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.