pretty pleased with it.

Congrats.

 

[Staples]

Yeah, especially when you got people saying that you should go to a SubReddit for PC building advice. This entire web site used to be devoted to DIY PC building, dammit! WTF happened to us?!?

This change occurred in the early 2000s when off topic forums came around. I used to notice this then. Off Topic forum attracted the normals from what was otherwise a PC centric website. Same with video games. Off Topic forums of very casual gamers were so much more active than the PC centric/Gaming forums.

 

[Staples]

There are some good selected pre configured suggestions at pcper

There are good off lease computers you can buy off newegg for cheap. I bought my mother one for $120. It was new too I think. Maybe a return. They may not be great for gaming but they are fine for office use.

 

[BurnItDwn]

^ all these tools made for everything imaginable and they still haven't created a nose picker.

You were born with 10 of them.

 

[Crono]

There are some good selected pre configured suggestions at pcper

There are good off lease computers you can buy off newegg for cheap. I bought my mother one for $120. It was new too I think. Maybe a return. They may not be great for gaming but they are fine for office use.

For office use even the Chrome/Windows/Android HDMI sticks are starting to be more viable, as are Chromebooks. I personally couldn't use them as my sole computer - most of us here wouldn't, as lack of power of side they are nearly impossible to repair - but they are practically disposable computers with zero footprint.

 

[Red Squirrel]

I've been building ever since Pentium 2 but I've come to realize like 10 years ago that

1) Building will be no cheaper than buying a prebuilt one unless you are going really high end
2) When you find people who give the prices for a complete build, they never include the price of Windows ($120)
3) Building a custom PC hardly gives much of a performance advantage over prebuilt
4) You can usually get a smaller/more attractive case if you buy prebuilt (eg Intel NUC).

Yeah that is true, for a base machine a prebuilt is way cheaper and will also be smaller in size and probably also use less power. I find the prebuilts always start so low in specs though. 4GB of ram, seriously? Minimum should be 8 these days. I also hate how they still ship prebuilts with a HDD and you have to pay a huge premium for SSD. So minute you want more than 4GB of ram and a SSD it's probably cheaper to build yourself. Though you might be able to find ram that will work in a prebuilt but it's a gamble as they're so proprietary these days.

 

[Craig234]

If you can read and use Google its really not that hard "if" you have an interest in building one. Its a lot easier today than 2003 when I built my first... and it wasn't terribly hard back then. I spent about a month learning about the different platforms available (settle on AMD Athlon XP) and then shopping for parts. I had it put together and up and running in a single Friday night.

I'm not sure how many times I need to say this didn't mean it's hard for people here, it's about appreciating what someone who hasn't done it - telling your friend who has no idea to build one - goes through that people familiar with it take for granted.

 

[Rubycon]

Well if you want to go back even further. I had one of these running CP/M.
S100 bus systems were the thing. Most processors ran at several hundred kHz. This ran at 4.77MHz!
Four point seven seven million cycles per second.
And 64KB RAM!
Modern CPUs have more L1 cache than that with speeds of hundreds of gigabytes per second and single digit nanosecond access times.
That's technology for you.

Look at that power supply! If you just saw it on its own you would think microwave oven, right?
I also had a dual 8" floppy disk house. The spindle motors were actually AC shaded pole motors!
And Winchester disks. Even as recently as the late 80s high end PCs with hard drives were touted having "Winchester" drives but that just meant hard drive.
Veterans know how they got the name.
30MB today isn't even enough to store most smart phone apps.

 

[MrSquished]

I've been specializing in mini PC's over the last couple of years & absolutely love both how easy it's gotten and how powerful the systems are today. The NUC's & BRIX compact computers are stupid easy...unscrew the bottom, clip in laptop memory (up to 32 gigs now) & an mSATA or M.2 drive (mmm, NVMe), and install Windows via a USB 3.0 stick. The Skull Canyon NUC lets you add on a GPU via an external Razer Core dock via a simple Thunderbolt cable (recently did one with a GTX1080 in it). Downside on that particular one is that the eGPU chassis costs five hundred bucks, but the price will drop over time.

But even higher-end DCC computers have gotten easier. Get a Lian-Li PC-Q25 chassis (side doors pop off, toolless!), slap in an i7-7700k (turbo's up to 4.5ghz OOTB), 32GB of RAM, a 24GB NVIDIA M6000 GPU, a Mini-ITX board, nice fat PSU, and up to a 2TB Samsung 960 Pro NVMe drive. Setup a Synology with iSCSI if you need massive storage for video files or whatever. Tech be crazy.

mSata drives are fricking tiny. I just discovered what this was some months back. My laptop HD died and I couldn't find the damn drive to replace it. Luckily the AT forums came to the rescue, told me it was an mSATA and I bought a replacement and swapped it out myself. Still super amazed at how small they are making these things for 500GB worth of data.

 

[Rubycon]

I put one of these in a Dell 9550.
2TB in a stick of chewing gum!

It is definitely noticeably faster than the 1TB Toshiba drive that it replaced. That one was also no slouch either but I did it mainly for the space. The PC shuts down and resumes noticeably faster.
I was surprised to see it benchmark close to one in a high end system as well.

 

[MrSquished]

I put one of these in a Dell 9550.
2TB in a stick of chewing gum!

It is definitely noticeably faster than the 1TB Toshiba drive that it replaced. That one was also no slouch either but I did it mainly for the space. The PC shuts down and resumes noticeably faster.
I was surprised to see it benchmark close to one in a high end system as well.

it's unreal right. I can't believe how small these things are getting. Fucking black magic

 

[Kaido]

mSata drives are fricking tiny. I just discovered what this was some months back. My laptop HD died and I couldn't find the damn drive to replace it. Luckily the AT forums came to the rescue, told me it was an mSATA and I bought a replacement and swapped it out myself. Still super amazed at how small they are making these things for 500GB worth of data.

Yeah, it's bananas. The new 960 Pro's are advertised with read speeds up to 3,500 MB/s. That's basically like an insane RAID array in something the length of your pinky. The new NUC's take up to 32 gigs of RAM as well (the tiny laptop chips too!), all in a tiny box you can fit in the palm of your hand.

I'm actually kinda curious why Apple hasn't updated the Mac Mini in forever...

 

[Kaido]

it's unreal right. I can't believe how small these things are getting.

The new 960 Pro's go up to 2TB in an itty bitty stick...

 

[MongGrel]

I put one of these in a Dell 9550.
2TB in a stick of chewing gum!

It is definitely noticeably faster than the 1TB Toshiba drive that it replaced. That one was also no slouch either but I did it mainly for the space. The PC shuts down and resumes noticeably faster.
I was surprised to see it benchmark close to one in a high end system as well.

I've been playing with the idea of trying something along those lines out for storage, one of my old hardware 10 RAID controllers with 4x1 TB drives has two HDDs that have puked out, pondering things atm before another goes and the array goes to HHD heaven.

The RAID card is probably 10 years old and not sure replacing them with larger drives would really be the way to go.

It's been a faithful storage system in a few computers for a couple computers for about 10 years+ now anyway.

I've still been pondering pocking up some WD Reds that are high capacity for storage, have a couple small EVO SSD's for the OS.

I'd need a adapter for the Sammy VNand I imagine, had not even looked at them closely.

 

[Kaido]

I've been playing with the idea of trying something along those lines out for storage, one of my old hardware 10 RAID controllers with 4x1 TB drives has two HDDs that have puked out, pondering things atm before another goes and the array goes to HHD heaven.

The RAID card is probably 10 years old and not sure replacing them with larger drives would really be the way to go.

It's been a faithful storage system in a few computers for a couple computers for about 10 years+ now anyway.

I've still been pondering pocking up some WD Reds that are high capacity for storage, have a couple small EVO SSD's for the OS.

I'd need a adapter for the Sammy VNand I imagine, had not even looked at them closely.

I've done some custom servers with NVMe drives only, it's pretty crazy how empty the cases are haha. The higher-end modern desktop boards come with three M.2 NVMe-capable slots built-in, which you can optionally RAID. They did a 3-drive RAID 5 setup in this test:

https://www.pcper.com/reviews/Stora...e-RAID-Tested-Why-So-Snappy/Preliminary-Resul

Downside is that I'm unaware of any USB adapters for doing imaging & whatnot for NVMe drives currently; right now I keep a spare SATA/M.2 rig for cloning as needed, which is a small hassle.

Although for the price of multiple large NVMe drives, you can rig up a nice Synology NAS & just setup a remote iSCSI over the network for high-speed RAID-protected storage, then you can stick with a nice little local machine like an HP Z2 Mini G3.

 

[Red Squirrel]

Well if you want to go back even further. I had one of these running CP/M.
S100 bus systems were the thing. Most processors ran at several hundred kHz. This ran at 4.77MHz!
Four point seven seven million cycles per second.
And 64KB RAM!
Modern CPUs have more L1 cache than that with speeds of hundreds of gigabytes per second and single digit nanosecond access times.
That's technology for you.

Look at that power supply! If you just saw it on its own you would think microwave oven, right?
I also had a dual 8" floppy disk house. The spindle motors were actually AC shaded pole motors!
And Winchester disks. Even as recently as the late 80s high end PCs with hard drives were touted having "Winchester" drives but that just meant hard drive.
Veterans know how they got the name.
30MB today isn't even enough to store most smart phone apps.

That's one serious power supply for sure, if I had to guess it's probably linear.


Those SSD cards are quite something too, did not realize they were that small now. Even micro SD still blows my mind, several GB on something the size of a finger nail. I guess those SSD cards are more for specialized applications though where you don't need lot of storage just lot of speed, since you're not going to necessarily do mass storage by using PCI-e slots as you only get a small number of them on a given system. But it's great to free up the need for any sata device in a server that is not dealing with storage. Ex: VM servers. They would be connecting to a SAN.

 

[sdifox]

Well if you want to go back even further. I had one of these running CP/M.
S100 bus systems were the thing. Most processors ran at several hundred kHz. This ran at 4.77MHz!
Four point seven seven million cycles per second.
And 64KB RAM!
Modern CPUs have more L1 cache than that with speeds of hundreds of gigabytes per second and single digit nanosecond access times.
That's technology for you.

Look at that power supply! If you just saw it on its own you would think microwave oven, right?
I also had a dual 8" floppy disk house. The spindle motors were actually AC shaded pole motors!
And Winchester disks. Even as recently as the late 80s high end PCs with hard drives were touted having "Winchester" drives but that just meant hard drive.
Veterans know how they got the name.
30MB today isn't even enough to store most smart phone apps.

Early 90s I worked on a project to replace Kodak's chemical kettle recipe reader. It was punch card driven and there was no more read head to be had. Replaced with touch screen.

 

[[DHT]Osiris]

That's one serious power supply for sure, if I had to guess it's probably linear.


Those SSD cards are quite something too, did not realize they were that small now. Even micro SD still blows my mind, several GB on something the size of a finger nail. I guess those SSD cards are more for specialized applications though where you don't need lot of storage just lot of speed, since you're not going to necessarily do mass storage by using PCI-e slots as you only get a small number of them on a given system. But it's great to free up the need for any sata device in a server that is not dealing with storage. Ex: VM servers. They would be connecting to a SAN.

You might be surprised. The Skylake board in my current build has 3x m.2 slots on it, just tied into the pcie lanes. That's totally seperate from the 6? 8? SATA connections on it. It'll usurp SATA very soon (another generation or two) for SSD connections. SATA will be left to the platter drives.