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Comment by brucehoult | Hacker News Reader

And that is why I don't build my own PCs even though I can. I build a new PC about once every three or four years on average I suppose [1]. In that time processor sockets have changed, RAM has changed, sometimes other things.

I select the parts, but pay the vendor or someone local to assemble and test it. Not only do they do it every week (if not every day), if some part is DoA they have others on hand to swap in and out to find out which part is the problem, but I don't, see: everything changed since I built the last one 5 years before.

[1] 2009 i7-860, 2014 i7-4790K, 2016 i7-6700K (had moved countries, didn't take the old PC, just the SSD), 2019 TR 2990WX (again had moved countries, taking just the SSD), 2024 i9-13900HX laptop (beats the TR in every way, plus sips power and is portable).

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If I was sure they were going to use good parts, I'd do the same.

I bought my current PC from a company that seems pretty good, and targets gamers with medium-high budgets.

The "liquid cooled" cpu cooler died after being bumped with a vacuum, and I had to replace it.

With that one thing that I was forced to do myself, I had to learn a lot about the system that I'd already have known if I'd ordered the parts myself. Worse, they no longer had a list of the exact parts in the system on their site. I had to pull things apart to find out what they were.

I'll be making my own PC from scratch again next time.

Careful with vacuums near electronics, they tend to build up static.

Best to use a compressor or canned air.

I don't mean a small vacuum. I mean a house vacuum, for the floor. They just rammed the computer. It caused the CPU Cooler to make a ticking sound, which I found was a pretty common thing for that cooler. I replaced it with a standard fan cooler instead and it's been fine.

Building a PC is just the right amount of challenge (for me). It's fun. I'd do it for my friends, if they let me. And wanted to spend one or two grand every other year. It's just challenging enough to be fun but not so challenging it's actually hard.

I build them, because basically no one offers prebuilts with ECC memory.

Maybe where you live, I don't know. I was living in the US at the time and in early 2019 adamant.com built me a TR 2990WX machine with ECC.

Here's a current catalogue customisable much cheaper machine from them with ECC:

https://www.adamant.com/adamant-custom-intel-xeon-e3-series-...

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