Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

Comment by jjcm | Hacker News Reader

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Your obvious rival here is PCPartPicker. Having used that extensively, here's some things I don't like about yours:

Expert mode removes compatibility checks. This shouldn't be the case - as soon as I select an item, it should cull the results and show me only the intersection of items that are now compatible with my chosen piece of hardware.

The lack of an ability to filter. Maybe I want to splurge more on a graphics card, but I need one that has at least 4 mini-display port outputs to drive my monitors. Right now there doesn't seem to be a way to say "show me only gpus that are nvidia, above $500, and can drive at least 4 monitors".

One of the biggest things for me: lack of reviews. You have a pangoly score. That's great and all, but you're a brand I don't (yet) trust. If I'm buying a component that costs multiple hundreds of dollars, I want more than a single score from a company I haven't heard of. I want to know what the reliability is like, and I want to hear it from people who have had hands on experience with it. I want to know how loud the fans are, what temperature it runs at passively and actively, etc.

Visually your site is really nice, but your expert mode leaves a lot to be desired, and I think you have a ways to go before you catch up with the competition. If I were you I would try and find your niche - either target users who are switching over from console gaming, and want to build their first computer, or build out a bunch of more expert features and target regular hobbyists.

I just built a pair of PCs using pcpartpicker. I had similar thoughts:

1) I really like auto-filters on compatibility. If my CPU and mobo aren't compatible, don't let me put both on the same build.

2) I don't need to see big pictures of most of the components. I might want to see what the case, monitor, and peripherals look like, but I'll only look at the SSD when I'm installing it.

3) I didn't see an easy way to sort or filter by specific criteria. On PCPartPicker, I sorted HDs by $/GB and was able to easily scroll down the list until the first drive that was large enough (1 TB), and probably could have filtered it to only include those. Here, I just have a bunch of hard drives to pick from, in no particular order, without a lot of advanced options -- and I didn't even get many on the screen because of the large images.

It's just a couple steps away from being a really excellent site.

Also missing: an obvious way not to include an HDD/GFX card (I just tried the "pro" setting).

I think your categories are too large - e.g. you show various motherboards but really no way to choose which one you want (i.e. physical size, minimal ports, other characteristics), nor an easy way to select the chipset.

Similarly, the SSD grouping simply had "SSD"s. Again, features like encryption support and/or powerloss protection might be interesting to look at; and even more obviously, I'd really like to narrow down the selection by size.

I saw you preselected the 4770K, yet the 4790K is it's successor (and certainly should be an option).

All in all, I want a system to satisfy various needs. Some aspects I may not care too much about or know much about, so a default choice or bias is fine, but there's almost always some aspect I do care about. And if you really don't care, you should probably look into just buying some ready-made HP or whatever (no idea which brand is best) box, and at least you'll get good somebody to put the thing together for you (and be responsible when it doesn't work).

Almost every type of "show me a filtered subset of something" website could benefit from your first feature - basically an "I've rejected this item for reasons your filters can't support, and never wish to see it again" button or checkbox.

Unfortunately, almost all such websites are supported by vendors paying to have their wares promoted to users, and letting users _not_ see them isn't what the vendors want. (e.g. in real estate searches, there are plenty of houses that meet all my criteria but which are terrible for other reasons and I'd prefer to never see in my results ever again.)

Thanks for your constructive feedback. We are still under active development and we are rolling out new features every week. Although analogy with PCPartPicker was inevitable, I'd like to say we're not aiming on being its clone, we're not providing price comparison and they are already doing a great job providing extensive compatibility checks so there's no point wasting time reproducing what is already available. Pangoly provides preconfigured builds with full compatibility checks that may satisfy most of the people needs (having the ability to also remove/add extra components) and it has a lot of useful features that noone else already provides. I agree with you for the "lack of reviews" part, we'll sort that out soon enough. Stay tuned!

So what benefit does your site provide? It sounds like all you really have is preconfigured builds in different levels of power - a sort of.. curated "best computer for $X" list.

Single product pros & cons, ratings, suggested builds for the component. Build guidelines, build performance index and power consumption, realtime best builds. Localized and multi currency. User friendly and beautifully designed, browsable with any device. And much more... As you probably are an expert user you most likely don't care about any of all those features because you already know what do you need and where to find it. As a matter of fact, I'm sure you also don't care that Facebook is localized in 97 languages, but trust me, a few people around the world do. I know missing features like advanced filtering might be frustrating for those who need them right now, but we're working hard trying to please everybody's needs and provide a better service!

Speaking of compatibility:

Does nobody care to check the mainboards support site for compatibility lists?

This one, for example: http://uk.pangoly.com/en/build/configure/pro

When you select the asrock mainboard, you are presented with these three choices of RAM: http://uk.pangoly.com/en/review/corsair-vengeance-16gb-2x8gb...

http://uk.pangoly.com/en/review/patriot-viper-3-16gb-2x8gb-2...

http://uk.pangoly.com/en/review/corsair-vengeance-pro-16gb-2...

And if you venture to that mainboards support site, it shows you a list of compatible RAM: http://www.asrock.com/mb/Intel/Fatal1ty%20Z97%20Professional...

End Result: Not one of the mentioned RAM options is on that list.

Why would that be important? Well, for one thing, it it weren't, there wouldn't be the need for the asrock people to maintain such a list, right? And, speaking from personal experience, I have had brand new builds bluescreen like nobody's business. Was the RAM faulty? Nope, send it back and got replacement of same make/model. Still bluescreens. It was only after I checked the mainboards compatibility lists and chose a RAM from that list when the bluescreens stopped! Nothing else was changed. And both types of RAM were "the same" as far as part pickers like this one is concerned. So, same Type, Speed, Dual Channel etc. The "only" difference here was that the one that caused bluescreens was not on the mainboards compatibility list.

I've had this issue as well, but that was over a decade ago, when using a smaller brand (ECS) mainboard for an Athlon XP. Eventually it was discovered that the mainboard didn't support Corsair memory, and the shop traded me some Kingston modules.

I have built many systems for myself, friends and family since, and never encountered this issue again.

In practice, just because RAM doesn't show on the list of compatible modules in the motherboard manual doesn't mean it won't work. We're thankfully past the Athlon XP days! I've generally had luck just making sure all the specs match.

Edit: Although, if RAM is listed on the Pangoly site that is in the approved list, that should be indicated somehow, as it's guaranteed to be compatible.

www.logicalincrements.com presents similar info in IMO a better format as well.

That's a really good site. I tend to build workstations these days, but have several friends asking me for gaming build advice; I can point them there.

Agreed. For the HN audience I would expect something like li, but with more interactivity.

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