Maybe Building Your Own PC is a BAD Idea

[marcgii]

 

XDDDDDDDDD

[StackUnderflow]

24 minutes ago, sydh said:

What was the point of this video? To show that people can build a pc while COMPLETELY ignoring any provided instructions? They were there for a reason, use them.

Yeah I was wondering this throughout the video. Both my case and motherboard came with instructions on how to install everything. 

 

I wonder if it's because they pulled this stuff out of their warehouse instead of buying new (as witnessed by the pre-opened RAM clips), and whoever used that part for a build before she did didn't put the instructions back in the box. 

 

[daze_]

6 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Not sure I agree with the conclusion.  

 

The best way to get into building your own PC is to start with a pre built ... then upgrade the parts as time goes on.  

Say you buy a standard HP pre built with a Ryzen 4000 APU  and one expansion slot.  This gives you a known working state to start from.  Then over time you acquire a dGPU when the price is reasonable.  Then you get a Ryzen 5950X when they are more available.  

The whole time you have a working computer, and if you break one of the parts you get you have a working state you can return to.   The hard part of building your own PC right now is the utter impossibility of finding a dGPU at a reasonable price AND the lack of an available and up to date APU.  

 

PLUS if you do break something most manufacturers will restore it to the working state it was when when they sold it to you.  At least that was my experience. 

 

First thing I did that resembled "building" a PC was adding a "blazing fast" 2400 bps Modem to my Tandy 1000 RL so I could use PCLink (AOL before it was AOL) CompuServe, Prodigy, then the internet before the World Wide Web. (They aren't identically the same thing you know).   Second thing was 4-5 years latter on a Tandy sensation 2 upgrading the Intel 486 SX to  AMD  AM5x86 or AM6x86 processor back when they had the same socket and heat sinks were either passive or not needed at all. 

After that experience I was able to buy a bare bones PC and slap together my next computer and put Linux on it around the turn of the century. 

TLDR buy a pre built learn how to take it apart and put it together and have it still work, learn how to add things to it.  Then putting a computer together will be a snap.  You'll also retain the knowledge longer. 

Hard disagree. If you buy off the shelf prebuilts like Dell, they have their own whack layouts and standards. Parts may not be swappable into them, and can be constrained by things like PCIe power connectors, SATA ports, memory lockouts, the list goes on.  You end up just learning about the quirks of that specific prebuilt.

 

Your replies boil down to "well just don't do that to the prebuilt." Well... why not just do a custom build where you aren't constrained? Upgrading a prebuilt is budget oriented for me.

[plurus]

35 minutes ago, sydh said:

What was the point of this video? To show that people can build a pc while COMPLETELY ignoring any provided instructions? They were there for a reason, use them.

 

Entertainment is a valid reason too. 

[Arika]

Sarah: *Wiggles GPU up and down*

off camera guy: *panicked* "don't do that"

Sarah: "what, this?" *wiggles GPU up and down*

off camera guy: "STOP"

 

i was waiting for the PCIe slot to just snap off

[Spotty]

14 minutes ago, Arika S said:

Sarah: *Wiggles GPU up and down*

off camera guy: *panicked* "don't do that"

Sarah: "what, this?" *wiggles GPU up and down*

off camera guy: "STOP"

 

i was waiting for the PCIe slot to just snap off

Sarah's just testing the motherboard manufacturer claims about super strong tough ultra durable armored PCIe slots.

[Egg-Roll]

But Samsung makes really good products (eventually)

the path and price to victory:

(seriously I've lost count the number of times they have had issues), yet I still bought a Evo

 

Also what is up with the audio from day 2?

 

Also while watching this video I cried and died a little bit while laughing, my first computer I basically yolo'd it and I wasn't this bad.

 

Sara with thermal paste:

 

As to why she wasn't watching a LMG video? when I googled how to install a sata ssd all I got was Kingston videos, called first click or no click. The video she watched was #2 on my results when I added 2.5". Google = gut instinct, not visit LTT.com for 99.999% of the world.

Side note: Next time point a camera at the poor crew recording such a video, at 20 minutes I would of loved to see what she saw

[Mark Kaine]

8 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

The best way to get into building your own PC is to start with a pre built ... then upgrade the parts as time goes on.  

 

8 hours ago, Mister Woof said:

I'd like to say I disagree with this, but for most people they started with the family PC which was a prebuilt.

Exactly,  that's the thing,  it seems easy for the most part,  but only if you have some experience...

 

My last pc before I built my current one was indeed a hp pre-built "gaming pc without a gpu" in 2007 and I knew I'd need a gpu so I bought one slapped it in there and also bought 500mb RAM for what would be around $100 today (lol wow?) and also slapped it in...  it was overall really simply and great upgrades that made the pc actually a gaming pc, and also gave me at least "some" experience... oh and I also worked in a computer repair shop for a while where I obviously learned a lot of things,  mainly hardware wise,  so that all helped when I built my first non pre-built pc in 2017 otherwise I'd be completely overwhelmed  ... and videos help but they often don't show every thing like cabling etc, probably because it's deemed "boring" which is extremely frustrating tbh, because it's exactly what you'd need to see as a "newbie".

 

Well, it still booted first try but I think it took like 8 hours overall to build... having decided to buy a inwin case didn't help  

 

Still,  I really like it, wish it had better airflow though (at least it's better than nzxt lol, proved by myself, oof)

[atxcyclist]

Ever been stressed watching someone else do something?

 

Yeah...

[SeanChronicR]

Sarah did a pretty good job overall I like this kind of content is really fun and refreshing... and nostalgic we were all Sarah when we built our first rigs.. I think it’s a shame GPU supply and demand are the way that they are right now it sets the bar unreasonably high for entry... atm

 

also I like how Linus cringe at how she handles some of the things I literally screamed at the TV “Okay this is coming from Linus whose butterfingers are the stuff of legend”

[FakeATF]

5 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

So you don't buy a 3080.   

 

Problem solved. 

That's not an argument lol.

 

Just because you don't need a 3080 doesn't mean I don't need one. You seem to be of the mentality that "I think it's an excellent solution, so it must be the solution for everybody!"

[Uttamattamakin]

1 hour ago, Mark Kaine said:

 

Exactly,  that's the thing,  it seems easy for the most part,  but only if you have some experience...

 

Everyone has to start somewhere. 

 

It's like.  Imagine if people decided to build a car from a kit (people do that) but instead of a kit where everything is designed to work they just went down to an auto parts store and bought parts to put together their own car?  Then the people who are enthused by that say that they should just be able to watch a few videos and without ever looking inside a car and seeing how to take one apart ... assemble a whole Porsche 911 or Tesla model 3 from spare parts.   It's easy to forget how perplexing the insides of a computer can be. 

 

3 hours ago, daze_ said:

Hard disagree. If you buy off the shelf prebuilts like Dell, they have their own whack layouts and standards. Parts may not be swappable into them, and can be constrained by things like PCIe power connectors, SATA ports, memory lockouts, the list goes on.  You end up just learning about the quirks of that specific prebuilt.

 

Did you read what I wrote?  

The first two computers I learned how to install parts into were made by Tandy.  Tandy had their own standards for audio and video.   Everything about the computer was bespoke.  EXCEPT the CPU, Bios and the IDE and ISA.  Yet I learned the principles it took to eventually build a computer.  I got comfortable with what the insides of a computer looked like and worked like. (In fact Tandy computers were so different software was even written specifically to run on them.  There were Tandy Desk Mate versions of Lotus 1-2-3 and other such software.  Desk Mate was their own Windows 2.0 like GUI.)  

Going pre-built means you are constrained.  So does choosing a particular motherboard and case.  As soon as you pick a CPU   Intel VS AMD you can't decide to change that.  The difference is they get to have a computer that works.  

 

Not everyone wants a computer out of a sheer joy of building computers. 

 

 

[tire]

little confused, I don't see why she's on a budget, last I checked, lmg has a bunch of 30 series cards and Ryzen 5000 chips that she could have used to make a budget mid range system with, but good job anyway

[Warin]

I don't understand why Linus didn't short circuit the whole dramatically overprices video card equation by pretending Sarah was in the VAG program and letting her "buy" a 3060 at retail. 

[Aveniform]

12 hours ago, Mister Woof said:

 

I'd like to say I disagree with this, but for most people they started with the family PC which was a prebuilt.

For me, when I finally became really interested in PC's (we had used Tandy 1000, 486SX2, but I wasn't that into the hardware aspect at the time) it was an IBM Aptiva with an AMD K6-2 with integrated Rage Pro graphics. While I didn't specifically upgrade that, the fact it was so difficult to upgrade was the catalyst for me becoming interested in assembling my own PC (which ended up being a Pentium III 450mhz on a 440BX board).

 

So yeah, most of us start out with a prebuilt family PC I would say. The model and spec just shifts over time, I think. Older people will be Apple IIs or something, and younger people will be newer stuff.

I think nowadays it's more likely to be a "family laptop" or "mom's old iPad" rather than a general-use PC, at least according to my anecdotal observations. I'm sure a lot of households still have an old family prebuilt PC on which the child gets their first (frustrating!) computer experience, just that this number might drop off in the future.

[Aveniform]

8 hours ago, asquirrel said:

You fail to understand my point. So you buy a new Dell and decide to upgrade the GPU. You bought it with a 1660 Ti, but you want to put a 3080 in. So you go to do that and...discover that the PSU only has a single 4-pin PCI-E power connector "You mean 6!" No. I mean 4, because Dell custom. "OK, no problem, let me change out the power supply."

 

So you buy a new PSU. You go to plug in the 24-pin connector only to find that Dell does not use a 24-pin connector, so you can't plug in your new PSU to the motherboard. So now you need a new motherboard. You get the motherboard and discover the case mounting points don't match any ATX spec (matx, itx, atx, etc). So now you need a new case.

I'm fairly certain there are adapters on eBay that allow nonsense proprietary OEM PSU connectors (cough cough Dell, Lenovo, HP, etc) to plug up to a standard 24-pin connection on the motherboard

[Kisai]

12 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Not sure I agree with the conclusion.  

 

The best way to get into building your own PC is to start with a pre built ... then upgrade the parts as time goes on.  

 

Eh, it depends on where the starting point actually is. I've seen (on this forum, and over the last 25 years, many other places) where people go "I bought a Dell/HP/Compaq/Gateway/etc X years ago, what can I upgrade?" but by the time they've made that decision to upgrade, nothing fits or is no longer compatible.

 

Let's roll back the clock to mmm 1990 or so, when books like this existed. Back then, no plug and play, everything used ISA cards, and it was a crap-shoot if X part worked with Y. If you didn't know what you were doing, it wouldn't even boot, maybe even let the magic smoke out.

 

But every part fit every case. Only if you were opting to change the CPU did things start to get more complicated. 

 

Today, it's entirely possible to buy parts, that not only do not fit together, while brandishing compatibility keywords, but parts that fit together that don't electrically work together. Yikes.

 

Just to use a more recent example, when I purchased the GTX 1080, a few years ago, I didn't know it wouldn't fit the existing case, so I had to upgrade the chassis with what NCIX had in the store if I didn't want to run it without a chassis at all. Now with the RTX parts, all of them require 3 PCIe slots of space, which guess what, my 7 year old motherboard wouldn't be able to fit, but all X590 motherboards have moved the spaces down one slot.

 

We've gone from having 8 usable expansion slots in 1990 to only one in 2021. Due to Intel and AMD not putting enough PCIe lanes and not having the ability to steer unused lanes to other slots. The heatsinks on GPU's and other expansion cards have also made it so every second expansion card space is unusable as well. So you're lucky if you can even use two PCIe cards, as the GPU will take the space of 3, and the next two cards take the space of two each.

 

A re-think is needed here, as much as I hate "riser" cables, perhaps it's time to put the GPU on a riser cable as standard, and have a 3-slot-width mount in the chassis that supports the GPU in a vertical orientation that is both thermally efficient and structurally solid for shipping and typical use.

 

So let's assume for a minute that you could get a pre-build that has space for a 3090 in it. Chances are the power supply will be dramatically under-powered for it. So you replace that, and find out that the chassis doesn't fit the GPU either, so you replace it. But then the clearance on the OEM's motherboard won't allow it to fit either. 

 

Hence why in many cases, a pre-build is not a good starting point if the two key components (CPU and GPU) don't fit your needs at purchase time. Who knows, maybe next year nVidia, AMD and Intel will make all their GPU's take 4 slots and require 6 x 8-pin connectors next time.

 

It's ridiculous, but if you want to start from a pre-build you have to initially min-max the initial configuration so that when you decide to upgrade a part, you're not throwing away half the system just to kowtow to the mechanical or electrical fidgityness of that one part. 

 

On the other hand, you could also just only buy a prebuild and never touch it again, and that's why you'd pick Dell or HP, because there are no parts that you could reasonably upgrade without throwing away half the system.

 

[dperolio]

Can anyone tell me what keyboard this is?

[komar]

14 hours ago, Uttamattamakin said:

Not sure I agree with the conclusion.  

 

The best way to get into building your own PC is to start with a pre built ... then upgrade the parts as time goes on.  

Not sure when we got our first PC in the household, but it was good 12-15 years ago.

It ended up being a cycle of each year spending X amount to fix it or "upgrade" it.

 

End result was a motherboard which supported Q Extreme CPUs, Pentium 4 single core, GT520 and some of the crappiest and cheap PSU and HDD. The win XP install was so f*cked up, it couldnt even open my computer for atleast a minute.

 

My mother argument, when I said "this is POS needs to be replaced" was: "I pay X amount of money every year, it cant be that bad, they said it will be able to play games!!!".  Well I made her actually sit and use it - 5 minutes later she ripped the power cable out since it wouldnt turn off even. Later that same week she bought a laptop....

 

What I ment to show with that story: "Upgrading parts as time goes on" is a bad idea for someone who doesnt understand and/or care. They will go to a shop where intentionally or not, the majority will get ripped off and just spend their money without much gain.

 

 

 

 

[GxAbdullah]

14 hours ago, James said:

PC Secret Shopper returns - with a twist. In this episode, Agent Sarah investigates the experience of building a computer herself with the help of PCPartPicker to determine whether it's better to buy a pre-built PC, or DIY.

 

 

 

 

Linus: Why is she not watching Linus Tech Tips.

 

Butt: What I remember from watching our previous videos.

 

 

Linus: 

 

 

The Best video ever in 2021!

[WereCatf]

I can't be arsed to read the whole thread, just stating my opinion/reaction:

I think Sarah did actually a pretty good job, overall, given her total lack of experience. She did at least attempt to find answers to her questions online, which many people even here on the forums can't manage to do, so that's definitely a big plus for her. Though, she really should have looked at the various manuals that came with the components.

 

Not exactly relevant, but I also really like Sarah a lot more than Madison or what her name was.

[darknessblade]

SOOO.... DID anyone suggest Sarah to buy a cheapo 2nd hand GPU and wait till the prices are back to normal?

[Uttamattamakin]

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

Eh, it depends on where the starting point actually is. I've seen (on this forum, and over the last 25 years, many other places) where people go "I bought a Dell/HP/Compaq/Gateway/etc X years ago, what can I upgrade?" but by the time they've made that decision to upgrade, nothing fits or is no longer compatible.

 

Let's roll back the clock to mmm 1990 or so, when books like this existed. Back then, no plug and play, everything used ISA cards, and it was a crap-shoot if X part worked with Y. If you didn't know what you were doing, it wouldn't even boot, maybe even let the magic smoke out.

Don't forget having to make sure the IRQ's , or jumpers, or dip switches were set correctly.  The computer learned a lot on, from Tandy had those AND also had a bios that ran a GUI very similar to the one installed on their computers.  (All of it in ROM as the C drive so deceptively fast.) 

 

In 1990 thought not everything was as the same as you think / remember.  At that time it was still possible to buy a non Apple non PC compatible computer like an Amiga.  One had to buy the parts that would fit the computer, not buy the computer to fit the parts.  In turn the computer was bought for what it would actually do. 

 

You make a lot of good points but here is where things go a bit wrong  

 

10 hours ago, Kisai said:

 

So let's assume for a minute that you could get a pre-build that has space for a 3090 in it. Chances are the power supply will be dramatically under-powered for it.

 

This is an example of the ethos of a computer hardware enthusiast.  Not like the rank beginner / casual user like shown in this video.   Like the people who come here and ask what they can upgrade on their five year old computer they want to know what parts will fit their computer. 

So that might mean they forgo a 3070 3080 or 3090 and the best they can get is a 3060Ti.    Something comparable to a 2070 in a package that is a 1-1 replacement for a 10 series GPU.   In doing so the new person who has never upgraded a thing and won't be risking so much money on it.   It is a way to get the feet wet before going all in.  

As I said above, one does not build a car from scratch without first getting to know how to repair a car that already exist.  One does not build a airplane from a kit, and pilot it, without first having some experience with airplanes. Same with computers. 

[Uttamattamakin]

8 hours ago, komar said:

Not sure when we got our first PC in the household, but it was good 12-15 years ago.

It ended up being a cycle of each year spending X amount to fix it or "upgrade" it.

 

End result was a motherboard which supported Q Extreme CPUs, Pentium 4 single core, GT520 and some of the crappiest and cheap PSU and HDD. The win XP install was so f*cked up, it couldnt even open my computer for atleast a minute.

 

My mother argument, when I said "this is POS needs to be replaced" was: "I pay X amount of money every year, it cant be that bad, they said it will be able to play games!!!".  Well I made her actually sit and use it - 5 minutes later she ripped the power cable out since it wouldnt turn off even. Later that same week she bought a laptop....

 

What I ment to show with that story: "Upgrading parts as time goes on" is a bad idea for someone who doesnt understand and/or care. They will go to a shop where intentionally or not, the majority will get ripped off and just spend their money without much gain.

 

If what you want is a computer to be a showpiece instead of a workhorse ... then you are right. 

 

Let me ask you did the computer function?   As for a crappy windows XP install  the fix for that is to reinstall XP.   In fact your mothers attitude sounds like the kind one would learn from using a computer at a business.  Lots of businesses just upgrade as much as they can and if it ain't broke they don't fix it.    Think of how many old IBM cash registers you still see around.   Go to a lot of machine shops or science labs and you will see really old computers still being used because they just work.   

 

To understand what this video is saying we all have to try and think like people who are not like ourselves.  I'd LOVE to have a computer with at least three GPU's.  Two from Nvidia one from AMD so I could virtualize Windows to game on, in a Linux host (using Wayland), while being able to do CUDA calculations in linux.   I get that... I also get that this is not what most people would ever want or need. 

[Mister Woof]

Frist PC I assembled was 

 

Pentium III 450mhz (Slot 1)
Diamond Micronics Intel 440BX Motherboard

128MB PC100 Memory (Hyundai? IDK, whatever Fry's sold)

Antec PC case w/300w Power Supply. I think it is the SX630II based on photos.

Nvidia Riva 128 4MB

2xSTB Black Magic Voodoo2 12MB PCI cards

9.1GB Western Digital 7200RPM Hard Drive

Some NEC CRT monitor. Think it was 17".

Microsoft Ergonomic Keyboard and the Intellimouse. I think.

 

Those were already the easy days though, because as stated above I think we had Windows 98 already and you didn't have to worry so much about drivers as you did before.