Regarding the hooking-up of those pesky little LED, PWR, RST, etc. wires. Asus makes and bundles their “Q Connector” with (some of) their motherboards. It’s specific to each motherboard and you plug all those wires into the one Q Connector. Then you plug the Q Connector into the motherboard. Unfortunately, no one (that I can see) sells generic versions. I noted one thread where a person said “20 pin block pin extenders” from “your favorite electronics parts store” do the same thing. Unfortunately, I haven’t been able to track that down. If anyone does find such a generic connector, let me know.
Mr. Markle, smart people don’t buy prebuilt PCs the same way good chefs don’t buy ready-to-heat plastic food. When I build a PC, I know exactly what I put inside it and I don’t cut corners to meet a certain price tag. Plus I can customize the rig according to MY needs, spending more for video cards and less for the case, for example.
When you buy a prebuilt desktop computing appliance, you either get something cheap built with cheap components (e.g. ECS, Maxtor) or you get something much more expensive than the price of the components + the price of your time. And the support is not much better then when dealing with hardware manufacturers and you have to pay for expensive on-site support in case you don’t want to mail-in the whole PC every time a RAM stick fails.
The only place where I can see the clear results of “engineering” are the business series notebooks. And that’s where I am ready to pay the premium.
My main reason for always building my own is that I’m generally stripping an old system of a number of parts: it’s an upgrade, rather than a “new box” – I don’t need a new DVD drive, and my hard drives are still working fine, after all. So why pay for new ones? – and if I’m going to have to be installing hard drives anyways, why not do the whole thing?
Good article so far. Cannot wait to see the multiple video cards part, one area I have never ventured into but want to on my next build.
By chance, can you include rough costs of the parts as you use them, or a link with a parts list / rough price? Was really curious what this build costs, and too lazy atm to check each part myself.
As another poster pointed out, the most time spent on building a new system is in researching all of the components that work well together. There is nothing worse than finding some incompatibility between your motherboard and the RAM you purchased.
So your cost and time comparison is not valid at all since you fail to tell us how much time you’ve spent over the years researching all of the options you had to wade through when deciding which components to buy. My time is more valuable than that. I’d prefer to let someone else make those decisions. And when they mess up, I’m glad that someone else has to stand behind the choices they made instead of me.
The only reason I build rather than buy is to be able to rebuild with all the software when the machine has become so infected that it is not worth trying to repair.
I have all the original driver and OS disks plus all the original app disks so I get to have everything working from scratch, not from a recovery disk. I have kids and they manage to mess things up badly enough often enough that rebuilding twice a year has become a regular part of having computers.
Friends who bought name brand computers with pre-installed software have no idea how to rebuild and often trudge on with crippled computers or pay to have them rebuilt or hope the recovery removes it all (and often doesn’t).
It’s been quite a few years since I built my own rig (the one we still are using is the last one and boy is it getting old!! at least I was given a brand new one for some contract work I am doing)… I just haven’t had the interest in that stuff, but this actually kind of gets me all sentimental about it again
I guess I got tired of trying to help family that got mad over me “installing viruses” (that they already had - they just didn’t ever know they had) and friends/acquaintances asking for help all the time that I got used to telling almost everyone to just go and buy a Dell or HP or something instead. It really did seem like the prices for std manufacturer computers were almost nearly as low as what I could buy for (but remember it’s been a few years). However I thought I had read that the parts Dell/HP/etc. used were not always the best quality … but I have no quantifiable facts to back that statement up.
You said “There are plenty of other things you might want to do with your time, like, say, spending time with your children, or finding a cure for cancer.” - what you can’t build a computer with your kids?
Seriously my son really likes to be my helper when I’m doing anything with a screwdriver (he gets to hold the tools or screws and help push things around, but he’s only 4) and my daughter who’s going to be 6 soon really likes using the computer (just the games though). It’s funny because when she was telling my wife that she really likes to use the computer and my wife told her how I used to spend so much time on the computer, she was amazed. Needless to say, I spend more time doing other things now that we have kids, but maybe I will slide back a bit to show the kids a few things
Last comment - I always have thought that the little details were why so many people don’t take building a PC on specifically choosing all the different parts and knowing they all will work together (can be very confusing), and also having an operating system to install. I’ve helped one friend years ago (in college) learn how to do it, but I’m sure he probably wouldn’t have done with it without something there to make sure he was doing the right stuff (honestly, I only made sure the parts would work together and generally point him in the right direction) and what to do about the OS when he got it all running.
Jeff - maybe provide some links (assuming there are some!?) to help people know how to find all the parts and make sure they work together, and what to do about installing an OS (that’s a sticking point for me as I don’t have any recent OS CDs and don’t want to use unlicensed versions that I can get).
dammit Jeff…this post really makes me want to upgrade my now aging rig.
I still don’t agree with you on the ValueRAM though. After going through some really terrible ValueRAM I always buy the good stuff. I know most of the stuff all comes out of the same bins, but I still like to get higher quality stuff for piece of mind.
I had to laugh at the cat photo. Been there. However, one finds it much less amusing when things aren’t going right. Time to eject kitty from the room, by air. Wheeee!
One thing you didn’t mention is that things very rarely go that smoothly. Perhaps they do for you, and I’m just a klutz. It seems I always end up with some bizzare problem.
For example, my current rig did absolutely nothing when I tried to power it on. It turned out that the header for the power switch on the MB was hosed. However, the MB happens to have a tiny power pushbutton on it (presumably for bench testing). Rather than send it in and be without a main rig for weeks, I just open the rig and (carefully) hit the tiny power button with a pencil whenever I need to power the rig on. I leave it on 24/7 anyway, so its no biggie.
On the installation before that, my hard drive was not being recognized. I was pretty sure the drives were OK, as I was just swapping out a MB. All my drives were the same. After swapping around cables for a couple of hours (and much wailing and gnashing of teeth), I figured out that the CDROM drive had somehow gotten fried in a way that prevented anything else from being recognized by the BIOS. It was working fine before I started the swapout. (ESD?) Buying a new DVD drive fixed it all.
As for electrically destroying things, I always wear the strap. However, I have to admit the only other components I’ve ever fried were because I was (stupidly) connecting things with the power supply plugged in. Hey, its grounded that way, right?
I used to be intimidated by the prospect of messing with the PC internals until I helped someone build a PC. This is a very good article indeed. Looking forward to Part II.
I always build up the motherboard first. Place the motherboard on top of the anti-static bag it came in so it’s easier to work on.
Be careful here Jeff. Anti-static bags remove the static from the inside by migrating it to the outside of the bag. You may not have messed up a component yet, but try putting your motherboard on the anti-static bag during winter…
I used to build machines for myself, friends, and family. But nowadays, the big vendors get such a discount on the operating system and productivity software that I can't come close on the price. Sorry--my friends and family aren't going to learn Linux, and I don't want to be their system administrator. OpenOffice is looking better every day, but it's still only one piece to the puzzle.
Building a *personal* PC is still a worthwhile effort, but it's not cost effective for most folks.
--dang
Oh dear god, yes, as Gregory says, please write something about the Redirect-after-POST thing.
It has to be said that .NET developers are the worst offenders here. I managed to accidentally place an order twice on an e-commerce site last night because of this exact problem.
It’s one of those things that anybody who ever wishes to do web development should be taught on day one.
Hate to rain on your parade, but the cheapest way to go is BestBuy. No im not an employee. No you cant get EXACTLY what you want but you can get really close. Get the 6 months same as cash or pay it all in cash at once. Dont get any of their extended or extra warranties or you will lose (its already obsolete anyway so why would you :D).
If you carefully spec out a PC from BestBuy part for part you will see that buying individual parts is more expensive. I tried really hard to beat them and couldnt. That was even before adding in postage fees BTW. And I included Windows. My biggest aingst with prebuilt machines is you get a version of Windows license that doesnt transfer. The transferable Windows license is what killed the custom PC price (and the mailing fees).
Otherwise if you like the satisfaction of picking exactly what you want for hardware and a Windows license (or go linux) you can transfer, and dont mind paying a little extra then build it yourself.
“They go together in pretty much the same way as they did 10 years ago,”
Back in my day it was possible to let the magic smoke out of your cache RAM chips by installing them the wrong way. I remember trying to figure out what combination of DIP switches and jumper settings would set the timer up right for a CPU I found at a use computer store. I’ve also made a couple of power supplies go BANG. Get off my lawn!
A few years ago I bought a pre-built HP just because I wanted something that I KNEW would work out of the box. Sometime with all the drivers already installed. It worked for a while, then I had some kind of lockup problem and had to install a new driver. Which caused other problems. Then a new video card came out, I installed a bigger hard drive. Pretty soon, I was right back where I started building my own PC and hunting down drivers like a truffle pig. Except I had a crappy, cheap case that made my hands look like raw beef whenever I went to upgrade something.
Maybe what you need to do is ExTRemE PC building! Don’t wear a static strap and install shag carpeting where you are putting your rig together. Shuffle around a lot. buy the cheapest parts you can and try finding a combination of driver versions for all of them that will work under Windows Vista AND Linux.
“it would be better spent looking for/going out with/whatever with a RLG*.”
Those of us who have a RLW stuck in the house with us ALL the time, appreciate a technical diversion from time to time. Even if we don’t, our wives sometimes appreciate us being out of their hair for a while.
