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[SapientWolf]

I know that can happen, but back in the day, I transferred a stick of 128mb SDRAM from one PC to another, across a carpetted house, wearing socks, with no anti-static anything, and nothing happened. We have pretty humid air though, and I think static is more of an issue in really dry environments.

I live in Arizona, and I have a habit of constantly grounding myself because I would get really nasty shocks even coming in and out of my car (which is one of the causes of fire at gas stations).

 

[tak]

I wouldn't place replacing something on the same level of building a machine. If you can operate a toaster, then you can replace what ever is in a PC. (without toasting the PC of course)

I know you're exaggerating a little, but there are a lot of little things the average Joe might miss when plugging in a new part. Sure it'll run in most cases if you just plug the part in, but in a lot of cases you're not using it to its full potential if you just plug it in.

For instance, if you don't install the correct drivers, incorrectly remove the old drivers, don't flip a setting in the bios or jumper on the motherboard, etc... it in might cause things to under perform or not run correctly

 

[Blackface]

I know you're exaggerating a little, but there are a lot of little things the average Joe might miss when plugging in a new part. Sure it'll run in most cases if you just plug the part in, but in a lot of cases you're not using it to its full potential if you just plug it in.

For instance, if you don't install the correct drivers, incorrectly remove the old drivers, don't flip a setting in the bios or jumper on the motherboard, etc... it in might cause things to under perform or not run correctly

Bingo.


There is more to building a PC then plugging everything in. Sometimes it works that easy, most of the time it does not.

Trust me, I do this for a living, I have built thousands of systems, and sometimes issues occur that even I don't know wtf they are until I pull out the diagnostics book and look up the light combination (and if you don't know what that means, you don't know as much as you think about building computers).

 

[Stoney Mason]

However what I can't understand. Is why it's so hard to go to a LOCAL PC shop, not bestbuy or any other major chain. Just go to a local PC shop, tell them what you want, and they will build you something for the same price you can order it online for. They make money on the Vendor discount, just like Newegg or Ncix does.

Once again this is reasonable and a lot of people do that. You still have to take into account however that a lot of people won't. A person who isn't crazy tech saavy might ask a friend this question and the person would then tell him this information and he might do it. That person is also very likely to head down to Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Comp-USA or whatever and ask the clerk there. At that point the Clerk is either going to give him that information also or he is going to lead him over to one of the 800 to 1000 dollar machines they have and tell him it's a kick ass gaming machine.

Plus a computer is far more useful then a console, it servers many different purposes, and will have paid for iteself in no time.

Agreed. Which is why most households have both a console of some form and a PC nowadays. But that PC they are using is still often just an email, internet, word doc, music/dvd burner, or home/office PC.

 

[JBuccCP]

The first computer I tried to build was a complete disaster. This was several years ago. I was reusing the case, hard drive, and mobo from my previous computer, a store bought one. So I guess it was more of an upgrade than a new build. Anyway I ordered all my stuff off newegg, even got one of those static wristbands. I thought I was ready, and had gotten all the right components that were compatible with each other. So I put everything together and thought it went well, but the computer wouldn't work. I opened it back up and discovered that a corner of the CPU wasn't in all the way.

Next I did what comes naturally when something needs to go into something else and forced it . As it still wouldn't go in I took it out and looked at the bottom to see what the fuck was up, and lo and behold the shape on the bottom of the CPU and the shape on the socket didn't exactly match up. At the time I thought "hey my old CPU is called intel and so is this one, so of course it will work!". Nevermind that my old CPU was a socket 478 Celeron D and my new one was an LGA 775 Pentium. Eventually I read up some on the other computer and figured it out. FFFUUUUUCCCCKKK.

So I then ordered a new mobo! And the sockets matched and I was happy. So I got the new mobo and put it in and god dammit the cpu still wouldn't go in the fucking thing. Then I got to looking closer at the CPU and realized some of them damn little pins were bent from my previous forcing session. I returned it to Newegg for a replacement.

I got it and put everything together and this time it fucking worked! Well, the computer worked anyway, but the Windows installation I had on my old hard drive didn't. Thanks to the new mobo Windows was freaking out thinking it was pirated or some shit. Since the version I had was a factory OEM with no disk, I couldn't do a repair install or anything. At this point I'm just pissed and wishing I had never spent my money on this shit.

Anyway long story shortened some I ended up downloading and installing OpenSuse on it (Also my first time using linux, which really got me into it, so maybe in a weird way this was all meant to be), but a couple days later the entire computer crapped out and wouldn't start. To this day I'm still not sure exactly what it was, but I suspect the PSU since I kinda went cheap on it. But at that point I was just fucking tired of it so I returned what parts I could and got a laptop.

 

[domokunrox]

I bought it from circuit city with the help of a $400 dollar gift card.

Anything with a decent graphics card cost upwards of 1200.

An interesting thing to note is that they only seem to sell a small selection of parts that would basically bring you to a final price equivalent to one of their pre-built PCs should you try to build your own through them.

I'm looking to just upgrade the graphics card but am unsure of how many fans I need.
Plus, school is looming and I have no idea what kind of power supply I need to run an ATI4850 or if one of those cards will even fit this Micro ATX board.

:lol

I'm sorry, I just had to quote this guy and point and laugh because based on all his posts I've read...hes probably the worst PC consumer I've ever heard about.

But let me add my story to PC gaming.

Aug of 2006
AMD Athlon 64 X2 3800+ (socket 939) on ASUS mobo
ATI Radeon X1900XTX
250GB HDD
1GB RAM
The rest of parts is scraped from my previous computer (pre built) I got back in 2001

Somewhat pimped out case and costed me a total of rougly $1000 including a 20" WD LCD monitor.

CS:S at full settings @ 1680x1050 = ~160 fps
Every game runs without any problem or discontent.
Only thing I had to fix with my system is reseating the CPU with AS5 because Bioshock was very stressful on my CPU during those hot August/Sept months in 07'

 

[Houston3000]

For the average Joe idiot, buying a prebuilt computer at Circuit City with a microATX motherboard and 320W PSU, PC Gaming is more expensive.

For the person who understand how computers work, the price of PC gaming is on par if not possibly cheaper than console gaming. These are the people who either put their own pieces together from Newegg or at least know what they're getting in a prebuilt and know how to do something simple like plugging up a new video card or more RAM.

The great thing about PC gaming that many people disregard though is the issue of backwards compatibility and, more majorly, scalability. Ok, so your computer from 3 years ago may not be able to max out Fallout 3 this Fall but it can probably still play the damn thing at the same settings consoles would use (720p resolution, DX9 shader settings, medium to low texture resolution, etc...). Not to mention the back catalog of games that you can max out that would blow away anything on consoles. This isn't even considering if that person upgraded their computer, I can guarantee that my old computer I built 4 years ago now would be able to play any game I throw at it if I had the forsight to buy a motherboard with PCI-E instead of AGP 8X back then.

 

[Hazaro]

I know most people won't be able to do this, but I just put a rig together for a friend using 60% used parts. You can get the same price point if you went with an Antec Case/PSU combo, but I got the Case and PSU cheaply on my end.

Intel E7200
Corsair 550TX
GigaByte P35-DS3L
Cooler Master 690 Case
BFG 8800GT 512MB
2GB G.Skill
Sctyhe Ninja (HeatSink)
Smasung DVD burner
WD6400AAKS (640GB)

for $608 including tax and shipping

Add a 22" LCD for $203 and he is SET

Monitor now doubles as his PS3 screen because it has HDMI (w/ HDCP), Component, Composite, S-Video, VGA, and speakers

 

[Kritz]

Then I got to looking closer at the CPU and realized some of them damn little pins were bent from my previous forcing session.

This happened with my first built PC too. Didn't put the CPU in properly (Well, actually, I didn't put the CPU fan on properly and kind of crushed the CPU). But thankfully all those weekends of playing Operation saved my ass. I got two creditcards and a toothpick and bent the pins back in place (a few pins were at 90 degree angles, I'm surprised they didn't just snap off).

Thankfully that was the only thing to go wrong building it. Still, was almost $250 down on the CPU until I fixed it.

 

[ianp622]

Bingo.


There is more to building a PC then plugging everything in. Sometimes it works that easy, most of the time it does not.

Trust me, I do this for a living, I have built thousands of systems, and sometimes issues occur that even I don't know wtf they are until I pull out the diagnostics book and look up the light combination (and if you don't know what that means, you don't know as much as you think about building computers).

It's even worse when you have to look up the sound diagnostic, and the only way you can find it is by going online.

 

[Gully State]

This happened with my first built PC too. Didn't put the CPU in properly (Well, actually, I didn't put the CPU fan on properly and kind of crushed the CPU). But thankfully all those weekends of playing Operation saved my ass. I got two creditcards and a toothpick and bent the pins back in place (a few pins were at 90 degree angles, I'm surprised they didn't just snap off).

Thankfully that was the only thing to go wrong building it. Still, was almost $250 down on the CPU until I fixed it.

You guys make me feel very fortunate about my first build experience. I didn't have any of those issues. I had to reseat my CPU b/c I didn't apply the paste correctly but all that meant was that my computer was running slightly hotter.