The Verge’s $2000 PC Build Reaction Supercut
USB-C cable has entered the chat.
In theory, this is how it should work, but is often not the case.
If you just buy interoperable components without taking into consideration if they’re compatible, you’re running a risk of things not fitting.
What immediately comes to mind is GPU clearance to the case, as well as to the CPU cooling solution. The CPU cooler may not also fit the MOBO you want to use, protrude too much in the case, or have clearance problems with RAM. RAM could fit, but may need to be low profile accommodate the CPU cooler. Power supplies nowadays aren’t as straight forward in compatibility as they used to, since some GPUs may require a special plug(s).
Once that’s sorted, you can assemble like a Lego set, until something doesn’t work. You’re your own support person, so you need to know how to troubleshoot correctly. Did you switch the power supply on? Are the components seated properly? What do the debug LEDs say?
I’m no beginner PC builder, but my current build (first AM5 system) was a nightmare. Everything worked beautifully until I seated the GPU, which was the last item to arrive. MOBO debug LED said VGA issue and no output. Long story short, and two AM5 builds instead of one, it turned out to be a faulty CPU (9800X3D).
Had I gone with what the Internet forums suggested, and with no other AM5 system available to verify, I would have sent the GPU back and still have the issue. Luckily AMD RMA process is pretty straight forward (don’t throw away your boxes until some time after you’re done with the build!) The new CPU worked as expected, but that was the first time I’ve ever had an issue with a CPU. It worked fine via on-board HDMI, but no GPU in any possible configuration with the faulty CPU using two PCs worth of components would provide output. Everything is good now, and a family member made out with a decent 7800X3D system as a present :)
This isn’t building a PC, this is plugging one in.
And to the average person, there’s no difference regardless of how right you are.
This is the fastest part after the careful compatibility checks, purchases, opening of packages, attaching heat sink with thermal paste, and screwing in components.
The round peg goes in the…that’s right! It goes in the square hole
Yes!
https://youtu.be/baY3SaIhfl0
One of my favourite videos.You mean the ethernet shaped hole?
I’ve always described it as just playing with expensive legos.
Have you seen the cost of Lego nowadays? Those adult sets aren’t far off the cost of a PC!
Good point, the lego death star costs more than I paid for my pc. I guess it’s like playing with slightly cheaper electric legos.
Psu cable goes in psu :-D
turns on
finds out that cable was in fact not from that psu
Hmm, maybe I didn’t plug that SSD back in. Everything is connected prop… Oh no…
The only real times where I have to stop and think is when plugging in the case components (like the power button). But many a times have I seen people put a heat sink on a processor with no thermal paste, thankfully sellers have gotten better with packaging to make it obvious so people don’t get hundreds of dollars of components now.
There was a glorious time in the 90s when PC building had enough stuff going on and not yet enough safeguards that I could actually put things in wrong and start a small fire.
Those were exciting days. And sometimes expensive.
Magic smooooke
Those are the gases that made the computer engine run. You let them out and the engine dies.
Any machine can be a smoke machine if you use it wrong enough.
One time it worked to quickly turn off and pull out the smoking chip (cpu cache extender) flip it 180 degrees and try again. No apparent permanent damage.
wait, have they finally fixed the “i can plug in my psu wrong” problem? the stress of that at my job was bad enough i don’t want to do it on my home computers now i can’t afford to replace parts if i bork em
If it was possible I surely would have for my last two computers. At least mine came with nubs and corners that enforced one orientation.
If you mix cables, between power supplies, definitely still possible
Yeahhhh… It’s suuuuper easy!
Nothing can possibli go wrong…
The horror! Seriously, I actually made the courier stand for 3 minutes while I did the CPU pins check.
I usually use a razor blade to scrape all those fuckers off anyway. Don’t want any spikies poking my motherboard!
SMORT!!
Was there, used a plier.
Retract the lead in a mechanical pencil and slide it over the pin to bend it back.
I used the razor blade trick and got everything more or less aligned and upright enough that the processor is okay booting up with a second stick of ram in the machine lol
Tech YouTubers to the rescue lol, especially Linus and jayztwocents
Ugh I had to do this with an internal SCSI drive many years ago, it would only reliably save if you held the back of the cable in, otherwise the pin might short just enough that the operation wouldn’t work. But I was a broke Jr High kid so there was no choice. Bent pins give me nightmares to this day.
Had to do this recently and couldn’t believe it worked. https://lemmy.world/post/16160426
Haha sure, linus
I remember lifting one of these bent pins with a kitchen knife feeling like i probably was making the problem worse… but it ended up working fine
I call it “assembling” a PC instead of “building” because I feel like I’m lying otherwise…
are you even good enough to have imposter syndrome?
Love it.
USB cables fit into Ethernet ports. They will also go into HDMI ports if you force them. Source: Family
USB-C cable also fits into USB-A port. Don’t do it, your pc will shut down. Source: me, trying to blindly plug in the cable, twice.
Yes. I used to work in support… I have seen things you people wouldn’t believe.
I’ve seen computers on fire due to dust buildup. I’ve seen usb cables glitter in the darkness, stuck inside Ethernetports.
All these moments will be lost in time, like a ticket in the support system.
I worked in automotive electronics. Our cables use asymmetrical trapezoid connectors made from heavy duty plastic with metal reinforcement. There are mechanical hinges to put things in place and lock them only if everything is aligned.
We still had to do electrical tests against wrong connections because apparently people somehow still force them wrong way around.
I worked in automotive electronics
But did you work with AUTOSAR?
I resigned about when we started the switch to AUTOSAR. I’m happily in medical tech now.
Nicely dodged a major bullet, apparently.
I work in automotive R&D, it happens here as well.
I used to repair air traffic control radios and other equipment, everything from glide-slopes and runway lights to the air traffic control console itself.
I’m going to stop right there.
Bravo! Beautiful!
I have a universal hole that fits all of those.
So does my ex
We know
deleted by creator
The complexity lies in the when and why, not the where, what, or how.
I mean, when I tried to fit my corebooted Dell Precision T1650 board into a new case and noticed the messed up proprietary front panel terminals, the where/what/how quickly became a factor…
Had to pull 3V from the TPM before to power an LED, but that one doesn’t have a port, so I had to solder an adapter.
Kids these days don’t know the horrors of wrangling IDE ribbon cables and fiddling with jumpers.
MASTER SLAVE AUTO (auto never works)
But yeah fuck flat IDE cables. I don’t miss old computers a single bit
MASTER SLAVE AUTO! MASTER SLAVE AUTO!
curls into fetal position and moansWhy? It was easy, one master and one slave per cable. You set it once. What’s the problem?
Except those hard drives that had a picture of the jumper positions on the sticker, and it’s not clear which end is pin 1, so you have to play around with it until it works.
Is it not working cause the jumper is in the right spot? Is the drive bad? Is a BIOS setting not right? Is that kink in the cable a problem?
Its a problem if you don’t know to do it because the it is not intuitive if you aren’t familiar with hardware jumpers as a concept since this was one of the last holdovers from that era and befouled many a hobbyist. You build it and it “just doesn’t work” and “learn that jumpers are a thing” is pretty far down the list of things that most people troubleshoot when their new build won’t post.
Back in þe day, þere wasn’t much of an online to learn about jumper settings. I built a couple of PCs entirely by trial and error. I just remember back in 1990 it being a pretty horrible experience.
It was in the manual of any motherboard of the time… I built a lot of PCs before I even had internet, you just needed to rtfm.
Yeah you had to have a special cable or something for Auto to work.
The 80 wire one, with the blue connector inserted in your motherboard/controller card/whatever. I never had a build where the longer end of the cable fit good in that setup, so jumpered Master/Slave it was.
Me wondering for 4 hours why Windows 98 isn’t booting.
Yeah I’m stupid.
You just awakened a buried trauma in my mind
Autoexec.bat, config.sys
HIMEM.sys
I still have some flat IDE cables in my collection of cables. Just in case…
Right next to my ps/2 keyboard and mouse with serial adapter cause you never know.
I carried around a floppy drive (like through moves, not day to day) for a long time after I last used it but eventually realized tech has gotten to the point where I’ll probably never use one again.
But I did get an external bluray drive instead of throwing away all those discs I burned back in the day. Even though, in the process of checking them for data loss and ripping to move them to m-discs, I realized I didn’t really care if any had lost data (though none have so far).
And if you tried to run more than one HDD and got those jumpers wrong, it would let the magic smoke out of one of your drives.
I don’t remember it being that bad. I remember the system just wouldn’t detect the drive.
Yeah, that never happened. Smoke coming out of the drive would require a short, or power where power isn’t supposed to go.
Yeah, I dunno what to say besides that it happened to me twice. Probably close to 25 years ago while upgrading my 12GB HDD to a 80GB Seagate Barracuda, I decided to try running both drives together for a whopping 92GB of storage. Whatever jumper combination I tried first ended up with one of the drives not being recognized, so I tried another combination, either both master or both slave, and the control board on the 12GB drive let out the smoke and that drive was never able to be recognized again. I don’t remember exactly what happened the second time, but I know it happened twice because I felt really stupid about not learning my lesson from the first time. Not saying there couldn’t have been something else going on, but they had keyed IDE headers that couldn’t have been reversed and no other issues until I tried the incompatible jumper combination.
My guess is that you didn’t put on the jumper properly and accidentally shorted them out. I know I shorted out things back in those days by putting jumpers on wrong. But who knows, you might be right. It was so long ago and the effects of getting a setting wrong were often so much more serious back then.
So you missed out on needing a manual and adjusting 20 dip switches to make your build work.
I had one of these used (think the board had 5 dip switches) but never really used it, am under 40
I’m a bit over 40 but got to have some older computers at a young age. One of my boards had like 20 dip switches on it. I overclocked that shit to… 33Mhz.
I never used CS (Cable Select) after accidentally nuking a drive because I had two of the exact same model and it flipped the order on reboot… couldn’t figure out why it didn’t boot and then noticed I cloned the blank drive to the good drive…
That kind of shit is why I recheck things about five times before running such operations.
Right, it was cable select… Yeah SATA was a blessing. IDE / PATA really sucked
Jumpers, IRQ conflicts, out of memory for your drivers and program at the same time. Still hella fun. The front panel used to be an unlabeled, unstandardized mess.
SET Blaster=A220 I7 D1 H5 P330 T6
Remember having stacks of boot floppies for each game so you could optimize memory allocation depending on the need?
Ah yes because some things needed eXtended memory and some needed exPanded memory, and some things didn’t like drivers being loaded into high memory and some things didn’t like other things to be on certain ports or interrupts haha.
This game requires EMS memory to be allocated, and this other game requires XMS memory to be allocated! Hold on, gotta edit my AUTOEXEC.BAT.
Some of us automated that shit.
There were times when writing batch files was more fun than playing some of the shitty games I had back then.
Still suffix my paradox games’ run commands in steam
Used to?
Ahaha good point it’s making a comeback!
Hon, i remember the days when we had to manually set the cylinder and head count in the BIOS
The first time I installed an nvme… Like a 14th century peasant standing in front of the Vegas smiley face.
Same. I was like “this cannot possible be a hard drive and it cannot possible get plugged into that thing, that’s where the wifi card goes on a laptop.”
I was so traumatized by jumpers… when I built my first machine a few years ago, after over 20 years since the last time I looked inside one, I had to do one tiny minor thing with a jumper. I legit panicked and felt like I was about to permanently lose my brand new mobo. For absolutely no reason other than jumper involved. I don’t even recall bricking anything, maybe just my dad scaring the life out of me about it in the 80s.
24 pin ATX cables for the mainboard are still a pain tho. Also plugging in RAM sticks is still dangerous as fuck if you arent careful.
The good news is, as far as components go, RAM is fairly cheap… Oh no…
But were you around for dip switches?
Wrangling IDE cables with awkward angles so you couldn’t both see and touch the space at the same time. And the case edges were made of knives. And then, yeah, it wouldn’t boot and you’d have to figure out that your master/slave jumpers were incorrect as others have stated and have to remove, tweak and replace the drives.
Good times.
And even configuring master and slave as well as irq and dma manually was never really an issue if you knew what you were doing. (except edge cases)
But every million different clone manufacturer had their own jumper settings.
You needed to have the manual for everything, because you couldn’t look it up online.
That’s what I would call edge case, I stuck to reliable ones.
But fair point and possibly the availability was different everywhere too. Also, the older stuff was the worse it was. It got better over time with prints on boards and such.
I remember my first build with SATA and being really confused when I couldn’t find the jumpers.
Back when usb was first appearing on boards, some cases had their usb port cables broken out into individual pins that you needed to place in the correct order.
In the 90’s: “Sorry you set the CPU voltage jumpers wrong and you’ve fried it. No refunds.”
In the early 90s, Linux actually let you set hsync on your monitors, not just vsync. With a CRT you could literally fry it with an invalid number. Generally I wasn’t as cautious because I knew I could never really brick a computer, except for that setting.
It warned you about that, but I don’t think actually frying a monitor was common. I was cautious, but I still made mistakes and gave it values that my monitor couldn’t handle, but the worst that happened was a dangerous sound coming out of the monitor and no useful picture on the screen. I immediately shut off my monitor when that happened, but it didn’t do any permanent damage.
Probably a cheaply made monitor might have issues, but well built monitors had hardware protection against invalid settings.
Many of the older monitors could let the smoke out if you gave it the wrong horizontal frequency. The better made monitors would limit the horizontal frequency to a safe value and just not sync if the video signal was outside that range. The later monitors were smart enough to not even try to display and invalid signal and may even show an error message on screen.
Uhm… Won’t
sudo rm -rf /*also brick your modern PC, as it also deletes UEFI variables that are always mounted rw for technical reasons?Generally no. Most of those variables are mounted RO now. Additionally you can factory reset the board and recover. There were some systems a while ago when UEFI first came out that didn’t correctly manage that, but that hasn’t been a problem for years now.
I’m in this comment and I hate it.
I once somehow managed to plug in a molex upside down and got to watch the magic smoke escape from a 2GB Bigfoot drive. Sad day.
I built my first PC at about 12 years old, while watching a youtube tutorial, with no prior knowledge or experience whatsoever. So I think I can safely say it is pretty easy and straightforward.
Built mine about 12 years old before YouTube existed. Honestly can’t remember where i learned. I think i just guessed. I’d previously taken apart my parents because i was that kind of kid so that’s probably it. There’s not many things that can go in the wrong place and cause damage.
My dad saw me doing it and quit his job as a butcher to start a business doing pc repairs and sales. This was around 2001.
I read that as you took apart your parents because it was missing the possessive.
My kid has a marketable skill. I should quit my job and exploit it.
Gamer move right there
I built my PC in 2006ish so YouTube existed but I doubt anyone was doing PC building tutorials then. The thing that pushed me over the edge to building vs getting a pre built was seeing an episode of How It’s Made where they were building PCs and I was like damn that looks easy as shit, I was not wrong.
The complicated (not really) part that some people skip is doing cross referencing of motherboard and what hardware it supports, and memory tested to work with it.etc. So many posts about "Ive plugged in my ssd drive now my nvme doesn’t work ( or vice versa). Where the motherboard document clearly shows that nvme and sata port may be a shared on certain boards, so you have to use the other sata ports etc.
Or buying a GPU that is too long for the case, or a power supply that doesn’t have the outputs you need, or any of the rest of it.
90% of PC building are the choices you make before anything even goes in your cart.
Especially true if you don’t just care about compatibility but are doing research to get the best performance and value for your money.
Once the boxes arrive it’s just Lego :)
My friend bought a GPU that he had to mount externally bcausr he didn’t check case compatibility. So yah you are right some people make their mind up on choices before research and end up with incompatibility.
Another person ordered nvme and confused why it doesn’t work in m2 sata slot. I had to explain m2 is the form factor not the protocol…and their response is its the same connection it should work. Smh.
I feel like your example is quite contrived, and having been in the trenches often, I feel like this is rare, and probably not even worth it for the average pc builder to know outside of when they need to know.
Even then, thats more of a “people should really try to search before posting for help” than anything else, and that exists everywhere.
No, it was a common question on reddit PC building subs. Or why is my sata ssd slow now I have added an nvme.
Or buying a memory brand that isn’t compatible with the hardware.
Or in my friends case buying a GPU that he had to mount externally because it didn’t fit in the case.
People just order stuff and hope for the best it seems
You have to remember that what you are basing your image of the common PC builder on, contains massive selection bias.
People who are just building their pcs silently, or who run into issues, but solve them themselves aren’t going to be posted.
That leaves the people willing to put forth the least effort outside of posts asking for opinions on builds (as well as completely reasonable people who are stuck).
I do think many people don’t really learn about everything that would be necessary, but thats largely one of the benefits of humanity; people not having to learn about everything.
I think people often ask a tech person they know for opinions, and sometimes that communication is muddied or that person doesn’t know as much as they profess, but I doubt that a sizeable portion of people are just completely yoloing.
This is a good point.
However, anecdotally, I do know a few people that spend tons of time researching the absolute hell out of stuff before purchasing (because they want the best of everything) but skip some important details that creates a no build situation.
But Yes, I will concede there are silent people out there doing stuff you never hear about.
Similar story here. Just no YouTube.
My only mistake was buying the motherboard first, without actually thinking about it or considering what components would go in it. I knew the components needed to match, but I didn’t think “what’s the best performance for the money”.
I was a kid, so I went on eBay and bought the first motherboard I saw, and then researched what components I would need to make it work.
I’ll spare the specifics, but let’s just say I ended up with a system that was significantly aged and underpowered for its time and how much I spent.
Good learning experience though.
I think where it gets complicated and sometimes frustrating is with troubleshooting.
That, and picking out the parts can take ages, especially if you obsess, or have one idiot friend who is stuck in 2013 and still think its intel or nothing.
