The Notebook Review forums were hosted by TechTarget, who shut down them down on January 31, 2022. This static read-only archive was pulled by NBR forum users between January 20 and January 31, 2022, in an effort to make sure that the valuable technical information that had been posted on the forums is preserved. For current discussions, many NBR forum users moved over to NotebookTalk.net after the shutdown.
As a parent, this video is 100% gold and 100% awesome. Parenting at its best.
As someone who has not built a PC and doesn't trust myself to, it kinda misses the point of the concerns that people like me raise. Most anything is easy for "you" to do when you have an expert right there "helping" (i.e., telling you exactly what to do and reducing everything to an idiot-proof series of questions with multiple-choice answers about your preferences).
Meh, it's not that hard. I built a PC for the first time myself recently. Watched some vids and was all set. But it does help to have some extra hands around. Had my dad help me with PSU installation, much easier when someone holds it in place.
"A person online said it was easy" is how every Pinterest-inspired disaster starts...only most Pinterest-inspired disasters I've gotten involved in don't involve $500 of electronics.
If you want to know why some of us don't want to build our own PC, do a Google image search for "Pinterest nailed it"...
Of course it's for everyone to figure out themselves if they want to "risk it" or not.
But as someone who played with Lego a lot I can honestly say that it was...well, someone who can operate a screw driver will certainly be able to build a PC following a manual. Of course there was that "if I screw up this can potentially turn into 1000 Euro piece of junk" thing, but isn't pretty much everything we do involves some kind of danger - driving a car, cooking, etc.
But oh well, I guess we all have our various areas of expertise.
Eh, I figure the most dangerous outcome of a DIY PC build would be if you stuck a screwdriver into the PSU while it was turned on. Or something to that effect.
Though I get where you're coming from. I feel the same sort of nervousness when it comes to car mechanics. I'm hesitant to do anything to my car at the moment, but plan on changing that sometime in the near-ish future.
Voltages and ram timings will need tweaking at minimum to get some stability.
Sorry I mean't building systems that can be ran under full load or complex activities 24/7 without failing.
If you want quick examples you can look at folding@home machines.
A lot of machines need tweaking running at stock frequencies to run stable for days on end.
More realistic examples are small time studios that use workstation class PC's to render effects for movies, commercials etc. Or Universities running statistics software to analyze years of work or data. Tasks that are processing intensive but do not warranty entire supercomputer builds or farms. You'd be surprised how many PC's fail at audio processing while running a load (rendering a video for example) without tweaking.
Umm, I F@H'ed quite a lot on my stock W520 (+extra RAM, stock timings/voltages/etc), and I currently run F@H on my DIY desktop (again, stock everything), and they were/are stable running that program for 24/7...
And part of my university program involved touring and learning about our local supercomputer (Palmetto Cluster: #66 Top500, #5 Top500 for a public university), and nobody mentioned anything about fiddling with voltages and timings... Their main concerns are cooling and power consumption (and networking interconnects).
These days it's more or less plug and play. Like Jarhead says, it's really power and cooling that are the critical factors. CPU, RAM, GPU are all pretty much plug and play. Sure you may have too weak a GPU for games you want to play or too weak a CPU to feed the GPU or run CPU intensive tasks that you didn't plan for, but it will work. RAM just needs proper type (ie DDR3/4) and speed. Even then as long as you have proper type it will work, just not optimal speed.
I used to cobble together PC's from spare parts all the time to run intensive single use projects including F@H, probably ten years ago even, without issue. 20 years ago you had to fuss with IRQ's and DMA and going back far enough EMM386 to eek every last KB of RAM you could. Now pretty much everything is automated. All the headaches that required manual intervention no longer is required, it's all auto-magical.
Farms or servers don't need configuring a whole lot if anything for stability just give it clean power and good cooling and you can run those suckers for years. That's what you are paying for. Mainstream systems often do need tweaking, I guess things have changed, I will learn soon going to build a new system (decided on intel have't decided if I want to go with a 5820 or skylake) soon. I've had a bit of experience with ivy bridge systems, they're fairly easy to get stable when doing reasonable overclocks. I feel they're some of the easiest systems to get stable.
Glad your system was stable, it's happening more often as I mentioned. Boards are coming out with way way better power systems which have been the biggest reason for unstability in the past. However they often won't be stable in every situation. For example if you do audio processing and video processing you have do multiple tests: Audio, GPU, CPU, and chipset testing. Chipset testing is where most systems fail due to power systems being flaky for the rest of the board (apart from CPU/PCI E lanes).
On my current system I had to do a lot of modifying to get it to run stable without deteriorating over time, been running my i7 960@ 4.3 ghjz for the past 3 years with 0 stability issues all on air with hyper threading enabled. In fact only issues I've had is when I upgraded to windows 10 and Asus has not put proper drivers for their Xonar DG which causes a memory address error when shutting down.
Hmm, interesting that you've had issues with your i7-960 build. Personally, computer part or not, if it doesn't run as intended out of the box, I would call that defective and RMA that sucker. I don't buy a car expecting to have to screw with compression ratios in my garage, for example.
My current computers are far from the only computers that have worked for me out-of-the-box. Never had to tweak our Vista-era desktop, nor our XP-era desktop, nor our 95-turn-98SE desktop either. Same with my sister's current laptop, nor my brother's laptop nor DIY desktop.
I was talking about DIY computers, per OP topic.
Also you will have to tweak the heck out of a car and often have custom fab if you are building a car yourself.
I've included a few DIY desktops in there. Also forgot to mention the current family desktop, which is DIY as well.
Even with a self-assembled car (or computer), I still expect the individual parts to work out of the box for daily use. If I was a "track day, bruh!" racer or was OC-ing my desktop, then yeah, fiddle away.
Yeah big difference between overclocked components and stock. Home built system should work out of the box no problem. Only time tweaking is needed is with custom hardware or overclocking.
Hey, I noticed your post about HP customer non service as I was searching for a way to email them. No dice. So I tried to find a way to chat with them but had to give them the product in question, and got a reply that there was no chat for that product. WOW.
Their customer service really does suck.
Anyway, I thought I would ask if you have a recommendation for laptops of better quality and service.
Also, I saw the title of this thread and wondered if you have done any kind of tutorial on building your own desktop. Do you cover all the steps in the various threads of that title here?
(I am new to this site. I was not able to reply to your post concerning your HP Hell Experience because there was no reply link, only a message telling me that I lack sufficient privileges to reply to that thread!
But they let me reply to this thread for some reason.)
Problems? See this thread at archive.org.
