What things should I avoid in my first pc build?

[NeedAdviceOnBuildingAPC]

I have watched a few videos on this and I have researched but I am simply looking for tips etc.

[Bombastinator]

26 minutes ago, NeedAdviceOnBuildingAPC said:

I have watched a few videos on this and I have researched but I am simply looking for tips etc.

Static electricity.  It can eat your components and shorten their lives without you even noticing. 
 

Fear.  As long as you carefully follow the instructions and don’t improv it’s a lot like tinkertoys. (Legos?) everything is modular.

 

sloppiness.  Just because it’s modular doesn’t mean it’s fault tolerant.  If something isn’t working make sure you didn’t just fail to seat something correctly or plug it in to the wrong place.

[Dedayog]

53 minutes ago, NeedAdviceOnBuildingAPC said:

I have watched a few videos on this and I have researched but I am simply looking for tips etc.

Do you want to know tips on parts or on the physical build process?

[LloydLynx]

Quote

What things should I avoid in my first pc build?

Windows and DRM software

 

I'm kiding, mostly...

 

You should avoid using a machanical drive for the boot drive. Installing the OS on an SSD will give you a much faster, snappier, and less frustrating experience. An SSD doesn't use moving parts so there's no waiting for physical parts to move around to fetch and write data. The difference is astonishing, like a completely different computer. 

[Somerandomtechyboi]

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Static electricity.  It can eat your components and shorten their lives without you even noticing. 

I literally throw mobos on my bed and they work totally fine

 

static electricity fear is overexaggerated, no you dont need one of those dumb looking bracelet thingys to ground yourself, though its not exactly reccomended to go throwing your boards on a bed and especially not a carpet but having said board die is next to impossible unless your bed or carpet has absurd amounts of static electricity

 

5 hours ago, Bombastinator said:

Fear.  As long as you carefully follow the instructions and don’t improv it’s a lot like tinkertoys. (Legos?) everything is modular.

Definitely this

 

Most fears with pcs are just ridicolous like "oH nO iS mY cPu GoNnA dIe BeCaUsE iTs RuNnInG aT a MeAgEr 1.4V?" Or some variant of that alongside the previously mentioned static electricity

 

also fears surrounding overclocking due to retards out there spreading garbage like degradation voltages being able to kill hardware when in reality killing hardware with voltage happens in an instant and at a certain volt and up (ex 45nm dying at 2.2v+), again overexaggeration of fears, also killing hardware via bios is next to impossible most of the time unless you got a bios capable of setting murder voltages like giga ep45 being able to for some reason set all the way to 2.3v vcore which is certain death for 45nm cpus but very rare to find a bios like that. though you can dive into oc later on, gains nowadays are pretty small so its not really important but if you want that extra 5-10% sure theres literally no risk with sane voltages and impossible to kill hardware

 

Then theres also the fear of putting pressure on things cause it feels like its gonna break the first time you do it, like putting that god damn 24 pin or mounting the cpu with the socket retention, feels like you are gonna break something but its totally normal, you can put loads of pressure on the 24 pin and cpu mounting, im already dull to this fear since ive done this problably hundreds of times now since i run a testbench and i swap around hardware frequently

[Bombastinator]

Static isn’t a big deal for boards. Or even stuff attached to boards. It’s memory and CPUs it can eat or shorten the life of. You need little tiny tiny wires for static to potentially fry stuff.  Interestingly static issues with memory seemed to me to lower when most memory got heat sinks.  Dunno why.  

Edited December 14, 2022 by Bombastinator