Building a PC, Part I

They aren’t fragile. You don’t have to baby them.

Solder joints can be quite fragile. And quite difficult to repair for surface-mount chips. So I would say while you don’t have to “baby them”, you should avoid placing uneven stress on any PLC. For example, if you hold the motherboard horizontal by just one corner, the weight of the heavier components on it can stress solder joints to the point of cracking. If you’re lucky this will either break your board altogether. If you’re unlucky, it will give you very frustrating, inconsistent, impossible to reproduce issues, that you will want to fix, but will likely just end up banging your head over.

how sad, I can’t see the pics because they’re hosted on flickr and my corporation’s automated shoulder-surfer blocked them all.

Just a small comment regarding static electricity. It takes about 1,500 volts (At least) to physically feel a shock so it is possible to damage components without feeling anything.

These smaller shocks will burn small pits in the IC substrate and while the parts will still work you’ve probably shortened its lifespan.

Touching something metal will definitely help but keep in mind that carpeted floors + shoes = 15,000 volts and that you can even generate static from coffee cups. Microchip damage can occur with as small as 10 volts of static.

In between build-it-yourself and buying from someone like Dell, another good alternative are “white box” vendors. I had my current PC built for me at a local computer shop (Central Computer) and was able to specify the exact components and configuration I wanted.

I’d avoid buying parts for a whole system from Fry’s Electronics. I’ve been in the return line before and watched someone who obviously had trouble assembling his components. Rather than accepting the return, the clerk made him unpack and assemble everything to prove/disprove what was broken. Not a pleasant experience.

Back in the late 80’s-early 90’s I worked my way through college building PC’s for a little mom and pop computer shop, so I’ve built a lot of PC’s. You’ve done a great job here explaining the basics. This is a post I wish I’d written for my blog!

I agree with you about how building a PC at least once gives you a deeper understanding of your hardware. It isn’t going to fill a specific checklist item in your resume, but IMHO the desire to try it at least once is part of the passion that a true craftsman should have for his tools. As an example from another field, I think it’s similar to how you’ll frequently see the celebrity chef’s on PBS, etc. go a winery, an organic farm, a bakery, etc. They aren’t going to learn something there that will make or break their ability to cook a specific dish. But as master craftsman they’re passionate about their tools and ingredients. They want to know everything they can about them.

Scott:

10 years ago, you were installing DIP-based RAM in your machine? That was 1997 (can you believe it?!). We were well into the SIMM era by that time. Hell, in 1997, my computer had PCI slots! (A Pentium 90 with 12 MB of RAM) 15 years ago, yeah, you’re definitely right.

And I guess you’re right about the RLG thing and technical distractions sometimes being a good thing. I’m not married, so I don’t feel your pain (yet!). LOL

For me the difference between a factory and a home build is :

The Factory is in the biz of cutting costs.

My goal is 24/7/365 uptime.

Wow that LEGO crane is sweet. We built the Imperial Star Destroyer at work last year:

http://shop.lego.com/product/?p=10030

Building rigs is easy ONLY if you’ve checked for component compatibility ahead of time. This is the key step. Otherwise, you’ll run into a situation like I did when I last built a system (several years ago) where I had an incompatible power supply and memory. And this kind of crap is very hard to debug when problems pop up.

The truth is that it’s just not worth it anymore. I think it’s good for everyone to build one system just to see how it’s done, but after that…just get a Dell. :wink:

That is one monster CPU heat sink! I’m curious as to what brand or where you got it and how well it works also.

“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.”

I can attest to that. My buddy had his machine take a dump on him, and what we initially thought was going to be a cheap motherboard replacement ended up being a complete rebuild. This was compounded by the fact that I forgot to take into consideration the processor socket type and RAM type (I’m a programmer, not a hardware guy), so instead of waiting a week for all the components, we’re up to 2 1/2 while we wait for his socket 775 P4 and DDR2 RAM to arrive.

Research = Teh Win.

That first boot is the scariest … especially with the Intel or Intel-based boards I’ve used on my last 3 builds, it takes maybe 10 seconds from power-on until I get the monitor going from stand-by to turned-on. :slight_smile:

not to mention that the sockets and connectors are usually asymmetric, and no 2 of those are alike, very hard to make a mistake, unless of course…

Some people have been mentioning the importance of research. I agree totally.

I’d also add that its important to have a backup machine (with internet connectivity). The reason is that even with a lot of research, something is eventually going to go wrong on you. If its something complicated (eg: RAM incompatable with motherboard w/o BIOS change), you’re going to have a lot more trouble figuring it out without net access.

Of course all these caveats we are adding are not going to help Jeff’s thesis that this is something easy that everyone should be doing. :slight_smile:

impressive heat sink and nice cat!

As someone who doesn’t have a lot of money I find myself slowly upgrading my rig one component at a time. However, if that component happens to be the mother board I’m effectively rebuilding the entire thing.

I don’t think it’s terribly difficult to understand what’s going on inside that box, and rebuilding from scratch certainly helps know what most of what’s going on, which really helps when your upgrading individual components.

Now I’m moving out of my parents house and am having to buy an entirely new rig all at once. It’s going to be…fun. And expensive. Still debating whether to roll my own or not.

Run wires underneath the motherboard tray. Great idea, Jeff! I think that might solve my wire tangle in my my power-supply-in-the-bottom rig. It’s just too much with power, SATA, IDE and MB connectors running through the same area.

Great article, too. After building even a single PC, small installs like a new video card or hard drive aren’t so intimidating.

One piece of advice - make sure you don’t add extra standoffs that your motherboard doesn’t use! One of the computers I’ve built didn’t boot at all until I realized an unsed standoff was shorting something out. It was hard to tell which hole in the case was the right one, so I put a standoff in both, figuring I could just ignore the wrong one and screw in the other. Oops. Fortunately, nothing broke; it was just very difficult to tell what the problem was.

Bought a MSI mobo, died inside of a year. It was replaced by the manufacturer, but died in 8 months, so no more MSI for me.

I trust you do not have power on the PC when your cat is messing around, or I will call the SPCA!

Nice system. I scrolled down and saw that pic of the heatsink, I almost choked. That thing is massive! If I were you, I’d use a piece of wire (not anything plastic or string) to support that assembly from the top of the case, maybe from an existing screw. Take some weight off the motherboard.