So... What was it like building your first computer?

[Pickles von Brine]

This is from a few years ago, but it was exciting. I use to read Maximum PC and drool over the pages wanting a computer for myself. I wished and hoped to build one, then crysis came out. I got a job, worked all summer long and saved every penny at $6.25 an hour to afford my machine. Ordered everything off of newegg and built it. It was amazing. Doing something I have never done before and wanting for so long. You are so scared putting all the bits together. Putting the CPU in and hearing a creek put shivers down my spine, knowing I couldn't afford a replacement. Pushing the power button for the first time and it all working was exhilarating. What about the rest of you?

Original specs:
E5200
4GB of ram
250GB drive
HIS HD4850

[kokakolia]

Ha! My first and only PC building experience was around 2017. I built a decent PC with a GTX 1060 and Core i5 for around $1000 CAD. 
 

It was a massive pain in the butt to put the PC together because I chose the weirdest, least space-efficient case: the Deepcool Steam Castle. It was basically a cube with a cramped bottom compartment for the PSU and cables and a very spacious top compartment for just the motherboard. I deeply regret getting a non modular EVGA PSU because it came with a bajillion molex cables and SATA cables which I’ll never use. So the bottom is cramped AF. 
 

If you’re building a PC for the first time please get a regular ATX case with a power supply shroud. It will make all the difference when building your PC. Avoid “cube” cases. 
 

Funnily enough, I only ever played League of Legends, Stardew Valley and Hearthstone on that PC. So it was a giant waste of money. 

My ex has the PC now. 

[Lurick]

First build was in 2008 and I pushed the power button and nothing. I got super scared I ruined like $1000 of PC parts and messed something up but after fiddling around and worrying like crazy I realized I didn't plug in the supplemental CPU power. Once that was done it worked

[silicon_lottery]

It was beautiful. On October 1, 2017, I pushed the power button for the first time. Hearing the whirr of the fans and the screen blip to life literally brought tears to my eyes. Me and my family, in a labor of love, had spent four grueling hours on it, and it worked, first try.

I will never forget that moment - literal chills!

[TrainFan475]

I never actually built a pc all at once before. My build started in mid 2018 with a dell studio 540s tower. Core2 duo E7400, 4gb ram, 500gb hdd, igpu, windows vista. I gradually upgraded the parts until I had a whole new computer, the one I have now. I knew nothing about pc building when I started out and made a lot of dumb mistakes (eg. not applying thermal paste to a cpu). I've learned a ton since then, though I still wouldn't trust myself with custom watercooling.

[silicon_lottery]

2 minutes ago, TrainFan2020 said:

I've learned a ton since then, though I still wouldn't trust myself with custom watercooling.

Neither would I. I first learned about watercooling, and thought it was pretty interesting. A friend from school told me otherwise.

Quote

"Watercooling is like playing Russian roulette with thousands of dollars worth of silicon. If it goes fine, then everything's great. If even just one thing goes wrong, you're screwed."

A more apt comparison would be K-2SO's quote: "One blast and the whole system goes down."

I still don't trust myself (that much) with AIOs, but I'd prefer AIOs a thousand times more than custom loops.

[Mr Nobody]

Stressful. I was certain I would screw something up royally and make my $3000 investment worthless. I got the components installed and practically cried when I looked at the mess of wires that I needed to "cable manage" (if you can call what I did cable management).

 

And when I fired it up for the first time? Nothing. No BIOS, just fans running at 100%. I spent hours disassembling and reassembling trying to figure out what I did wrong, but eventually I gave up and called ASUS tech support, thinking it was possibly a dead motherboard. The extremely helpful tech support guy walked me through troubleshooting it, removing one component at a time, and then jumping it. The conclusion we came to was that it was either a dead motherboard or CPU, so I was proactive and just exchanged both.

 

But when I reassembled it and hit that power button....wow what a sigh of relief!

 

On the plus side with all the assembly and disassembly experience I can now tear down my PC completely in about 10 minutes, lol.

[silicon_lottery]

2 minutes ago, Mr Nobody said:

Stressful. I was certain I would screw something up royally and make my $3000 investment worthless

That's quite pricey for a first time build. I was also terrified I'd mess something up, so my build was relatively modest in terms of price. Didn't want to burn lots of silicon out if I turned it on and my PC went nuclear on me.

[nelska]

I did a LOT right and a LOT wrong. I bought stuff I didn't need or know I had. Uhm. i ran a mobo with a 3.1 usb gen 2 and m.2 slot without the driver for the usb or the m.2 nvme card for like 3 years before I knew it had them. I looked at the back one day and thought why is the one usb 3.0 slot teal and not blue like the others. I was like wtf. and then realized I bought something that I didn't need to. But glad I did. The only down side is you have to make sure to fill the mobo with all the stuff its suppose to be compatible with. I don't like having empty slots ect. fan ports ect. The only thing I have thats not fully loaded in my pc is the secondary pcie slots. So if your gunna build i would go with the least features that you actually need lol.

[TetraSky]

My first build? It was painful. These days, cases have rounded edges and what not inside. But back when I first built my PC... Lets just say, an old case would cut your fingers off if they could.

[Tristerin]

Frustrations because I had no patience.

[NineEyeRon]

Not great really but it works so good enough

[Radium_Angel]

Explosive.

My 1st PC build was in the AT days, where you could easily plug in the power connectors (there were two) "backwards", which I did unknowingly, flipped the switch and blew a hole right through the motherboard, tripping every circuit breaker in the house.

 

Once I corrected my mistake, I tried again, and it worked, even with the hole though the mobo.

This is why I am an Asus fan.

[silicon_lottery]

2 minutes ago, Radium_Angel said:

xplosive.

My 1st PC build was in the AT days, where you could easily plug in the power connectors (there were two) "backwards", which I did unknowingly, flipped the switch and blew a hole right through the motherboard, tripping every circuit breaker in the house.

I guess you could say it was a real blowout of a PC. (Sorry.)

I'm sorry for your loss, even if it had a hole through the motherboard.

please do not ban me for my terrible pun

[Mr Nobody]

2 hours ago, silicon_lottery said:

That's quite pricey for a first time build. I was also terrified I'd mess something up, so my build was relatively modest in terms of price. Didn't want to burn lots of silicon out if I turned it on and my PC went nuclear on me.

I have a bad habit that when I do something, I tend to do it big.

 

[Nine Tailed Fox]

I forgot to put the motherboard standoffs in and shorted it out lol

[silicon_lottery]

Just now, Nine Tailed Fox said:

I forgot to put the motherboard standoffs in and shorted it out lol

Ouch. Did you have to get a new motherboard, or were you able to salvage the old one?

[Nine Tailed Fox]

Just now, silicon_lottery said:

Ouch. Did you have to get a new motherboard, or were you able to salvage the old one?

Luckily everything still worked after I put them in

[Radium_Angel]

4 hours ago, silicon_lottery said:

I guess you could say it was a real blowout of a PC. (Sorry.)

I'm sorry for your loss, even if it had a hole through the motherboard.

please do not ban me for my terrible pun

Heh, this is why I like Asus, even with the hole completely through the mobo (Asus) it still worked...

but good pun.

Now you are banned! 

[Jae Tee]

For me it was real easy. I never gamed at the time and it was shortly after Ryzen came out. So i built the classic No GPU PC build, using the Ryzen 5 2400g APU. Of course i wanted to game shortly afterwards so i found a gr8 deal on a gtx 1060 3gb mini. My only upgrade since was my cpu to a R 5 2600x.

[4stringstargazer]

I'm still daily drive my first build. Trinity A10 APUs had just hit the market, and I managed to snag one with a damaged box for $25 off. Still run that same chip, motherboard, case, and PSU. I've replaced the case and heatsink fans with Noctuas, upgraded RAM sticks, second HDD, and upgraded from a Radeon HD 7770 after it bit the dust to a GTX 970 that a buddy of mine gave me for this last Christmas.

The build itself was fairly straight forward, since I did myself a few favors by buying a case with plenty of room, a motherboard with a good layout, and semi-modular PSU. I did have some problems POSTing at first, but the issue cleared on it's own after I reseated the RAM and gave the power connections a solid wiggle, so not sure what caused it there.

It was my second scrapyard build that I learned 3 major lessons: Don't use cheap no-name PSUs, make sure you're properly grounded, take off your stainless steel wedding ring, and electrical discharges leave a lot of black carbon-like crap all over your ring when it's done shocking the hell out of you.

[silicon_lottery]

3 minutes ago, 4stringstargazer said:

electrical discharges leave a lot of black carbon-like crap all over your ring when it's done shocking the hell out of you.

Wow, that's quite shocking. I'm glad I wasn't the one in your current situation.

Did you have to go Ohm and clean the ring?

(Sorry for the puns, by the way. Building PCs is really electrifying.)

[4stringstargazer]

17 minutes ago, silicon_lottery said:

Wow, that's quite shocking. I'm glad I wasn't the one in your current situation.

Did you have to go Ohm and clean the ring?

(Sorry for the puns, by the way. Building PCs is really electrifying.)

It really did hertz a lot. And the carbon-stuff turn out to have major resistance to cleaning. I just went a replaced it with my current tungsten ring.

[silicon_lottery]

Well played. 

 

[butre]

I've been taking shit apart since I was a wee lad and by the time I built my first computer I had gotten pretty good at getting them back together too, so there wasn't any real drama with it.  I put the parts where they fit and it fired right up first try.  was a nice slot 1 pentium 2, the 400 mhz model because I was ballin but not ballin enough for the 450, a voodoo 2, and a whopping 256 megabytes of ram in a salvaged gateway case with a side window cut in