Building a PC, Part I

Just because you’ve not totally fried a component with static discharge doesn’t mean you’ve not damaged it. Static discharge can substantially shorten the lifetime of a component - the MTBF of electronic components handled without antistatic precautions is years shorter than the MTBF of the same components handled with anti-static precautions.

So you don’t in fact know that you’ve never zapped anything. All you know is that you’ve never zapped it so badly that it was dead from first use.

If you don’t expect your machine to last more than 2 years then you probably don’t need to worry. For hardware that lasts 25+ years (e.g. some telecomms kit), you’re grossly irresponsible not to take precautions.

For anything in between…well it’s hard to say where the line comes exactly. Caveat zaptor etc. But the main thing is, it’s slightly irresponsible to tell people that static discharge is over-stated. It’s more that it’s misunderstood.

“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.”

My first real understanding of hardware (besides the basics having put CD-rom drives together myself) came with an HP. My friend had a maxtor that was about to fail (go figure, right?) and it was a hardware nightmare. The way that the motherboard was seated in the cpu, you had to completely mangle the IDE cable to fit it in the slot, and that was with well lit room, and fingers that bend in unnatural angles.

Hee. Definately going to keep this page as an interesting piece. I’ve never set up my own motherboard but this looks like a rather fun project for when I actually have the time and money. And yes, like everybody else, you start with what works together IMHO. Of course at the same time I’d think about what I was going to do with the thing to begin with then work from there. LOL

As far as pre-built computers. I have a Dell computer. Because I’m not a complete idiot three years later it’s still running pretty good. I may not know the complete specs (anyone know where to find out your hard drive information save opening the case? I can’t find it in the hardware manager).

Now that I’ve properly rambled on…

You didn’t count the time you spent doing the following:

  1. Researching motherboards, power supplies, video cards, compatibility, and the like = 40+ hours

  2. Hunting for the best price online for EACH component = 8 hours

  3. Downloading all of the latest drivers = 4 hours

  4. The cost of the OS = $150

So how much did you save again?!?!?

I guess that most of the times it is easy to put a computer together. I built my own computer last year and it all went without problems.

But before you buy all the components, you should be very careful and do some research to find out if it all works together. Some brands of memory don’t work well with some motherboards. You have to know which kind of memory you need (DDR, DDR2, DDR3? Which speed? Which voltage? etc.), if all the components work well with the OS you’re going to use (if it’s Linux, you’d better not get ATI video cards, for example, because they don’t have very good drivers for Linux), etc.

So while putting the PC together once you have the components is easy, you do need to spend some time to research what’s available and what you need / want.

By the way, why two videocards if the guy is not a gamer? That seems like total overkill to me.

“I’ve learned through hard experience that “maybe I need to use lots of additional force” is never the right answer when it comes to building PCs.”

Except when installing CPU heatsinks that require you to BEND THE MOTHERBOARD so that they will snap into place. No amount of force is excessive for these things.

I hope the cat touched a metal surface before helping out.

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“Me too”, I can’t see the photos either thanks to damn shoulder surfing web blockers that can’t see flickr.

The text was good though !

I have nuked memory chips, but then this was a time when memory came in a tube and you had to place individual IC’s onto the circuit board and they were really sensitive. I haven’t since, but I then I do like yourself, touch an “earth” first.

Ah, this takes me back. Well done - its the best guide I’ve seen for assembling a pc. Plenty of common sense there also.
All that burn-in stuff is pretty important, I used to do that on machines I built, turn up the graphics full in quake3 to stress the graphics card, load up a deathmatch with no time limit, spectate from the bots POV, ( this is better than playing a demo in a loop, cos the demo just gets cached ). Then run prime95 in the background to soak up any spare cpu cycles. If you get up in the morning and the house hasn’t burned down and the game is still playing, the pc is ok.
I think the burn in process would still be a good idea on a pc that you’ve bought off the shelf, like a dell or whatever. It might warn you up front of possible stability problems down the line.

where did you purchase your components?

mirror RAID configuration for ultra high access speeds?

Mirror (RAID-1) doesn’t improve performance.

It improves performance for reads.

a.)the pair of video cards Jeff is using are NOT mid-range by any specs that i’ve seen

You should check out this “Midrange Cards: NVIDIA GeForce 8600 Round-Up” article then…
http://www.neoseeker.com/Articles/Hardware/Reviews/8600_roundup/

I wish I will someday build a computer like this for me :).

Good ideas:

  1. Using an Antec case, they’ve been one the best for a very long time.
  2. 3-Monitor setup. I’ve wanted one since the Parhelia came out, what, 6-7 years ago?
  3. Snipping the rounding plastic off of the IDE cable. rounded cables can cause interference problems, I’ve seen this firsthand.

Bad ideas:

  1. MSI boards, neither I nor my friends have had any good luck with MSI boards in the past, I refuse to use them.

  2. Intel? Nothx, I’m an AMD man for life. I can wait for AMD quad-core, especially since I’m using a single-core 32-bit Athlon XP 300+ right now and it works perfectly fine. Of all of the components in a PC, the processor is definitely far from being the bottleneck these days.

Man this looks just great. Can I tell you how jealous of Scott I am?

Good looking, with Type 1 diabetes, AND a custom PC built by Jeff. What a guy. :slight_smile:

Wow, I suppose you should install Mepis 6.5 64bit Distro. Runs mine just fine!

You will be disappointed if you try any Microsoft ‘64bit’ OS!

Once you mentioned that you don’t properly protect against static you immediately lost a great deal of authority as far as I am concerned.
It seems that you have a poor understanding of how this can harm components.
It does not have to be fried to be damaged.
The consequences of static may not be apparent until a later date.
The advice you have given is irresponsible.

Jeff, those are some excellent photographs!
May I ask what kind of camera you have?

I’ve tried to take photos of electronics in the past but they always came out blurry on my ancient Canon PowerShot S45 camera.

Thanks.

Ignore “PCman”:
Once you mentioned that you don’t properly protect against static
you immediately lost a great deal of authority as far as I am
concerned.

My experience is the same as yours - I’ve worked on/inside/building PCs since 1985 and I have NEVER killed any component with static.

As you say, touch an earthed metal surface and you are pretty much safe. And don’t wear anything that generates lots of static (nylon, fleeces etc.)

I don’t see why some of you are still complaining about building a computer. So what if you have to research to see if a component supports the motherboard - thats the point. I work at a computer company called CompUsa and we always have customers complain about a faulty motherboard a company installed for them and they have no one else to turn to but us. Most of the time its pre-built pcs, and the manufacturers give them a big run around about fixing them. You want to build a computer to last, and that is why I stress take your time, you don’t need to rush. If you do this you will learn that they will last as long as you build them. Research on the website to see what motherboard is rated the best. Don’t get a motherboard that has hundreds of complaints on it saying it was a bad bored. People get those bad motherboards because they think they look cool, but trust me if the board dies, it really isn’t cool now is it. Trust me I spent $6400 dollars on Alienwares Area-51m desktop and regret it to this day. The motherboard completly burnt out, and since it was 2 months after 30 day warrenty to send the pc back for a new one, I was stuck. I couldn’t do anything, I contacted those newbies on the phone who knew 10 times less than me about computers and gave me nothing but a run around. Finally they told me to take it back but I didn’t waste my time because I knew it would be sitting at their warehouse months on end before it would be fixed, but luckly I went back to my old pc I built which was an AMD 3200+ 939 pc, its been working for about two - half years and still going strong. As for this Alienware pc I saved up and bought, I took some of them parts out inside the motherboard and threw the case and the damn problematic liquid coolant they installed in the trash. It was no use to me anyway.

Oh my god, you spent 6,000 DOLLARS on a comp and got a 30 day warranty?
That is crap, shoulda been like 3 years.