7 Reasons PC Gaming Is Not Too Hard

daglesj said:
I still think a few things could be improved and standardised. You tear apart a PC and it still looks a little late 1970's there in places..

I would like to see -

A better 'snap in' quick release motherboard mounting system rather than nasty brass stand-offs and screws.

A standardised plug for Power/Reset/HDD Light/Power Light.

A better design for the sockets back plate. Okay there has been a little movement on this at the top end but those nasty chrome/tin plates just have to go.


I think the main thing that annoys me when sorting out other peoples PC's is when you find someone used screws on the other side of the HDD/DVD drive. Grrrrrrr
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I bolt them fuckers in like a child in a carseat. I will use 6 screws if I can!!! I come from the land of LAN parties and you better have that bolted when you trek across town on the shittiest roads in the US!!!
 
Dead Parrot said:
As long as you aren't trying to win some "Most cool gaming rig ever" award, you can do pretty good by ordering a Dell Optiplex, full sized case, with the CPU, RAM and drive setup you want. Monitor also if you need a new one. Just take the on board video option. Unless something has changed, the Optiplex line takes standard power supplies and generally has one video slot open. As shipped, it will have a minimal PS so all you have to do is order a 5~700 watt PS plus the video card of your choice. May not be the cheapest way to go but will save a lot of will this work worries plus you get a warranty. Be sure to get the full sized case, the compact ones get weird on replacement parts. You might be able to do the same thing with the Vostro line.
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Some of the Dells now have some oddball power supplies with just 8 pin connectors to the motherboard, but there are adapters:

Dell OptiPlex 3020 PSU Main Power 24-Pin to 8-Pin Adapter Cable (30cm)

It's a bit of a hassle, but not the end of the world.
 
DrLobotomy said:
Forgot the blood. Always bleeding from sticking hands inside old cheap white box cases. I haven't cut myself up lately. Almost forgot about that.
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Good newer cases are MUCH better these days with sharp edges, inside and outside the case.
 
Dead Parrot said:
As long as you aren't trying to win some "Most cool gaming rig ever" award, you can do pretty good by ordering a Dell Optiplex, full sized case, with the CPU, RAM and drive setup you want.
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You could do that. You can break even cost wise because Dell buys everything in bulk. But you have to realize Dell uses the cheapest components for everything including the mainboard. Last time I checked they used ECS as their supplier. They also use the cheapest cooling and power supplies possible. Less than 1% of customers care or know about the quality of internal components.
 
Building your own PC or even getting a pre-built NEVER includes the words DELL.
 
That said I built my newphew his first computer/gaming rig yesterday. Four hours total including win 10 install, steam account setup, and origin account setup.

MSI Z170 Mainboard
Intel i5
16 Gigs PC2100 DDR4 mem
240GB Muskin SSD
NVIDIA 1060 GTX
EVGA 650 Watt powersupply.
Corsair Spec M01

Some of these components are a little overpowered compared to the others (Z series chipset and 650 Watt supply) But I wanted him to be able to swap out the CPU and Video card in the future without having to worry about replacing the motherboard or power supply. So he should be good to go for 8 years with two swapouts.
 
Lorien said:
Old timer huh? Here's a brief run through memory lane

Using jumpers to manually change IRQs when adding new hardware.
Knowing by heart how to create custom msdos.sys (remember it had to be larger than 1024 bytes), autoexec.bat, config.sys, himem.sys, etc. etc.
Properly loading emm386 or qemm386

Ah the memories...
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Heh, I started my computer building career in the late 70's while still in college. I wire wrapped all the boards (s100 bus system) except for the 16 line by 64 character display card. I had a z80 processor and a whole 4K of RAM. Used the 2KB Zapple monitor (like a very simple version of 'debug' in DOS) to learn z80 programming. I use to know almost the whole z80 instruction set by the numbers. Eventually upgraded things until I could run CP/M. Boy, those were fun days.
 
DrLobotomy said:
I have a couple of friends who can repair car transmissions, work on any gas engine and is totally afraid of opening a PC case. They have this phobia about computers and they always just bring it to me. When I ask them what did they try to do to fix it, They always reply with "I ain't opening that fuckin' thing!"
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Well there is that kid that opened his power supply to try and fix it and somehow electrocuted himself to death on the capacitor.
 
DocSavage said:
Well there is that kid that opened his power supply to try and fix it and somehow electrocuted himself to death on the capacitor.
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I thought you were supposed to discharge those bad boys on your little brother!!!
 
DocSavage said:
Well there is that kid that opened his power supply to try and fix it and somehow electrocuted himself to death on the capacitor.
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Ripping open a power supply sounds exactly like what a car mechanic would do.
 
It's as hard or as easy as you want to make it.

I remember my first PCs assembled out of mail order and used parts: Yay! 16 MB of used ram for only $600! Which was much better than the 512KB I added to my Amiga 1000 by pulling the CPU and putting a custom memory board in the CPU socket, then putting the CPU back into the memory board. No ZIF sockets for the CPU either, you carefully pried the the CPU out of it's socket.

I did multi-source parts for years, to save a few bucks, but it was negligible.

Last PC I just submitted a parts list to a local vendor, they price matched parts, and charged a mere $30 to assemble and test. Money well spent. It's not like I have extra everything on hand to test if something doesn't work.

On a previous build I had a motherboard that was finicky about RAM. I ended up buying 3 different brands to get it stable.

IMO these are the main options, that have existed for at least 10 years:

1: Buy an off the shelf gaming PC (or Robust desktop and have a Video card added).
2: Spec system for your Vendor to build.
3: Assemble parts and do it all yourself.

#1 and #2 are easy. You are only doing #3 because you want to, not for any real benefit. There is ZERO need to do this. So zero reason to whine about it being hard.
 
Cmdrmonkey said:
The original i7 920 is still fine for gaming almost a decade later. This author just has no fucking clue what he's writing about, and should not be working at a tech site. Go with a decent CPU, mobo, and ram, and the only thing that will need to be changed out for the better part of a decade is the video card. And those take literally two seconds to swap out, and maybe only really need to be upgraded every 3-4 years or so. This guy is just an incompetent retard. He's a Mac/Console using dumbass who should not be writing about tech.
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I recently upgraded my 920 and I probably didn't even have to. If you are 1080 gaming almost anything will be fine these days.

Completely agree with all your other comments...

Gaming on PC is easiest it has ever been... Get PC, install Steam/Origin/what ever client, install games... play.
 
DrLobotomy said:
I have a couple of friends who can repair car transmissions, work on any gas engine and is totally afraid of opening a PC case. They have this phobia about computers and they always just bring it to me. When I ask them what did they try to do to fix it, They always reply with "I ain't opening that fuckin' thing!"
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Yeah I have a friend that will suddenly strip apart an entire motorbike to individual parts and put it all back together perfectly first time in like a day, without a second thought but he wont dare touch the inside of his PC.
 
chenw said:
A lot of take the simple things for granted, because we ALL know what we consider simple basics. For example, Speccing for a gaming PC, given a certain budget constraint, and subsequently building it after buying the parts, would like driving a car after driving one for 20 odd years.

But for someone who has NEVER anything similar before, and only want to get to the result, it can be daunting task.

IE you have to know what motherboard goes with what CPU, what PSU you need for your GPU, what GPU you need, how to find quality parts etc. It's basically like learning to assemble a car from modularised components, when you all care about is trying to get a transportation method from A to B.

That's still one of the major appeals of the consoles: buying something specifically designed for games, games that are specifically designed for the said console, not having to worry about whether it'll work or not (unlike PC where games say D3 may happily run on a lowish system, but TW3 would crawl to a halt, when both games work on XB1).

This is akin to learning to drive a car to get to work, when you have never seen a car before, but all you care about isn't learning to drive, but getting to work.
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Building a PC is pretty simple these days if people actually want to learn and don't go into it with an attitude of "this will be hard and I will hate it" like the author of the original article clearly did. There are literally thousands of resources someone can use now days to assist them in building. Forums like this are great places to come and ask about different parts and get suggestions on what to avoid. There are tons of tutorials on Youtube with people taking a couple hours, or more, to walk newbies through building a computer step-by-step. There are articles all over the web talking about computer building. There is no excuse for not knowing what you are doing now days. The amount of information we have access to from a simple Google search is staggering. It's a hell of a lot better than when I first learned to build computers in the mid-90s and even better than when I bought and built my first gaming rig in 03. If someone is lazy and goes into it with the wrong attitude, of course they're going to have problems.
 
daglesj said:
Yeah I have a friend that will suddenly strip apart an entire motorbike to individual parts and put it all back together perfectly first time in like a day, without a second thought but he wont dare touch the inside of his PC.
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That's just fear or indifference. Anyone who has these skills can build a PC with ease.
 
With no cable management and rushing it can take around 30-45 mins to put together a standard PC ready for first switch on? I'd say that was about fair with no major hitches?

Obviously if you want a super tidy install add on another 4 hours....;)
 
Lorien said:
Old timer huh? Here's a brief run through memory lane

Using jumpers to manually change IRQs when adding new hardware.
Knowing by heart how to create custom msdos.sys (remember it had to be larger than 1024 bytes), autoexec.bat, config.sys, himem.sys, etc. etc.
Properly loading emm386 or qemm386

Ah the memories...
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Ahhh the days. I remember them so well tweaking the heck out of it and trying every option.
 
Snowdog said:
1: Buy an off the shelf gaming PC (or Robust desktop and have a Video card added).
2: Spec system for your Vendor to build.
3: Assemble parts and do it all yourself.

#1 and #2 are easy. You are only doing #3 because you want to, not for any real benefit. There is ZERO need to do this. So zero reason to whine about it being hard.
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#1 uses cheapest components possible. Questionable quality.
#2 if I bought it from a builder: $2100
#3 if I built it myself using same quality components $960

Lets face it, as soon as you attach the word "gaming" to it, you get @#$@#.

Everything these days is standardized, keyed, and clearly labeled. It's hard to screw up unless you muck around in the low level bios too much.

Any way, I had my nephew sit there and help me build the system. I showed him how to insert the board. I showed him how to hookup the headers based on the motherboard. I showed him how to route the cables from the power supply. I showed him how to insert a CPU. I showed him how to put in an expansion card and memory. I had him do about 1/2 of it. So he can do it in the future.

It's a good skill to have.
 
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Lorien said:
Old timer huh? Here's a brief run through memory lane

Using jumpers to manually change IRQs when adding new hardware.
Knowing by heart how to create custom msdos.sys (remember it had to be larger than 1024 bytes), autoexec.bat, config.sys, himem.sys, etc. etc.
Properly loading emm386 or qemm386

Ah the memories...
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How about manually pushing in DRAM chips into the sockets in order to go from 512k to 640k of RAM (which should be enough for anybody, really). I still have my DRAM chip extractors around here somewhere....

They came in handy when I upgraded my Advanced Gravis UltraSound to its maximum memory, for those sweet tracking music.
 
DrLobotomy said:
Forgot the blood. Always bleeding from sticking hands inside old cheap white box cases. I haven't cut myself up lately. Almost forgot about that.
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I have some nice scars on my hands from computer cases I had to work on in the 1990's
 
I'm not really too sure how anyone can see it as hard. I mean, I literally had little real experience on the inside of a computer when I built my first computer, but everything was relatively self explanatory. I mean I occasionally just looked into one of my HP's to see what was going on inside.

I had no one helping me and yet I put it together myself, with no guides or youtube videos. I think the only thing I did was use another random computer that was either built by someone else or a prebuilt in general, which is all anyone should really need. I just used those as reference for any ambiguities and everything else fell into place.

On the PSU (which is the only part where you can really mess up the system by doing it wrong), all the wires are even labeled.
- Where does this header labeled CPU go?
-- Probably the only freaking place where you can insert it near the CPU.
- Where does this large motherboard power cable go?
-- Probably the only freaking place you can insert it on the entire motherboard.

Etc etc. It's not rocket science. The most annoying thing is hooking up the power buttons and such to those pinouts on the motherboard. You have to look that up in the instruction manual. But that's about the hardest part. It's hard to insert the GPU anywhere that it does not belong. It's difficult to insert much of anything where it doesn't belong as long as you're not literally jamming it in. Most (read: pretty much all) CPU coolers even come with some paste pre-applied, so if you don't know how to do that step it's okay if you just skip it and fudge the thing on there and make sure it screws down. CPU's are even more heat tolerant than they used to be, too, so even if you mess it up they won't just overheat and go bad on you.

Anyone with half a brain should be able to monkey a computer together these days, especially with all of the videos and simplification.... Is what I want to say but frankly for some people they need to just make part sets that are extremely modular, where a child could do everything without messing up.
 
If there's a case into which you can install a motherboard without needing to twist in six to nine Phillips-head screws, I have yet to see it.
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I have an old Dell minitower from the late 90's which has a tool-free design for the motherboard *and* PSU. I keep meaning to rebuild it into something a bit more modern, but we already have too many enough computers in our house.
 
VIC-20 said:
Yeah, finding a mouse.com driver from a Genius mouse that used less low memory area than mouse.exe so Doom shareware would run.... Ah the memories indeed.

Not to mention jumpering for CPU voltage and multipliers, adding VRAM chips to VESA local bus videos cards for more colors, resolving memory address conflicts in Win 95, and so on. Man I feel old now lol.
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Oh yeah, keeping busmaster PCI cards away from each other because neighboring slots used the same IRQ? That was some fucking bullshit you no longer have to deal with.

And one step further: the AGP slot shared IRQ with the first PCI slot, so again you had to keep that first PCI slot clear.

This is why we called it "Plug and Pray." The OS usually detected things properly, and the driver install was usually easy, but managing those IRQs was a mess! So turn it off an play PCI card musical chairs again!

And this was vastly easier than the old DOS way, where you had to manually manager IRQs/DMA settings for each card.
 
Mohonri said:
I have an old Dell minitower from the late 90's which has a tool-free design for the motherboard *and* PSU. I keep meaning to rebuild it into something a bit more modern, but we already have too many enough computers in our house.
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The thing I have noticed with Dell kit is that its either made stunningly simplistic and sensible or overly technical and complicated. Its like they have two teams of technical designers and they draw lots as to whom designs what.

I remember one machine took me over half an hour to figure out how to remove the HDD. Most corporate Dells it's a 15 second exercise.

I've removed parts from Dell workstations that I am still baffled as to their purpose. Makes no apparent difference to the machine whether its in or not.
 
I remember one of my big PC building bugbears was around 2001-2004. A lot of machines had VIA chipsets or at least VIA USB chipsets. The problem with them was that they always failed to provide enough power to the more commonly used USB ADSL modems of the time. I lost count of the number of times I had to hunt out NEC USB2.0 chipset cards and install them for friends and family. VIA Chipsets...thank god they went.
 
daglesj said:
I remember one of my big PC building bugbears was around 2001-2004. A lot of machines had VIA chipsets or at least VIA USB chipsets. The problem with them was that they always failed to provide enough power to the more commonly used USB ADSL modems of the time. I lost count of the number of times I had to hunt out NEC USB2.0 chipset cards and install them for friends and family. VIA Chipsets...thank god they went.
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Couldn't you have put that under a spoiler tag with a warning or something? Never speak of ridiculously odd USB issues again!
 
Lorien said:
Old timer huh? Here's a brief run through memory lane

Using jumpers to manually change IRQs when adding new hardware.
Knowing by heart how to create custom msdos.sys (remember it had to be larger than 1024 bytes), autoexec.bat, config.sys, himem.sys, etc. etc.
Properly loading emm386 or qemm386

Ah the memories...
Click to expand...

Yep...I remember loading as many drivers I could into himem.sys (especially the CD driver and mouse and sound drivers) so I could get as close to 640k as possible to play Doom, and load a PWAD without any issues....
 
I remember sitting my hands in micron server tower, but I would wear cotton gloves for clients machines you would pull them out with smoke and lint all over the gloves and ripped threads where they caught a piece of punched metal, it was not worth to the person selling the beige boxes to roll the edges of the metal. Now the biggest issue is making sure your psu supplies more current than your hardware needs and there are websites that estimate that. I would say make sure to have the off set screws tightly screwed down to ground the board to the case. But I remember as a teenager most of the computers had options to build your own but you had to know where to find them, retail stores sold parts not all the parts. These days you hop on the internet and hundreds of sites sell the parts and you can check out what to do in a book from your public library.

Just think process catching fire because the heat sink was sitting on the counter because you were too much of hurry to play what ever game you had bought or upgraded your system to play, and some of the other silly stuff is mostly designed to stop those mistakes.
 
natos said:
Yep...I remember loading as many drivers I could into himem.sys (especially the CD driver and mouse and sound drivers) so I could get as close to 640k as possible to play Doom, and load a PWAD without any issues....
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I remember somehow playing multiplayer doom in two instances via windows 3.11 on the same machine using a 4MB 25MHz 486 which was amazing because doom required 4MB ram on its own to run.
 
Quix said:
If you're lazy, just get an Alienware. Full stop.
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The only benefit of the Alienware brand these days is its association with Dell so that you can use your Dell credit to buy a system. The boutique market is actually doing extremely well and there are plenty of laptop and desktop offerings from the various boutique makers (Falcon Northwest, ibuypower, cyberpowerpc, digital storm, origin, velocity micro, and others). The laptop offerings from Asus and MSI are also exceptional (if a little exceptionally priced). There are a lot of power offerings available these days for anyone who doesn't want to build the kit.
 
Rustynuts said:
If you haven't used conductive car window defroster paint to short traces on a MB to unlock a locked CPU for OC'ing, your PC build was too easy.
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I didn't do that, but I did short CPU pins by spooling a wire around them. And I used graphite on my R9000 to increase voltage.
 
M76 said:
I didn't do that, but I did short CPU pins by spooling a wire around them. And I used graphite on my R9000 to increase voltage.
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Yep, used a pencil to mod a video card, and used one strand of a copper wire in the cpu socket to boost a 1.6GHz Xeon to 2.4 GHz.
 
M76 said:
I didn't do that, but I did short CPU pins by spooling a wire around them. And I used graphite on my R9000 to increase voltage.
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Did that on my old laptop to unlock the bus to overclock. Also have changed resistors on a geforce card to force it to identify as a quadro. Worked really well for 3dstudio at the time.
 
I started gaming on a Commodore 64 when I was 5 (I think it was a Commodore 64C but it has been so long I can't remember). Hard drive? What hard drive? All I had was an 5.25 floppy A drive and everything was command line based, or used a one button joystick.



AND GET OFF MY LAWN!!!! :p
 
I started building my own PC's around the time you had to set jumpers for damn near everything, no case was ever made out of any light material, and you were bound to bleed just trying to get a stick of RAM in. Hell, I remember when the blow-hole mod was like the modern equivalent of man discovering fire.

Today? If you can turn a screwdriver, have the patience to properly seat a stick of RAM or a video card into place, and not go utterly batshit with the thermal paste, you can build a computer.
 
And use extra stand-offs even if there is no hole so that the motherboard has the extra support for pushing those cards all the way in.
 
defaultluser said:
Oh yeah, keeping busmaster PCI cards away from each other because neighboring slots used the same IRQ? That was some fucking bullshit you no longer have to deal with.

And one step further: the AGP slot shared IRQ with the first PCI slot, so again you had to keep that first PCI slot clear.

This is why we called it "Plug and Pray." The OS usually detected things properly, and the driver install was usually easy, but managing those IRQs was a mess! So turn it off an play PCI card musical chairs again!

And this was vastly easier than the old DOS way, where you had to manually manager IRQs/DMA settings for each card.
Click to expand...

Wow. I had completely forgotten about all that. My network card would always try and share an IRQ with something else, which only some cards would allow. So shuffle the sound blaster around until the NIC worked without locking up the machine and video card driver could kick in without a bluescreen. All while disabling unused parallel or com ports to try and free up IRQs. Man, that was some sh!t.
 
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