
'PC Building Simulator' Is More Fun Than Building a Real Computer - danso
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/wj7jqb/pc-building-simulator-review
======
Symbiote
> They don't tell you that closing the CPU guard feels like you're breaking
> hundreds of dollars worth of equipment 100 percent of the time. 

I had a brief summer job as a 17 year old, assembling computers.  Even after
over 100, I still had that feeling of imminent destruction of expensive
electronics. 

~~~
news_to_me
When I built my PC, I learned about this beforehand, so when I heard the
"crunch" I wasn't worried.  Until the thing wouldn't boot. 

I took the CPU out, and sure enough, I'd bent a few of the pins in one corner. 
_Fuck._  I then spent the next couple of hours with a tiny magnifying glass and
tweezers, painstakingly trying to bend the pins to where it would boot again. 
20 min of bending, stick the CPU back in, try to boot... nothing.  Several
times. 

Finally it booted, miraculously.  I'm never taking that CPU out again. 

~~~
LeoPanthera
I recently built a Skylake PC and the CPU doesn't have any pins on it - just
pads.  The motherboard has springy contacts that the CPU rests against. 

You still have to clamp it down _worryingly_ hard, but it doesn't go _crunch_
anymore, and I think it's probably quite hard to damage the contacts. 

~~~
jasonkostempski
Now when you hear _crunch_ , it's coming from the flexing motherboard that's
mounted on just 2 raised screw holes. 

~~~
penguinUzer
Pro tip: Assemble the cpu/heatsink/ram/nve on the table surface then put the
whole thing in the case.  No flexing :)

~~~
jowsie
This has been my method for a while, but the last 2 PC's I've build have had
fan/power connectors in places that I simply can't get my hand too once the
board is installed, leading to me either pulling out case fans, or even CPU
coolers, just to connect a 4 pin CPU power lead. 

Double check your hand will fit in the thing first! 

------
colanderman
No doubt inspired by the amazing My Summer Car [1]. 

And presaged by the classic Onion videos "World of World of Warcraft" [2] and
"Call of Duty Modern Warfare 3" [3]. 

[1] [http://www.amistech.com/msc/](http://www.amistech.com/msc/)

[2]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw8gE3lnpLQ](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Rw8gE3lnpLQ)

[3]
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTkgi7scKo](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yuTkgi7scKo)

~~~
Raphmedia
Car Mechanic Simulator also comes to mind. 

[http://store.steampowered.com/app/645630/Car_Mechanic_Simula...](http://store.steampowered.com/app/645630/Car_Mechanic_Simulator_2018/)

~~~
abritinthebay
God I wish that game had classic VWs...

------
rdl
I can't believe they left out the blood sacrifice on sharp parts of the case. 
Always different/unexpected parts of the case, and always miraculously sharp. 
(Less so now with higher end modern cases, but was definitely this way with
80s/90s/early-00s cases.) 

~~~
glandium
The best part is that most of the time you don't realize you've cut yourself
until there's blood in the case/on the motherboard/etc. 

------
dfxm12
_One of the cooler things about PC Building Simulator is that it uses a lot of
real brands._ 

Smart.  If this game takes off, there's a ready made revenue stream to sell ad
space in game.  You can't ignore the core gameplay! 

~~~
acmecorps
Think it'll be profitable to make this free and make many just using affiliate
links? 

------
kunai
Building PCs is plenty of fun IRL too -- at least that was the case before the
year began, at least. 

Yeah, cable management might suck, but for the most part fitting together all
of these complicated pieces of silicon to create a working machine is
incredibly rewarding. 

Now, what we have is a monopoly of those same pieces of hardware by miners,
leaving much of the fun of building a PC gone, replaced by scrounging around
for deals on Amazon and Newegg to see if you can find a GPU at less than 400%
markup.  It's taken a huge bite out of PC gaming and left the RAM and GPU
market in shambles. 

Proof of work is an environmental disaster, and an economic one as well. 
Crypto needs to get its shit together and switch to proof of stake as soon as
possible, because this type of gold rush helps nobody except a small few and
hurts the people who use PCs for science and personal entertainment, who are a
far larger chunk of the PC userbase. 

~~~
mistermann
> It's taken a huge bite out of PC gaming and left the RAM and GPU market in
> shambles. 

RAM prices have skyrocketed along with GPU?  Sorry, not kept up on it....

~~~
developer2
DRAM and NAND shortages aren't new - the current supply problems started in
2016 and got progressively worse throughout 2017.  The smartphone market is to
blame - or rather, its consumers who upgrade/replace their phone every damn
year.  Apple alone drains the entire supply chain every time they ramp up for
the next iPhone; add to that all the Android manufacturers, and there's just
nothing left for desktop. 

If more people kept their phones for 2-4 years instead of expecting an upgrade
every 9-12 months, we wouldn't have this problem. 

------
meuk
I've found the older article 'PC Gaming Is Still Way Too Hard' to be quite
amusing, but not very similar to my experience (although I only built two
PC's). 

In my experience, the process of checking compatibility of the parts, and
getting the parts can be a bit tedious (I had to wait multiple months for some
parts).  I did order DDR3 memory for a mobo that only supports DDR4 and bought
a powersupply that was way too big for the small form factor case I was using
(luckily I could return it). 

I found the actual build to be, by far, the easiest part of the process. 
Everything was basically plug and play (in the sense that the colors,
annotations and connectors made everything very obvious to me).  I also never
experienced a crunch when I mounted the CPU. 

To be fair I didn't really use the manuals.  If I would have broken something I
would have a very different story. 

------
nerfhammer
Windows only!  I was excited at first because I always wanted to learn how to
do this.  But if it only runs on an OS I can't run that turns it into a
chicken-and-egg problem...

~~~
dbsvsv
Only 99.3% of pc's can run a game about building PC's.  Sad. 

~~~
lostmsu
I think it's closer to 100% due to Wine

------
huffmsa
Considered downloading this to do a few practice runs before rebuilding a $10k
machine yesterday, decided to do it live. 

The game should definitely have other people standing around saying stuff like
"should it make that crunching sound?" 

------
harlanji
Fun.  Lately I have a growing pile of RasPis and SD cards everywhere.  I guess I
built enough PCs in the 00s and now they’re $50 so why not build clusters/etc? 
Back then PC games were around $60 or upgrades $200, now weekend projects with
whole computers are too.  I dig the idea still, would probably play before my
next build which will surely be of expensive gear (eg.  big Swarm/k8s nodes). 

------
ferongr
Is this by the same writer that started crying while trying to build an actual
PC? 

~~~
robrtsql
I did that when I built my PC too.  I was fairly certain I had ruined $1500 in
equipment. 

~~~
Scoundreller
While doing a bench build for a friend, when motherboards became really small,
I put an AGP card in a PCI slot backwards because the port side wasn't
constrained anymore.  Thankfully only non-magic smoke came out. 

------
ryan-allen
He complains that PC gaming is too hard, but I'm pretty sure you can find
companies that put together custom PCs with a warranty.  In Australia there are
dozens of well known places that do it. 

Saying that, you _can_ build a PC if you hop along to reddit /r/buildapc, they
seem pretty happy to help you out if you can be bothered with the effort. 

I love building my PCs, haven't done it in a while due to it not being
economically worthwhile, so now I just browse the parts for fun! 

~~~
penguinUzer
Yes I read his original article and he should have bought a assembled and
shipped gaming machine. 

Kinda like complaining it's difficult to build a fast car with zero domain
knowledge and looking up a few websites.  Either put in the time to learn or
just go buy a performance package Mustang GT/Camaro/Challenger/etc. 

------
seiferteric
> Building a gaming PC in real life is way too hard

Huh? 

~~~
InitialLastName
I think folks here are missing something.  It isn't _assembling_ a gaming PC
that's difficult, it's the process of _building_ the rig; specifying parts and
confirming that they're compatible can be a daunting task, much less sourcing
them and recognizing the appropriate prices. 

It's a really big matrix of possibilities that can be pretty opaque to people
who don't keep up with it. 

~~~
jotux
There are sites now [1] that let you select components and will tell you if
your CPU/motherboard/RAM are compatible.  It will even tell you if your power
supply can handle the amount of power of all the components.  When you select
components it will give you links to multiple places to purchase them. 

I don't keep up with current events in custom PCs and when I built a PC last
year [2] I thought it was incredibly straight forward. 

[1] pcpartpicker.com

[2] [https://pcpartpicker.com/b/HgBbt6](https://pcpartpicker.com/b/HgBbt6)

~~~
bsder
Except that you have the problem right off the bat:

[https://pcpartpicker.com/products/cpu/](https://pcpartpicker.com/products/cpu/)

Which CPU family and which series?  Once you finish _THAT_ , everything gets a
lot more straightforward. 

That list is terrible.  At least order the families/series chronologically. 

If I'm a reasonably informed random, I know to click a handful of things with
"lake" in the name and a handful of things with "zen" in the name and that's
about it. _ Except you can 't do that with the chooser_ as it gives you zero
choices, since -zen is a series and -lake is a family and those are disjoint
(I should be able to union those). 

As a noob, I would miss any of the "gaming value" choices with that heuristic
(Haswell/Broadwell that are quite nice). 

I don't see any EPYC in that list, so I'm scratching my head (yes, I know it's
a server but a random person won't) and I would miss the Threadripper choice
(why doesn't it have Ryzen next to it). 

The problem isn't assembling a PC.  It's the fact that PC knowledge has a half-
life of like 6 months, and you really can't trust review sites or web searches
on this topic anymore. 

~~~
LeoPanthera
You're not supposed to pick a CPU from the full list.  Use the filters on the
left to narrow it down. 

~~~
bsder
Did you actually _read_ my comment?  I was talking about the choices _IN THE
FILTERS_. 

The problem, as a noob, is that you don't even have enough knowledge to use
the filters correctly. 

~~~
pcarmichael
Aye.  We've got some things in the works to improve that. 

------
digi_owl
Frankly i find the "problem" to be modern Windows. 

The 9x series had little trouble being moved around between motherboards and
such, but the NT based ones seems to error at the drop of a pin (never mind
how ornery Microsoft has become about copyright). 

~~~
JepZ
You might want to try Linux.  As long as you don't compile your system with
options optimized for your CPU and stay away from binary graphics drivers, you
can pretty much boot it on every desktop PC hardware you like without any need
for a new installation. 

Just don't expect everything to be perfect.  Linux has its own set of
weaknesses, but being picky about changing the hardware isn't one of them. 

~~~
digi_owl
I have and i used to like it. 

But some kind of mindrot is setting in at the user facing levels of
development, and it is worming its way down the stack towards the kernel. 

------
mikewhy
Note this is from the place that said building your own computer is too tough. 

------
dmurthy
Never thought I'd need a tweezer until I met jumpers. 

------
Kenji
Hell no it can't be more fun than PC building irl.