10 Reasons Why Building a Gaming PC is Awful

[Julio Franco]

Building a gaming PC can be difficult and stressful. There are a thousand things that could go wrong, and any one of them could wind up costing hundreds of dollars. And yet we do it anyway. Why? Lord only knows.

Last summer, I finished building and fine-tuning a new gaming PC. I had a lot of fun, but the process could also be pretty annoying. Today, I'm going to list the ten worst things about building a new gaming PC.

Last week I listed the ten best things about building a new PC. If you want positivity, that's the place to go. But now: Bitterness! Negativity! Complaining! Here we go.

Read the complete article.

 

[stewi0001]

Pretty much hit almost everything.
stuff I would add are:

Compatibility: at least in the past when I'm researching what I want to get, I would sometimes run into issues where they don't really say all the sockets and this and that are, and you're stuck wondering if I get Motherboard X will it work with part Y?

Another Frustration, is when you put it all together like you are suppose to and it doesn't turn on or start up. Usually due to a DOA or something came loose during assemble.

 

[VitalyT]

Getting a new PC is like getting a new fridge - the most important part is putting all the right stickers on it...

 

[Guest]

After reading the title I was preparing for a lot of hate comments. That was written really well though and even as a PC enthusiast that made me laugh

 

[Guest]

No one agrees about how best to apply thermal paste.... That's because the average person is basically stupid. Every numb nuts on the internet is an expert. An expert at relaying half the info they heard and getting it totally wrong. When you get someone relaying the info that they heard from one of the previous numb nuts, things can hit the fan. To top it all they cannot even use common sense to figure out why it's wrong.
Take the positive case pressure myth. Yes it's a myth that came from the way intel fabricates chips. Some bright spark heard that intels rooms have positive pressure in them to keep dust out. A rather dim light bulb went off in his head and he assumed that pushing more (dust filled) air into a pc case would achieve the same results. He didn't realise that intels pressurised air is super filtered and the positive pressure is to stop contaminated air getting in from doors, etc. So what you get is a bunch of low IQ retards regurgitating the myth that positive pressure in pc cases is a good way to keep dust out!

 

[cmbjive]

Number 4. It's always number 4. Right after I built my PC, the feeling just set in that I should have waited until ATI 290Xs came down in price instead of going with the 780s I purchased (because of the BitCoin fanaticism ATI cards were vastly overpriced). Then, because my power supply could only handle one 780 I wrestled with whether I should spend another $200 and get a 1,000+ watt PSU. Then I saw the new monitors that had higher resolutions and wished I had the money to buy that...

...And on and on it went until one day I just didn't turn on my PC. It really isn't worth it sometimes.

Now, who's with me in building another PC so they can play GTA V at the highest possible settings in 4K?

 

[Guest]

I must concur with a few things on here. Having built a new pc in January and having buyers remorse.
Bought a ROG hero vii ... omfg. Sound cuts out if using speakers as if it goes to sleep need to raise the volume to wake it up. If using usb connected bt headphones, works fine til they run out.

Went on the Asus Rog website, which is not even supported by asus. Just the community. I moaned that you shouldn't give a system disc with the motherboard, if the apps on it suck donkey balls.
AI Suite 3, told to remove, though the one app that seemed ok, made my pc run at 4.2 without me manually overclocking.
But the Roggamefirst 3, some amazing awesome gaming network enhancer, that makes your network..... stop. Thats right, on my board, it just stopped all browsers, anything that was trying to download stuck at 99%. It was the worst. And yet other people with Rog boards, love it. Maybe a diff Rog board. I stopped using that site, and the included apps.

Looking for the screws on the diagram of the case instructions. Hunting for ages. At Midnight. Stupid time to build a pc. Later finding the motherboard / case screws already attached to the case. FFS ? If they are already in, don't tell me they should be in the packet.

It died. For ages I could not work out why my pc that I put together so slowly... hours it took, too tired perhaps, but it was working one minute then not... why... I even had my return sorted for Amazon after I gave up. But then I couldn't give up, and I found a power cable had somehow come loose. My infuriating errors were just mounting up.

I have grown to like my pc. Have yet to see if my 970 gtx 3.5gb gfx card sucks. Can't find a new game to test it out on. Payday 2 claims to run at 130+ fps.

 

[Adhmuz]

After having built hundreds of PCs while working at a local PC shop you get pretty comfortable with most of this stuff, starts getting pretty mundane. Some of the "points" make the author sounds like a whinny *****, the whole anti static strap point is just a waste of time, or filler, actually most of the article is just frustrating to read. Anyone can build a computer these days, making it sound like an impossible task doesn't make sense any more, just makes the author sound like an *****.

 

[Skewed Input]

Great article, but one thing your missing...

Once someone builds a PC (I put my first bare-bones-kit together when I was 14...some swear they did it much earlier...) they somehow morph into a "I know everything about IT" person. Wreaking havoc for those like myself who spent years getting professional training and certifications in the IT field. Self-entitled "IT" people then go on to tell everyone else how there's no reason for "IT professionals" while they're around.

Typically I don't mind, everyone should be proud about building a PC, after all you BUILT a machine with nothing more than your bare hands and curiosity to fuel the adventure. But PLEASE for the love of computers STOP confusing the accomplishment with a career. They are not the same.

And with that said, game on!

 

[Ranger12]

I've got a solution solution to number 2...

Jk!

but not really...

 

[Xabi Granja]

So many truths here, I laughed out loud plenty times. The 10 best things was good, this article is waaaaaaay better

 

[cartera]

You could of gone on forever with this, very funny though.

Personally I always forget sata cables, too the point I now have a box of them!

One you missed though, drivers and choosing the best.

 

[wiyosaya]

I really don't get the problem with thermal paste. Perhaps the reason it is found so complicated here is that people who do not know what they are doing are being consulted on something they have absolutely no clue about doing. I say that is the problem here, so frack them.

Instead of wasting your time with the village, excuse me, PC-building I-diot, go to the experts. http://www.arcticsilver.com/instructions.htm Nothing could be simpler.

 

[oldikes]

" Wreaking havoc for those like myself who spent years getting professional training and certifications in the IT field. Self-entitled "IT" people then go on to tell everyone else how there's no reason for "IT professionals" while they're around."

See, the problem is you have "IT professionals" who insist that my defective ram chip is actually a horrible horrible piece of malware. Thats why I would rather people trust me than an IT professional because at least I can google things and better ensure people I know arent getting fed BS.

 

[p51d007]

I don't care for the time to:
Install Windows
Install the motherboard drivers
Install SP1
Install the 385 updates past SP1
Reinstall drivers MS changed when you updated the update
Installing all my software, virus software, ad blocking, malware and on and on.

I bought a new tower about 5 months ago, as my almost 6 year old Win7 box was showing its age.
This time, I spec'd a new one, versus building. The price difference wasn't worth the lost time,
installing from scratch.

 

[gamoniac]

Awesome article.

...Thermal paste is one of Rumsfeld's known unknowns...

It makes me laugh.

 

[Jam_Man]

That thermal paste part is the one part I always hated doing.

 

[hahahanoobs]

That had to be one of the worst pieces I've read in a while. The author was digging pretty hard to find faults that he complained about screws?! Applying thermal paste? $100 for a copy of Windows?! Oh and my favourite - "If you're building your own computer you're probably going to overclock." WHAT?! FFS, stock coolers and even my H100i has PRE-APPLIED paste!

PC building has cons of course, but these ones are just bad. Nothing about troubleshooting your own hardware, or dealing with drivers, or warranties, etc. This piece had NONE of that. Just some dude whining about petty crap.

I could go on and on tearing apart this pathetic piece, but I think this sums up PC building (or any job/hobby/project):

Newsflash: Building a PC isn't for everyone.
In other news, water is still wet.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Install SP1
Install the 385 updates past SP1
Reinstall drivers MS changed when you updated the update
Installing all my software, virus software, ad blocking, malware and on and on.

That is actually irrelevant cause you may have that to contend with regardless how the PC was built.

 

[amstech]

Who puts CPU paste on with a glove?
And don't tell me you need to do it that way, my CPU temps on every CPU I have ever replaced/installed/overclocked have been nothing short of EPICNESS.
Just don't masturbate prior.

 

[Deltree]

I have the CM Storm Trooper case and it is so badass. Great article.

 

[Trillionsin]

It's harder to screw up thermal paste than this article makes it sound... at least in my opinion, it's pretty easy. Either that, or I am just good at it and dont stress over it.

known unknown... if you benchmark or stress your PC, and temps are okay. You can imagine its on there right, if temps increase dramatically past the safe point, then shut it off, remove the heatsink, inspect what you may have done wrong, and try again. Most people have a full toob of this stuff, and you usually only apply it to one pc. (actually most of the heatsinks have a nice layer of thermal paste on them, so I dont even know why this article stresses it so much)

 

[Julio Franco]

@Adhmuz @hahahanoobs You may know this already, but this article is a follow-up to the one we posted last week (The 10 Best Things About Building a New Gaming PC), so rather than seeing this as an absolute, it was written more within the context of the opposite side of PC building "awesomeness"

 

[cliffordcooley]

That had to be one of the worst pieces I've read in a while. The author was digging pretty hard to find faults that he complained about screws?! Applying thermal paste? $100 for a copy of Windows?! Oh and my favourite - "If you're building your own computer you're probably going to overclock." WHAT?! FFS, stock coolers and even my H100i has PRE-APPLIED paste!

While this is likely true. You can't deny TechSpot has been covering both ends of the stick here lately. This is simply the opposite end of the stick to "10 reasons to build your own PC" article done a few weeks ago.

 

[Adhmuz]

@Adhmuz @hahahanoobs You may know this already, but this article is a follow-up to the one we posted last week (The 10 Best Things About Building a New Gaming PC), so rather than seeing this as an absolute, it was written more within the context of the opposite side of PC building "awesomeness"

Yes, I have read that article, it was better, but still trying to hard to make building a PC a comedic event. But perhaps I'm being a little harsh, I only figured all this out for myself at the at of 13, or maybe 14, have 75% of a Network Administrator course completed and have worked in the field for a couple years. So maybe I'm not the key demographic for the article and am starting to get annoyed with the lack of sense people have surrounding what to me seems like child play, certainly making jokes about it doesn't help.

 

[lripplinger]

Clearance issues with radiators, or cpu cooler towers and and RAM....or damn radiators barely clearing the motherboard....I just dealt with that on a client build. That is one of my nightmares of building PC's.