I've heard people say that before they actually put a PC together. Afterwards every one of them said "Oh, that wasn't so bad!" At least, in the last 15 years... The days of AGP and PCI-X and sharp-edged rolled-steel cases were a little more fraught.

AGP/PCI-X wasn't really any more difficult to work with than today's PCI Express etc.

You really have to rewind to mid 90's pre-Windows 95 in the days before Plug 'n' Play when manually assigning IRQs etc was a thing before the process of building your own PC meaningfully changes in my opinion.

> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Plug_and_play

Still, all a skill set of experience that has it's uses today and when it comes to IRQ sharing and all those years the golden leason is read the motherboard documentation and don't assume shipping defaults jumpers/setting can be wrong.

Still, before AGP we had VESA, also around the time of MCA and IBM's attempt to capture some copyright patent control back from the expanding PC market and BIOS clones ("Halt and Catch Fire" Season one well worth a watch if you missed that era in life).

Yes pre Windows 95 was a fine art, from tweaking DOS memory, to optimising windows .ini files and then the fun of having to dial up Microsoft's patch BBS for a TCP/IP stack.

But top-end gaming PC's back then, sure made less noise.

Sounds like you skipped over the phase where Plug 'n' Play was mandatory, but didn't work reliably past maybe 1.5 expansion cards, and required even more arcane ways of configuring hardware than the IRQ days.

Or possibly you had money to buy higher quality components than I did at the time.

Right, but you had to match all the parts you were buying. It's easier now that everything is ATX and PCI-e. And before Amazon and Newegg, return policies were patchy.

> And before Amazon and Newegg, return policies were patchy.

OTOH, before the main consumer storefronts were the kind of flea markets of no-name sellers that used to roll into county fairgrounds every couple months, you could actually find good retailers with not only strong return policies, but also focussed on quality parts with a high S/N ratio in their catalog, that even offered added value (including, e.g., mounting CPU and memory when bought with a motherboard.)

Some of those same places survived, but they don't do consumer retail anymore.

That's true, and they would proactively look out for compatibility issues if they knew what your project was. Amazon can check car parts for compatibility, but as far as I know, they don't have anything like that for PC parts.

Hah, that brings back some memories. Configuring IRQs just right for that ISA Sound Blaster to work (after fiddling with drivers, as well)

Shit, I’ve done it before (years ago) and did it again somewhat recently.

It’s nerve-wracking as hell. Closing the swingarm to hold the CPU in place feels like—as the article’s author points out—you’re 100% about to destroy a really expensive piece of hardware. Installing the CPU cooler was surprisingly difficult, and I only noticed that the pins holding it attached weren’t fully seated because I checked and rechecked the mounting. Every time you plug a cable in there’s a moment of doubt if it’s the right cable or if you’re about to overvolt something and melt it. Even when you’re done plugging everything in there’s anxiety around whether or not you’ve missed something like a fan cable, that will eventually result in an expensive piece of hardware overheating and taking out the entire machine.

The act of pressing the power button when you’re all done isn’t an exciting and satisfying one. It’s a massive surge of anxiety followed by a wave of relief, followed by more nagging anxiety that gradually fades.

Even then you’re not done. After fiddling around in the BIOS for an hour to set things up, I ran a benchmark and discovered that I hadn’t used the right profile for my RAM, and it was only using half of its performance potential. Apparently many other people did this too, because the benchmark showed a graph of others’ performance in comparison and it had two equal-sized peaks: one where it was misconfigured to a slower (but presumably safe for all configurations) speed, and one where it was operating at its published speed. It took a few hours of research to discover something called XMP—which I still have no idea what it is—that apparently allows my motherboard to detect RAM timings in a way that unlocks this performance. I never would have noticed this without the benchmark.

I also noticed that my new NVMe SSD wasn’t performing well. Turns out the heat spreader my motherboard uses actually worsens performance for whatever reason. Simple fix: open the box back up, disconnect cables until I can get to the m.2 slot, and remove the heat spreader. More anxiety follows: am I just killing this expensive SSD?

Every step of the way is like this. I am not a naturally anxious person. I am financially well-off, and easily able to eat the cost of any mistakes. I am extremely technically inclined. Expecting nontechnical people to do this with limited budgets and expensive components is nuts.

Almost all of those fears you enumerate are unfounded. You won't kill a processor through overheating if you forget to plug in a fan. Not properly securing your CPU heatsink only really poses a risk to the GPU that it could fall onto. Likewise for your concerns about the SSD's temperature: it'll throttle itself and shutdown if necessary, but the latter won't happen even if you're blowing 85°C air from a GPU directly onto the SSD—I've tested that with most of the M.2 NVMe SSDs on the market. There are essentially zero connectors inside the PC that allow for the mechanical possibility of connecting dangerous voltages to the expensive components.

Whether or not those fears are well-founded is beside the point. I know that components will undergo a safe thermal shutdown. I know that power cables mostly can't go anywhere they shouldn't go. And I still get anxiety around it, even as a person who doesn't get much anxiety. Expecting a nontechnical novice to feel comfortable doing these things is asking a lot.

Plus, there's still a lot that actually can go wrong. Crappy PSUs and built up static electricity have killed uncountable motherboards and GPUs. Misconfiguring your BIOS can actually kill your components, sometimes quickly and sometimes slowly.

But back in the P4 days man was it easy to melt your expensive processor. They didn't have fancy things like thermal shutdown then either.

Thermal shutdown was added fairly early in the P4 days. I recall a Tom's Hardware video showing removing the heatsink from a P4 while it was running Quake 3 and the framerate tanking but no crash, while the Athlon (XP?) next to it went up in smoke when the heatsink was removed.

That was for AMDs, and I believe by the time of Pentium 4, even Athlons had thermal safeties. I remember quick testing (see if it powers on) Pentium 3s, Celerons and P4s without the heatsink - they even managed to boot Windows before shutting down lol. Same for GPUs.

I managed to melt one by incorrectly applying a heatsink. Years later we did some "experiments" on an old P4 to test the cooling capabilities of scotch. It's not effective FYI.

Funnily enough, a friend of mine had his GPU die due to heat yesterday. He'd been mucking about with performance settings, and apparently set his MSI card to use too much power and not enough fan.

GPU hit > 95˚C and is now a several hundred dollar paperweight.

I just wanted to say you did a great job of bundling up all those nerves, anxiety, and feelings about getting your own rig up and running. Great comment.

I hear you.

On my latest Asus motherboard, an Asus Strix Gaming, choosing XMP timings with an otherwise mild overclock overvolted the 6850k in a voltage setting I wasn't even aware of (not vcore) in such a way that the CPU died over time - my last build was a 2600k, which is now son's computer (OCed, and working fine).

This happened twice. Computer shop couldn't figure it out and replaced the CPU on warranty. Not Intel's fault, yet they copped it. I should have insisted on a new motherboard as well, very frustrating.

Fortunately I somehow discovered the hyper aggressive setting not too far into my third. I know it is at least a bit degraded, but oh well...

In 3 years I'll try an AMD. ;)

The whole point of XMP is that it overvolts the RAM, which in turn increases the voltage the on-CPU memory controller runs at. That's why the XMP timings are faster than the stock timings. So it's probably kind of Intel's fault, since XMP is their invention.

Ok - order is restored then, as it is pretty much advertised as "these are settings that will run your ram optimally".

Hmm. I've always thought it was exciting and fun, even when I didn't have the money to replace parts in a potentially-botched installation. I can see where you could get a feeling of anxiety from, but that was never my experience.

The scary part is actually not building it but looking up a dozen components with weird detailled descriptions and figuring out what that stuff actually means. Then getting back at it two years later and finding most names completely changed.

The problem with Motherboard is the way they talk about hardware. The pessimistic voice makes it seem not worth the trouble. They aren't even trying to spark curiosity in their readers and it's a disservice.

It certainly can be daunting at first, I generally just get a bit frustrated when people assert a task is too hard when all it really requires is some concentration and research.

If the argument were "I have other things I prefer to spend time on" then I would completely understand, but rejecting it as too hard seems somewhat lazy unless I'm just overestimating the average person's ability.

Everything is scary and daunting if you've not researched it properly and step into it thinking you have.