What was your first experience with building computers?

[Adorable Cat]

For me it was a few years ago, one of my stepdads friends had some old (2004-2006) prebuilt computers lying around that I could have for free, and until then I'd only had a laptop. None of them were very useful but I enjoyed learning they all went together, and then built my own with used parts a few months later.

[doggg]

last year i built a half decent system (my first build) but i had always wanted to build and had been watching tech channels for years. Was an i5 8400/gtx 1060 build. Ran pretty smooth. Passed it down to my brother a few weeks ago and built what I'd like to think of as my dream pc, specs in the signature  

[BigRom]

About 15 years ago watching my cousin exasperatedly trying to cable manage a whole load of IDE HDD cables so that it would not block the fans for better airflow, and accidentally tearing them because IDE cables are shit

 

IIRC, SATA was still quite a new thing and most computers at the time were still running with IDE cables for the HDD. Not to mention stuff like floppy drives were very much still a thing as you had optical drives, the optical discs itself were still stupid expensive

[r2724r16]

24 minutes ago, Adorable Cat said:

What was your first experience with building computers?

Troubleshooting a "dead" computer by disassembling it and then reassembling it.

[Retro_R]

I don't know if this is what you mean, but my first build was about 6 months ago. Was actually pretty easy

[Tristerin]

Going to Best Buy, buying a GPU that had an AGP slot, got home couldn't fit in board.  Went back, had to get a PCI GPU.  Didn't understand why their was a problem.

[Founders]

Here's my first custom build. Isn't it great?  I can't remember the first time I started tearing apart computers but I've been doing it for 20 years and I still love it. 

 

[Ravendarat]

I built one back in 2009 ish with a pair of 6880's in crossfire and an amd processor but I dont remember which one. Then I didnt build a second one until earlier this year where I went 2700x and a 2080ti, i have since upgraded the board and processor as well as went full open loop, you could say I got bit by the bug hard and have progressed rapidly lol

[amdorintel]

back in the day we bought kits and soldered our own desktop computers.

that was the dinosaur age

 

a lot of pc's later, until mid to late 1990's

its a cake walk to build your own pc.

 

 

 

 

[DJboutit]

I have never done a full computer build I have done some upgrades before like swapping out a power supply video card sound card add hard drives added a usb card.  I have also replace some faulty connectors the parts they were connected to were just fine.  I do not think I could do a full computer build I do have the skill and tools to do it.  I have been tinkering with computers since like 2006. 

[dgsddfgdfhgs]

everything started in 2012, my brother and I decided to build a pc, and I was overseas and will return in a few weeks time. he suddenly bought a 2500 in stead of 2500k as agreed and built by himself

[tatte]

It took place in 2007. I put together some awful list of parts that my friend thankfully sorted out. Judging by the lack of case, I'm guessing I started with my old case (and HDD, naturally). Prior to this I had only swapped the GPU a couple of times (Radeon 9250 and 7600GS). Coming from a Celeron, the immeasurable bump in general feeling of the system this build delivered has at best been replicated by SSDs, but no CPU upgrade has ever come close.

Quote

BX80557E2160        INTEL DUAL CORE E2160 1.8GHZ 800/1M S775   1   71.05 EUR
HEC420TDPTX/R       HEC 420W POWER SUPPLY RETAIL               1   61.66 EUR
NE/850TS+TD21       PALIT GF 8500 GT PCIE 256MB GDDR-3 SONIC   1   84.56 EUR
IP35                ABIT S775 IP35 ATX DDR2 SATA2 GLAN HD FW   1   82.04 EUR
KVR667D2N5K2/2G     2GB 667MHZ DDR2 NON-ECC CL5 DIMM KIT       1   43.47 EUR

Sadly I don't remember anything about the original building process anymore (did it alone, didn't break anything). New case followed a month later, I added a fan to the CPU funnel but placed it backwards as I didn't realise which way CPU fan blew (same friend from earlier enlightened me on this too). 8600GT entered the scene a month after that. I played Crysis with the 8500, which in retrospect was probably the first thing hinting at my future as a console peasant.

 

I put Arctic Cooling Accelero S1 Rev.2 on the GPU, and were able to run it passive (but chose to strap fans to it anyway, because it provided more to do, and tinkering, no matter how pointless, was the name of the game back then). At one point I bought a second 8600GT, but thanks to doing 0 research couldn't figure out how to get both of them to work, and just resold it soon after. Probably sounds like I shouldn't have, but I started overclocking with this system.

 

I ended up with IP35-PRO through warranty replacement, and went on swapping the CPU and upgrading the GPU over the years, ending up with E6300 or E6400 and GTX 9800GTX+ by the time it was time for my second and so far last all-new-at-once build (2011). I miss not having to use half the budget on the GPU, and relevant amounts of DDR2 got so ridiculously cheap when DDR3 started rolling in.

[wafflehaus]

I was pulling apart 486's in primary school.

 

I really got into mucking around with early Pentiums in the late 90's and built my own full then-current spec PC when I was 18. AMD Athlon 1200.

[Gegger]

my first pc was a family pc, a dell dimension e521 with an athlon x2 5000+, that's when i really got hooked on computers/tech(i was like 5)

 

my mom then got a really shitty hp laptop, don't remember which model/series. that was when i had my first experience with games except for minesweeper on the e521

 

my first hands-on experience was earlier this year when i decided to clean out the aforementioned dell e521

 

a month ago i went to a friend's house and did a complete disassembly and reassembly of an old emacs machine, then upgraded his rig

[MartinKweh]

I was 12 then. i was like buy this buy that and i ended up with a $1000 PC with bad specs for 2008 I think i had a 4870 and a core 2 quad that i cant remember which one.

[atxcyclist]

I was ten in 1994, and threw the components of an IBM XT together in my grandfather's shop room. 4.7mhz, 640k ram, 20mb hard drive, legit Hercules graphics, it was pretty sweet.

[NineEyeRon]

Replacing GPU, fans, drives, RAM and PSU in my prebuilt PC over nearly a decade.

[mr moose]

Marveling that this 3Kg chunk of steel could hold a massive 20MB of programs.   Then trying to convince my brother that our PC was only an 086 and couldn't run windows as it needed a 386.  That was my first experience with min requirements and the never ending need for the latest hardware just to play elvira and the colonels bequest. 

 

Yep, people these days whinge because Intel only support for 2 generations,  today a midrange system will last 6+years adequately, when I started you had to upgrade almost every generation or you couldn't play the next round of games.  I remember watching friends play commander keen whilst I was still looking at a monochrome monitor.

[Bombastinator]

I vaguely recall an attempt to update an old penguin III that turned into a mess.

[jones177]

The first PC I built was in 1989. It was a 286 inside a Amiga A2000 chassis.  It ran MS Dos in a widow and I used it to create business apps with dBace. It had its own HDD and later was upgraded to a 386.

The first real PC I built was a Pentium 1 in 2003. It was also my first tower.  About 3 months earlier I bought a 486 clone(compUSA) to play Doom and the Pentium was to play user created levels(mods) smoother. This was the start of my hardware choices being mod driven that continues to this day. 

I used the case until beige was no longer a thing. 

 

  

[rcmaehl]

My first completely custom PC was in September of 2012. I built a Phenom II X4 965 BE system on a Asrock 970 Extreme III with 8GB of RAM and a 1TB HDD but I had upgraded prebuilts for at least 6 years before that and disassembled my Acer Aspire 4720z more times than I can count.

[Lord Letto]

Mine was in 2013 & went good IIRC:

AMD FX-4100+Cooler Master Hyper 212 Plus+some Arctic Silver Ceramique 2 for $60 Canadian

Gigabyte 990FXA-UD3 for $85

OCZ GamexStream 700W PSU+2x4GBKingston HyperX 1600MHz DDR3+500GB Seagate 7200RPM HDD for a 24 of Beer (about $30 IIRC)

EVGA GTX 560ti 2GB for $120

BitFenix Outlaw for $35+tax on clearance from Canada Computers

[Kawaii Koneko]

With building? Honestly, for a good part of my computer life I just used pre-built systems. Mostly because early on, I was a minor with no disposable income so I just took whatever my parents bought. Eventually, when I had my own money to spend I started mostly using laptops because I wanted something portable and got more into console gaming. I only had so much cash so building a PC was always something I wanted to do but just kept getting put on the back burner.

 

I think the first thing I could call building was when I converted an aging P4 3Ghz machine I had into an HTPC. I can't even remember the brand right now lol. It was a tower PC so I took a super outdated machine in one of those cases you can set a monitor on, gutted it out, and swapped over everything from the tower. Mind you that this was during the earlier years of 1080p content. There was no way it could handle 1080p content but it was also around the time more and more cards starting having x264 decoders built-in. So I bought an NVidia G210 and then it handled 1080p playback flawlessly. I also bought a Blu-ray burner for it so I could rip Blu-rays. 

 

Much anime was consumed on that machine. I still have it sitting around but it was retired from use years ago.

 

The first machine I built 100% from scratch is my current build.

 

Now that I'm gaming more on PC again, having a desktop makes sense again and now I'm well passed the point where I would consider anything pre-built.

[Kisai]

On 11/17/2019 at 4:32 PM, Adorable Cat said:

For me it was a few years ago, one of my stepdads friends had some old (2004-2006) prebuilt computers lying around that I could have for free, and until then I'd only had a laptop. None of them were very useful but I enjoyed learning they all went together, and then built my own with used parts a few months later.

I built a 286 from spare parts.

 

Hot tip for people who are nervous about putting their hands in their computer. You won't feel bad about it until you kill at least one motherboard. I killed two MB's (a 386 and a 486) before I learned which parts not to hot-plug. Now considering that you can now hotplug several PC parts things in now (where you weren't supposed to hotplug anything in during the pre-USB days,) it's still a crapshoot if it will work since it requires OS, driver and BIOS support. Like it's a crapshoot just to hotplug USB flash drives at boot and ethernet adapters in TODAY.

 

(The 386, I blew a chunk out of the ISA slot, and the modem never worked properly after)

[Otto_iii]

My first experience i was very young and my dad did most of the real work, i just sat there watching and confused, intimidated ,i don't really count it.  In HS i pieced together a build but had a shop put it together.  Later I inheretted some crappy but usable computer in that time period, had a Pentium 4 in 2012ish which everybody laughed at me for (hey it could still play some games!), eventually did the deed of putting a GPU and PSU in a cheap-used pre-built after i got tired of my more expensive completely pre-built system i had bought to replace the Pentium 4 rig previously mentioned.  Although simple this did garner some confidence in myself.

Finally, very recently i decided i should try it for myself, after watching a bunch of people on youtube do it 1000 times over.  Honestly the scariest part for me was putting the CPU Cooler on and getting the ram in (i'd tinkered with my ram before but the slots only open on one side with this motherboard so i was unsure if it worked them same way, required more force then i expected)  Wiring which scared me with pre-built systems was much less confusing as the case i bought managed the cables well, and i had seen all the parts and plugs already, trickiest part of that was figuring out front-panel connectors but no big deal. 

It was pretty cool, i wondered why i hadn't done it sooner, but then thinking about it i wouldn't have wanted to with older motherboards (im on AM4) that became obsolete with every new generation, it finally made sense and im happy i did it.