There’s a nice little post up at BoingBoing that has neatly summarized + symbolized my decreasing desire to build a new PC for gaming (switched to Macs for the most part) every few years/months:
Blargh, should have gone into Hardware. Wrong tab.
I’ve built two pc’s in as many months. It Will soon be time to order more Arctic Silver…
No stability issues and no trouble with vendors if parts were faulty.
I, for one, and getting the itch to build a new machine.
nvm…
Funny about that tube of Arctic Silver. Have one sitting in my old computer-junk toolbox. Maybe used it for one CPU. Probably about 5 years old, too.
That was my deal. I eventually realized that I could just buy something prebuilt that was substantially as cheap and fast as building it myself.
I don’t get enjoyment out of building myself, so once the price difference was lost, I was done with it.
Assuming my next PC even is a desktop (and my current rig, though over three years old, is humming along fine with a recent GPU upgrade), I don’t expect to build it from scratch. It’s just too hard to justify when the price difference is so low now and you factor in the risks mentioned in the OPs link. For a long time I justified it by telling myself that by choosing my own components I was giving myself partial upgrade options. But in all the years I’ve had PCs, that never ends up happening because by the time CPU upgrade might make some sense, they usually aren’t even making compatible CPU’s for whatever motherboard I have anyway.
The problems in the article aren’t inherent to building your own PC. They’re inherent to being an unorganized berk.
I don’t relish the idea of building another PC. It’s no longer a process from which I derive any satisfaction. I relish even less the idea of trying to turn a gunked-up OEM Windows installation into an acceptable gaming experience.
I really hope Microsoft’s Signature program gets some legs. I’d love to see a choice of 3-4 gaming-capable Signature PCs available.
Love building a PC.
I have the exact same thing…unused tube of that stuff just waiting for the next time I build a PC.
It’s right next to my can of air and my bottle of thermal pasted remover and thermal surface purifier.
I had some scares while building pcs, like an dvdrom not working with the motherboard, or a faulty stick of RAM, but that’s it, small stuff like that, and i never had stability problems with my built computers.
I hate building the things, but I can never find an OEM machine with all the bits I want.
Last time for my main PC I went with Ibuypower becasue of the minor difference in price between building myself and buying pre-built. Then a month after the warranty was over, I ended up having to replace the video card. A month later, the motherboard. Two months later, the power supply. I then added a high-end sound card and 7.1 speakers. At least the hard drives, CPU and memory are still original, although I did have to pull them out of the original MB and reinstall them. I guess I just had bad luck, but I ended up essentially building my own anyhow. It’s been working fine for 2 years now, though.
Hmm, that link was gentler than I expected.
I used to build systems every four years. For my current box (quad core Q9300), I think that may stretch to five years, with a GPU upgrade midway (e.g. right now!). Two years from now I expect there to be some new consoles, or at least a new level of cloud-gaming performance that games will be rising to. Though it might go as far as six years.
Building one PC per six years is OK with me – I get to really familiarize myself with the current generation of parts, new toys like SSD (I don’t have one yet), etc.
I just built a new one. Once it was assembled it would turn on but the monitor remained blank. Then I noticed that the GPU is has no power connection. Connected the power, still nothing. Turned it off, on, off, on - nothing.
I Opened and closed the DVD, suddenly the monitor came to life.
I still can’t get it to connect to the wireless printer but who the hell cares.
Up until I got a good quality case and stopped handling motherboards like an idiot, each PC build would cause me to lose blood. I literally put precious bodily fluids, sweat and tears into each one, so I’ll be damned if I’ll let some minimum wage assembly line worker put my PC together.
I, for one, and getting the itch to build a new machine.
Yeah. I wouldn’t mind getting a new system soon either.
I’ve never done it. I’ve gone as far as to select and price all the individual components 3 or 4 times, but I always end up chickening out. I’ve had my current machine for nearly 4 years. I have a feeling I might want an upgrade about the time Secret World comes out next spring. Then again, I’ve got a quad 2.4 running at around 3.0 and a pair of 8800 GTs. I could probably just upgrade the graphics and get a nice bump.
i like building my own box because i know exactly what components are in it.