It is shockingly easy to make a computer
Procuring parts can be hard, but assembly takes like two hours.
A quick note: it’s been a while! I know I promised a post once a week, but life (a new job, a move to a different city) got in the way. I’m kicking around a bunch of ideas and will have much more coming to your inbox soon.
If you play PC games, you’ve probably at least flirted with building your own computer. There are tons of evangelists for PC building online who are constantly claiming that it’s easy, rewarding, and cost efficient. Historically, I’ve been a little skeptical of all three points. But I also recently had to say goodbye to a beat up gaming laptop which I had been treating like crap for years, and felt like it was time to make the upgrade.
I looked at buying a premade gaming PC, but it was another point in favor of building my own that pushed me over the edge: modularity. Choosing all of my components, and knowing how they fit in with the rest of the computer, means that I can replace them each as they die or become obsolete, instead of having to buy a whole new computer.
The first step was procuring parts. To build a computer, you need at a minimum a motherboard, CPU, graphics card, RAM, storage, power supply, and case. I did a ton of research, tried out different combos on PCPartPicker (a very cool site that tells you if your chosen components are compatible with each other), asked people questions on reddit’s BuildAPC forum, consulted a friend who’s knowledgeable about building, and then started ordering.
The graphics card (aka GPU) was the only thing that was especially tricky to find; there’s a massive worldwide shortage right now, making new cards of any level exorbitantly expensive, so I ended up taking a gamble on a used, earlier generation card (AMD Radeon RX 480) that is well out of date but more than enough for my needs.
Then came the fun bit.
My friend Matt came over to help on a Friday evening and we put the thing together in under three hours. It’s really just a matter of carefully attaching parts to the motherboard (the CPU, or processor, is the most delicate and has to be carefully applied with thermal paste), screwing the motherboard, graphics card and power supply into the case, and then finding all the hookups which on most cases come pre-installed.
I am the least handy person I’ve ever met, but with help from YouTube tutorials, this guide from Tom’s Hardware, and some gentle warnings from Matt that I might be about to break something, I put everything together with relative ease.
Installing Windows caused a brief hiccup, because the only other computer I had to work with was a MacBook, and they make it frustratingly hard to get a copy of Windows on an Apple machine. But a little bit of troubleshooting later, I had a fully working PC which I had put together myself.
I’ve started using it for games, work and other general life needs and I feel a pretty strong sense of pride every time I turn it on (in addition to freaking out every time it makes a new noise).