Questions, questions, always questions. This week we want to know about your PC-building habits. Don’t build PCs? Tell us! Just use a laptop? We need to know. There are few questions below, so please do us a favour and fill them in. It’ll take mere seconds, and you’ll probably be reward in PC gaming heaven. Probably.
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Do you build your own gaming PC from seperate components?
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Do you upgrade internal elements of your PC (memory, 3D card)
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I have bought a 3D card in the past...
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Do you use a laptop for playing new, 3D games? Aka: do you have a modern gaming laptop
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I selected and purchased the individual parts of my computer but I had never built a computer before and didn’t really have any sort of guide so I decided that I would let a local computer store build it. They did a shit job with the software side (bluescreens related to drivers that took FOREVER to fix) so next time I’m just gonna do it myself.
Thanks Howard and ManRaisedByPuffins. I’d read about these charities sending out PCs to Schools in Africa etc. but don’t know how to contact them (not have I tried to find out as yet) or whether they build from components. I’ll have a look later and see what I can dig up.
Laptop’s the option for me, though it’s more a desktop replacement than laptop.
Since i’m still at uni and don’t know where i’ll end up next (if, as is likely i start a PHD then I’ll have stayed for various lenghts of time in about 5 different locations over a five year period) it’s much easier to have a laptop.
Once i settle down I’ll get a desktop but I’ll most likely buy that from retail or get a friend to build it – I’m too lazy to do it myself.
Built it myself.
Although next time I might let the guys from the shop do it. But in any case, I want to handpick the components.
Can pick the components you really want. Medium to good processsor, good (well around €200) gpu card, lots of ram and a huge HD. Still only cost me around €700 last year. And no, no need for crappy wireless on board cards, tv cards, card readers or a radio in my PC.
I have 4 PCs at home, three homebuilt, one netbook. Probably the only major component I upgrade is the graphics card, other than that I tend to build an entirely new PC every 18 months to 2 years. My old PC gets passed to my son, and his PC to my daughter, so I always have a couple of PCs capable of running recent games, just in case my main PC goes down. My Asus EEE 1000H occasionally gets used for emulators, half-life or peggle.
I really enjoy building new machines, but it is quite tense when I turn them on for the first time.
I built my current pc back in Christmas 2006, and quite honestly I can’t recall having the same pc for so long. I’ve upgraded the graphics card once in that time frame, along with adding an extra 2gb of ram but the main components are still the same.
It’s still going strong at this point, but I’m starting to get itchy feet for an upgrade! The Problem is i’ve not been able to rationalise it, as what I mainly play (wow, tf2, etc) still runs fine at near enough max everything.
I’ll build my next one myself again but I would probably consider buying a custom built pc from a reputable source, if the benefits of doing so were worth it.
My laptop is an eee PC, so I said it was old and neglected. That’s a lie though, but it’s the closest. I use it to play Q3A, HL1 and EVE, but I intentionally bought a weaker smaller computer so it would be easier to assert my dominance over it! Yeah, I’m still my desktop’s bitch…
Anyways, it would be nice to have another category on the laptop question.
I used to build all my pc’s. Then I got a decent job and didn’t have a screwdriver after moving countries. Silly I know, but I bought a dell for not much more then if I’d made it myself. It was soo much less hassle I don’t think I’ll ever bother to build one again. I’m sure as hell never building another one for my family.
I used to mess with every component of my systems, but that was back in the late 486 days, when CPUs didn’t even have heat sinks, and when I could pick up used machines for $50 and play with the parts to my heart’s content without worrying about breakage.
Those days faded, and I was left for the longest time in a state of being fairly confident when popping PCI/AGP cards and RAM in and out as needed, but unwilling to go any further (e.g. messing with heat sinks), and I had shops do all my initial assembly for me.
It’s been very liberating to get back into full system assembly and realise that for all my fussing and worries that the system will never actually boot, it inevitably does anyway. My best success story was getting my CPU down from 65C (stock cooler gone bad) to a max of 35C (awesome heat tower with near-silent 120mm fans everywhere).
I still sometimes let the shop do the bare-bones assembly (mobo + CPU + stock cooler), but only because it’s free and comes with a warranty. I wouldn’t want them doing anything that involves wiring, because the Antec P182 has taught me the magic of proper wire management, all nicely tucked away behind the motherboard.
Built my PC myself and have done so for about ten years. Most pre-built computers here in Sweden are expensive and underpowered, or simply expensive. Besides, putting a pc together is fun, and not nearly as difficult as some people seem to think.
@malkav11
True that. The golden rule in my book is to buy a decent motherboard over everything else. An ok Processor you can always overclock, and Ram you can always replace or double up on, but a barebones motherboard will always hold you back.
I got my first PC at a local computer shop, and it was pretty lousy, but it worked. The next PC I specced out part by part and built it by hand – the result being an economical gaming machine with a tendency to refuse to boot any time I installed a system update. By the time I finally got it stable the internal components were out of date, so I added a few upgrades, which brought their own breed of problems. About that time, Macs went intel, so when I upgraded from an old G5 to a Mac Pro, I just installed Vista on a partition and used that. Oddly enough, it’s been my most trouble-free gaming machine to date…
When I was a child, I played with Lego every day (only toys I had)….what? Yes, that’s probably why I love putting my PC’s together myself. Fun stuff to do.
home made beast :D
I carve my PC myself from slabs of black onyx. I score tracks and pour in molten silver. It looks cool, but the shift to 32nm was rather tricky.
Seriously though, building a PC is a piece of piss nowadays. Everything goes together like lego, and Windows picks up almost everything before you even load the supplied drivers.
I always build my own. It’s been just over two years since I built my latest rig and it still runs things great. No need to upgrade in the foreseeable future.
I suspect this is part of your full on plot to get advertising money?
I sometimes buy stuff used so I don’t have to do the building but in general I build them. Even if I get them used it’s essentially bare bones and heavily upgraded after I get it.
Most of my pcs are based off of server boards though.
I get an error message when trying to take part in the poll (using Safari, so that’s probably it). Anyway, I’m a mac user so..
1) I don’t build my own machines.
2) I’ve never done so, but I might given a mac which allows for such (I have an iMac and I doubt that I could easily install them).
3) Never. I could very well get one if I get a more beefy mac, should I have need for one.
4) Nope. Nothing against laptops, I just don’t feel the need to take my computer with me wherever I go.
I have always built my own computers for gaming, my media center or anything else I need computer wise. Had a laptop didn’t last long power controller fried but I was never happy with it so I haven’t felt like buying a new one, mainly cause I can’t fix the hardware myself.
Current Rig specs
Koolance PC4-1036BK Liquid Cooled Aluminum Full Tower Case Black (displaces 1000watt of heat)
Asus M2N32-SLI Deluxe Wireless Edition Motherboard
AMD Athlon 4×4 Fx-74 Dual cpu for Quad core – only quad on the market 3 years ago
BFG Tech GeForce 8800GTX 768MB Water Cooled OC Edition x2 for SLI goodness
ENERMAX GALAXY 1000W Gamers Power Supply
mushkin 8GB (4 x 2GB) DDR2 800 (PC2 6400) Dual Channel
Swiftech Apogee GT Water Block x2
Fluid XP+ Extreme non-conductive coolant
X-Fi XtremeGamer
Klipsch 5.1 THX Cert Spekaers
Logitech G15 Keyboard
Logitech G9 Mouse
Dell 2405fwp 24″ Monitor Primary
HP f70 17″ Monitor Secondary
SataII Western Digital Caviar 320gig main os
SataII Western Digital Caviar 500gig installed games
SataII Western Digital Caviar 1tb all other files
oops the mother board is a Asus 4×4 – L1N64-SLI WS, forgot to update that
I have always built my own machines. It has always been cheaper, and more often than not, having all available software/drivers ready next to the machine comes in far handier then having to search for them, make phone calls, etc.
And don’t get me started on pre-installed software. >.<
I usually end up putting together a brand new pc every four or so years, so I generally don't upgrade specific parts unless they die.
Recently, however, I've started to think about paying someone else to put one together for me though. Honestly, putting a machine together has only gotten more complicated and more frustrating as each individual part has its own compatibility list that you pretty much have to check beforehand or risk returning it wasting your time and money, not to mention the sheer number of them.
Its gotten so bad I've even pondered upon the idea of running a collectivized information site that would let you input your part and it would bring up its compatible components without forcing you to go to each and every other manufacturer's websites. Then again, that would be a huge headache too.
Still, if you can live with the headache, building your machine is the best way to go.
I have never not built my own system.
I tend to customize them highly, too, for silence and performance. (Right up to machining my own hard drive racks out of aluminium.)
I got a pre-built system for Christmas a few years ago, and have since replaced every single part of it besides the CD drive. I’ll probably just keep upgrading it. No sense rushing out and spending a bunch of money on an entirely new batch of parts when I can just buy them one at a time.
I’ve built my own desktops since I was 12 (that’s a decade now). It is cheaper and more fun! I’ve built three enclosures from scratch, one of which was a unit I built into my custom-fabricated desk. If there’s anything I hate about computers these days it is this trend towards obnoxious, retina-searing LEDs and cathodes. I pretty much despise case windows, too — I don’t give two shits about what the insides of the PC look like so I hide them away. I care that stuff’s properly seated and wires are out of the way, mind, but I don’t need to constantly peer inside to get a techno-stiffy off the internals.
My first PC I had built to order in the shop – the rest I’ve made myself.
I could try to pretend I do it because it’s better value for money or that you end up with better component but that would be a lie. I do it because I’m a huge geek and I enjoy it. Doing all the research into which components to get and from where to get them. Having all the parcels arrive on my doorstep. Best of all is the little burst of nervousness when you’ve assembled all the component and press the On button for the first time – will it jump to life with a quiet yet contented purr? Or will it go BANG and toast several hundred pounds worth of silicon.
@Jambe:
Technostiffy is an awesome neologism, or should be at least.
I always have and always will build my own boxes, in fact in the past 5 years i’ve built over 1500 boxes, as it is my chosen profession. MMMMMM, did a OC’ed i7 today, I was super temped to take it home with me.
Wow guys your readers are major, humongous nerds.
I am too, of course. Yes, yes, 6 months, and sometimes, for my answers. The truth is I never play modern games on this laptop (that I am typing on right now, in bed, decadently snacking on raspberries), but I ought to, because it should be able to run them.
I bought an ASUS GeForce GTX260 a few months ago but it may be the cause of the freezes and BSODs I’ve been expecting since then. Which would make me very very sad. Or it could just be a Win7 thing. Or both.
Uh but I digress.
Can I has non-lonely hearts adverts on my favourite PC gaming website? I’ll gladly take PC component parts over flirty-titty-eye contact. There’s nothing worse than lying in bed next to my girlfriend and having to explain why I’m viewing a website with soft porn on it. Please find a new revenue stream chaps.
I love my Rock:-
http://www.custompc.co.uk/labs/125903/rock-xtreme-ctx-pro.html
Just had the 7950GTX replaced under warranty.
Kenny: It’s an Evony ad right? They’re flooding Google ads with those, it’s a pox on the entire internet right now. Evony is probably an identity-theft scam of epic proportions, which steals content from other games, so yeah, nasty business altogether. There’s no way to block them without getting off google ads altogether.
Anywho.
My current PC is the first one that I’ve assembled from ’scratch’ with parts I bought online. I got an Nvidia 8800 with it, and haven’t really felt the need to upgrade it since then so I’m probably a generation or two behind.
My last PC before that was a barebones rig off of Amazon or EBay or something, meaning it had the case, motherboard, and CPU already assembled. I was too scared I’d break the chip or warp the motherboard or mount the fan wrong or whatever.
I bought a gaming laptop about 2 or 3 years ago. First mistake was going to Office Depot first, an office supplies store that just happens to carry computers too. Second mistake was buying it from the first store I went to. Third mistake was buying a gaming laptop. Altogether I paid 1,000 $ for a not very good laptop, and six months later it lost the ability to regulate its own heat and can’t do any type of gaming whatsoever.
Hell, browsing with Firefox and multiple tabs isn’t even a good idea with it. It once overheated and crashed just from reading Rock Paper Shotgun with ads enabled.
Unless you’re living out of your car, or you have a bunch of money you just want to throw away on a gadget, stay the hell away from gaming laptops is my advice.
I fell into the trap of thinking a laptop could be good for gaming, proud owner of a Dell XPS M1330. Then the nvidia graphics flaw came to light. On third mobo atm, and its starting to give signs of this one giving in too… To be fair though, the thing does run at 95*c when gaming (I’m not sure if that is 95*c, or if thats just where the mobo’s thermometer maxes out).
(pressed opinion too quickly!)
SO for me it’s desktops all the way. Though this one is struggling with my new 1900×1200 screen, time to build a new one? :D
@cncplyr: that was why i bought my last pc – the old one didn’t really like games in 1920×1200, much better with the new one. Almost a year old now, so it’ll probably commit suicide over OFP2 or Rage.
I have a netbook I just bought. So I can’t really answer the laptop question. I use it for playing X-Com terror from the deep, the only x-com game I missed during my leap from amiga to pc. Can anyone recommend other good netbook suitable oldies? I do use steam and gog.
Genres that would suit me on this platform are strategy (turn based pref) and adventure espec. point and click. Bear in mind I’ve covered lucas arts and the first broken sword.
I built my computer about a year ago now. Cost me ~1400 (Canadian) and it’s a fucking beast. Short of games that are just poorly optimised, I can run anything maxed. I think the best part of it is the 9800 GX2 that I got for 190 dollars. I’ll probably use this til about 2012 when all the new hardware starts rolling out and upgrade then.
I’d usually prefer to build a PC myself, but sometimes you find package deals from suppliers that are better than what you can put together individually.
My current system is a MESH computers corei7 one, which i picked up for a relatively cheep £850 back in march. As they literally supplied a tower, vista64 install disk and the mobo disk, it was very basic, but after looking around at buying those parts myself it would have worked out over £100 more expensive for the same stuff (the OS pushed it over the 100 mark really).
The big thing for me was getting a really good mainboard and processor as i like to make my PCs last a long time. The i7 920 and the mainboard were over half the cost of the PC. I do alot of 3d work and rendering can be a bastard, but going from my old P4 box to this was like taking a hop step and a high speed train to along way away very quickly. Render times on my uni work dropped from 15 mins a frame to ~2 mins and working on models over 1 mil polys was suddenly possible haha.
Since then i picked up an EeePC for all my mobile needs, which worked fantasticly till the SSD died, so it’s now on it’s way to ASUS to get that fixed. The eee was also my first step into Linux, which was interesting. Watching my piddly laptop boot quicker than my shiny fast desktop was a bit depressing heh.
Last video card i bought was 2 years ago, i haven’t upgraded not because i don’t want to pay for it, but because the 8800 gts still runs pretty damn near everything at full settings.
As to “other,” I’ve both built my own PC and bought them from retailers. The former is too much hassle and the latter is too expensive and often you can’t get quite what you want.
I’ve seen mwave.com mentioned before, which is essentially a parts shopping place, a la tigerdirect or what have you. For a few extra bucks, though, they’ll assemble everything and test it for you until it works (this last bit is the rub with building your own. Never having enough parts to swap out to see exactly what the hell is broken.)
I haven’t tried them personally yet, but I look forward to getting my next PC from there, which will probably be sooner rather than later.
I don’t want to be chained in place, I see the desktop as a ball with an invisible chain, and as a person who likes to bounce about, I find it insufferably restrictive. My first laptop rather effortlessly outclassed the best desktop I’ve ever had anyway, and that was the clincher for me.
Since I’ve started using a laptop, I have had desired mobility, and if I’m going to do something in an MMO with a bunch of friends and it’s a sunny day, I can even take my laptop outside on the patio and game there! That’s not exactly something I could ever do with my desktop.
If I feel like lounginig, I can hop into a comfy chair and lazily poke around the Ages of the D’ni in Uru, or play something else more cerebral, and the whole experience is rather homogeneous to (or at least a modernist equivalent of) relaxing with a good book.
I might get some extra performance out of a desktop, if I buy the very cutting edge technology and get back into the cycle of upgrading every few months, but given the choice of a little extra performance, or the personal freedom a laptop grants, I’d quite merrily opt for the latter, whenever asked.
Besides, the whole upgrade cycle was an incredibly tiresome and arduous process that I’m glad to have washed my hands of.
I usually build my own pc’s, but I’m certainly not against buying pre-fabs if the price is right. Tiger Direct had a really good price on a high end (for me) refurb’d media center last thanksgiving that was about $100 or $200 cheaper than i could have built it for.
I haven’t gotten into the gaming laptop scene; I mostly just can’t justify the price difference, and I rarely am gaming anyplace besides home anyways, so it makes more sense for me to just have a desktop, and go through the arduouse task of carting it around to lan parties two or three times a year. I have an eeePC for little stuff, and it serves it’s purpose well.
@Clayton Hughes – if you keep an eye out, it doesn’t take long to have way more extra pc parts than you could possibly need. I’m currently running Win 7 on an ATI vid card circa 1997, while i wait for my new GTX 260 to come in =P
@Wulf – while whether you actually -need- the extra performance depends entirely on what you’re looking to do on your computer, the performance difference between a fully hand-built desktop PC and an equivalently priced laptop is in no way little. And that laptop will stay at exactly the same performance point forever, while the desktop machine can keep pace with a $150 card here, a $250 CPU/motherboard upgrade there, etc, over many months.
@Ourdreamsoffreedom: What kind of store do you shop at? I’ve never heard of a place that would do that for free. But, on top of that, I do enjoy putting the computer together myself, even when I do invariably get pissed off at it when SOMETHING doesn’t work.
Dunno why people knock laptops.Personally,when I can only afford 1 computer,it needs to be…portable.
I own a 5yr old HP Pavilion DTR. 17inch screen,2.8GHz P4 processor,512MB RAM,64 MB(yes,I know)Radeon 9200 graphics card.
I had to change the motherboard once under warranty,and have traded in a 60GB hard drive for a 120GB.Handles Ground Control brilliantly, CnC Generals,Act of War Direct Action,Dungeon Siege and Sins Of A Solar Empire very well but chugged in BFME2 and CnC3 Tiberium Wars.
Next computer will also be a laptop,as soon as they suss out the whole USB3 thing.Before then,RAM and HD upgrades.Probably.
Another person here who has put his own pcs together but when the guy at the shop does it for 40 bucks and helps me source all the components cheaply there is no real point. Would never buy pre-packaged though.
@Jerricho
Either you’re running one heck of an overclock, or you don’t know how dual cores work. :P
I’ve built the one PC that I’ve ever personally owned, which I’m typing on right now. I’ve done some other random upgrades as well.
It’s going to be two years old next month. I’ve made two upgrades to it thus far: a ram upgrade (I can’t resist good sales), and a graphics card upgrade (my old one died of a hot and wheezy death). I fully expect most of my parts to last for a long, long time. All of the parts that don’t constantly change formats were purchased in hand-picked high quality. However, my Mobo/ram/gfx/cpu were purchased for mid-range prices. All I have to do to overhaul my system is replace those components.
I’m a big fan of midrange parts. I don’t need to be cutting edge, as cutting edge costs an arm and a leg. Price for performance is almost an exponential curve. Related to this is my total lack of desire for multiple graphics cards. If you can afford a second card as an upgrade path, you can probably afford a newer card that has twice the performance. The only possible need I would have for more than one card would be to support more than two monitors. I recently replaced my old (mid-range) graphics card with a new (mid-range) graphics card. For the new one, I paid half as much, got a card that’s two inches shorter, runs 20 C cooler, and get about 150% extra performance. An Ati 4850 for 75$. That was an awesome sale, and timely, too.
My next potential upgrades (not sure when) are the CPU (which is getting old) and a new hard drive. I can get a terabyte of hard drive space for about 80$? That’s gonna be purchased sometime soon.
I’m also twitchy about heat sinks. I don’t overclock, and I don’t want to watercool, but I’ll do just about anything else.
Oh, and for people who don’t like flashy cases, go take a look on newegg for the Antec P182 SE. It’s a perfect example for a case that I love, but I would never buy.
Also useful for computer building is the use of Hot Deals sites. Any given week and I can find ridiculously good deals on most anything. Often the exact part I’m looking for. I think my current computer was purchased from three different websites, with different sales running at each place.
Same as first poster:
Select components but let the system be built by someone else (covinience).
I upgrade components myself though if needed (toying with the idea to replace my E8500 with a Core 2 Quad right now).
Only thing left from my original PC (Dell XPS P2-300 circa 1998) is the speakers. Everything else has been chopped and changed by me over the years. About the only thing that’s still awkward nowadays is swapping the motherboard, and that’s just time consuming rather than scary once you’ve done a couple.
I’m going to guess at most of the commenters here being under 30.
I used to build my own, too, back when I had more free time, less disposable income and no wife to complain about boxes full of cables and motherboards and things cluttering up the office.
These days I buy off-the-peg, because frankly my free time is too valuable to spend figuring out why the fuck the machine has begun bluescreening after a about an hour since boot when before that it’s been running perfectly for several months. The difference in price, when factored into the time between upgrades, is pretty damned negligible, plus whilst individual *parts* might have warrantees if you build your own, that doesn’t fucking help if you don’t know *which* part it is that’s causing your machine to go belly up and your wife is whinging at you because you’ve covered the living room in computer parts and you’re getting stressed because the problem is intermittent and not simple to track down and… yeah, fuck that. I just want to play some games. If something breaks, I’ll phone the supplier and they can sort it out. I deal with enough computer-related cruft during the day at work; I’m not doing it at home, too.
Best bang for you buck is to build it yourself (or at least buy the components and get someone to build it for you).