I had a friend ask me to come over and help him put his new rig together and it took me 20 minutes from start to finish (minimal cable routing).
My friend was like.. "that's it??"
Last time we did this together (Pentium 4 days), it took us 2 hours, a full toolkit (hamers, pliers, 2-3 different types of screwdrivers) and I cut my hand on the metal edge of the case.
Today, I only needed a philips head to screw the motherboard. Installing the OS and other programs actually took longer than the hardware assembly.
Yeah, I built a rig for my friend last year, and I noticed it was the shortest amount of time I had ever spent building a computer. I felt like kind of a speed demon, lol.
We ended up getting him a 2500K, 8GB of ram, an ASUS P8 series motherboard, and a GTX 560 TI. He just used an old hard drive he had lying around for his boot drive. He decided he didn't have enough cash for an SSD. I let him make all the decisions for his build. I just tried to push him in the right direction.
It was just funny because we got back to his house, and I must have had the CPU, RAM, and Cooler Master V6 GT CPU cooler installed in less than 5 minutes. We didn't even have a proper table to put it together on either. We were just in his room using a TV tray.
How much time it takes depends on a huge amount of varibles. How much hardware you have, are all the slots tool-less or do they require screws? Does your heat-sink and require mounting a backplate? Is your PSU modular? Are you doing extensive cable routing? Is your case big/small, easy to work in? Are you using included case fans or replacing them with 3rd-party ones? Are you using watercooling, is it a pre-assembled loop or are you building the loop yourself? Then it also depends whether or not you run into some problems with mounting your hardware, when I was building my brothers computer the graphics card was very difficult to get in place properly because of the way the case was designed, it almost felt like I was going to snap something. I'm also the type of person where I double check everything as I'm going to make sure I haven't accidently overlooked something.
But yeah, it is a lot more "put the thing in the thing" than it used to be.
True enough the assembly of a system is not too difficult today. What takes me the longest time is my cable management. I am anal about separating the various sets of cables and insuring the best air flow possible. Cable ties are inexpensive so I have no problem using lots of them to keep my wiring harness nice and tidy.
Yeah, my build took me all day to do just because I was trying to manage cables to the best of my ability. I'm still not entirely happy with it either, lol. I didn't even put the graphics cards and sound card in until I felt like all the cables were in the right places.
There are actually laptops that are even easier, at work I fix Lenovo laptops for the university and all but one model is way easier than even spending the time setting up a desktop.
welll..... you can, my freind has one, he was able to replace the cd drive with a hard drive, and he has 2 other drives as well, so, 2hdds in raid 1 and an ssd for the os... also backlit keyboard. not sure where he got it from, but its a beast
My latest build posted after about 10-15 minutes of assembling (cable management included.) Installing a graphics card and swapping out a dead power supply in an older HP (DDR2, amd5000+ era).... I honestly have no idea how long this took because of all the breaks i needed to keep myself sane.
I usually spend about 20min building a system then about 4 hours doing cable managment and sleeving. Watercooling also adds some time onto the building process as well.
Starting my first build this week and have done hours upon hours of research. The NewEgg videos on how to build a PC are great. Just the reviews of products on newegg and other sites are scarry. It seems there is a DOA rate of over 20% for some of the best quality products online. Kind of intimidating. I'm definitely going to build a lot like you, take my time, make sure I'm doing everything safely, touch the case alot to diffuse static etc.
Don't expect my build to post after i put things together for the trial run (before I mount it all in the case). Kind of upsetting if it doesn't, but oh well that's the price you pay for saving money doing it yourself.
See this is what scares me. I don't have backup parts like extra MOBOs or PSUs. I'm worried there is such a high DOA rate on parts these days that I'm going to be sitting at home waiting for another 3 weeks for all my replacement parts to come to me. Kind of daunting to say the least. 1rst time builder.
Do you typically see if your system POSTs first or do you just mount it all in the case and see what happens? What's the typical DOA rate of the parts you've purchased? I don't have any backup parts so I'm crossing my fingers hoping NewEgg and NCIX are going to get it right. Heard too many horror stories about fried MOBOs etc.
I agree a lot with the DOA thing, that is the part I'm always most worried about is getting it then it not working. But I find most of the time people who get problems have most likely screwed up themselves by not doing something correctly. Although if there's a large amount of people reporting a problem then that problem is probably a legitimate issue to some extent. That's why I usually go with the known good brands even if they cost more like G.Skill, Corsair, Asus, Gigabyte, Cooler Master, etc.
A good thing to do is once you think you've found a product you want to buy, go to Google and search "(Product name) problem" or some variation of that just to see if there's widespread problems with it.
I bought a fair amount of parts in my time and I've only had one DOA. It was an Acer monitor which didn't turn on out of the box. Had no problems with any other hardware.
Of course you can spend a day with cable management but it's really not needed. You just have to take the cables and route them to the back of the motherboard. You can spend hours apon hours tying down the cables on the back of the mobo if you're really anal about things like that but once the side of the case goes on, you don't see that stuff.
Even if you have an aftermarket cooler with a backplate, how long does it really take to mount it?? 5 minutes max (as long as you do it with the motherboard out of the case).
Custom water cooling can take days to do right. Measuring, cuting and fitting the tubing. disassembling the GPU and mounting the custom water block. reservoir and pump placement. ETC. It's a pain in the ass but the finished product is, 9 times out of 10, awesome.
Also, if you're going to swap the existing case fans with better ones (or ones with more lights in them) and fitting LED's and crap into your rig, that also adds time to the process but most (good quality) fans today have those anti-vibration mounting rubber things which take 2 seconds to install.
In conclusion, yes, you can spend two days assembling a computer but you can just as well do it in less than 20 minutes and have something that you have no reason to be ashamed for. In the old days, you had far less options and if you weren't careful, your PC could draw blood (I think that's when consoles were invented... Oh snap!! Yes, I said it!!).
Thanks man. You calmed my nerves a bit. I'm still crossing my fingers about any of my parts coming DOA. I'm going to have to open up an entire thread of how to test parts without MOBO picking up the ram, or even figure out if I can test anything before I get a replacement part. Unlike a lot of people here, I can't Frankensten an old build into a new one if there is a faulty part. I'm pretty much stuck with what I have.
But thank you, my nerves are a little bit less frayed hearing about your only 1 DOA experience.
