After my last machine decided to stop functioning properly, somebody recommended that I build my own PC because it is cheaper than buying a prefab, and apparently the process is pretty easy, even easier than building a LEGO set! This is the biggest mistake that I made all season. He convinced me that I could handle it and I failed to handle it.
First of all, I don’t understand why anyone thinks that offering a how-to guide like this one on assembling a computer is a good idea. That is about as reasonable as giving someone a guide on how to fix an engine, as if a Yugo’s engine is identical to a sports car’s (yeah, right). Unless the reader or listener happens to have all of the exact same parts as the author, the guide is next to useless. There is no point.
Computers vary massively in layout and accessories. I hate to state the obvious, but you can’t just toss any fucking how-to guide at a beginner and expect them to understand and follow it perfectly. These guides, much like the official manuals, are dense and loaded with jargon, showing us crap that we don’t have and crap that isn’t where we expect to find it.
Here’s a good example: somebody told me that I needed a large screw to secure a stick. At first I thought that I had to order another part since I lacked that, but it turned out that the screw that I had was just obnoxiously tiny. Almost microscopic. Even my long-distance assistant said that it ‘looked wrong’ when he saw it, but it did the trick.
Likewise, it is ridiculously easy to plug something the wrong way, which can potentially fry your machine. My computer also came with a load of crap that I apparently didn’t need, which is fine for compatibility but ends up making the process more confusing and intimidating.
This hardware is both delicate and expensive to replace, too, which means that if you fuck up, it’s a big deal (unless you’re rich). It was only after I finally took my machine to a technician that I learned that I broke two parts beyond repair, meaning that now I have to spend about $300 on repair and extra parts for a plan that originally cost me $600. I could have purchased a good prefab with all that fucking money!
Look, just don’t tell anybody that assembling a computer is easy, and especially don’t tell beginners to try it without constant, immediate-distance supervision. (Long-distance supervision is still too risky.) The process is so delicate and there are so many ways to make serious mistakes that it isn’t worth it, and anybody who finds a guide or manual unhelpful is going to be very tempted to improvise, which is dangerous. I actually made my fingers bleed trying to assemble a computer (no joke), and I wasted hundreds of dollars that I could have spent on a cheap, prefabricated gaming computer instead. I feel very frustrated tonight, and I am stuck on my smartphone for another week or two.
Two points:
That build sucks because it’s literally just someone theorycrafting based on the specs of each individual part. I think you learned this the really hard way, but each part has a physical shape and takes up a certain amount of space. And it’s not just length, width, and height because there’s also wiring involved. Much better guides are builds that people actually build irl like this one so you have a general idea of how the PC is actually supposed to look like.
The video guide is missing a fundamental prerequisite, and that prerequisite is that like many things, before you can learn how to assemble something, you have to learn how to disassemble something first. That’s pretty much how IT technicians begin their training. They start out by disassembling old PC that need to be salvaged. Since those PCs need to be junked anyways, there’s no reason to be delicate in handling those PCs, so you quickly develop a sense of how much each part could handle. For example, in the process of trying to take apart an old tablet to remove the SSD, I forgot to unscrew something and had to more or less snap the screen in half before just ripping the screen from the back with the screw awkwardly still there. Real amateur hour on my part, but the tablet was going to be junked anyways and nobody saw me snap the screen in half. For your case, unless you have a bunch of old and dead PCs lying around, you can’t really practice.
I guess this is too-little-too-late advice, but one route to take is to just buy a refurbished enterprise tower like this and the appropriate parts (GPU, additional RAM, SSD). Enterprise usually refresh their PCs every three years when the warranty expires, and a lot of the time, those PCs are actually in pretty good shape because it’s not exactly physically demanding to run Excel and Outlook in an office setting. Worst case is the case has some scratches, but that’s pretty much it. Those enterprise PCs have completely standardized parts, meaning it’s very easy to order spare parts and find video guides of IT technicians physically disassemble and reassemble those PCs. The only real obstacle is the PC might not have the clearance for the GPU, but that is just solved with research because it’s definitely not the case where enterprise towers are somehow physically designed to never have GPUs. Here’s a guide I found. I think cost wise, it’s cheaper than buying prefab because you’re technically not buying a brand new PC.
IMHO, you got led astray by PC g*mers who are nowhere near as knowledge about computers as they think they are. You needed advice from people with actual professional IT technician backgrounds.