How NOT to build a PC

Gazza

Bronze Level Poster
Guess most of you have heard about this poor guys disaster in showing how to build a desktop.
This is a member of youtube's 'The Verge' team with over 2M subscribers.
See how many mistakes you can spot :)

[video]https://streamable.com/6pe47[/video]
 

SpyderTracks

We love you Ukraine
Only watched a bit so far but:

His anti static wristband isn’t attached to anything??? Is this some modern hocus pocus denounced by the church?

How much paste has he applied? Surely that’s gonna totally bork it!

I’m old fashioned, always assemble the board, cpu and cooler before putting it into the case.
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
...to make sure the power supply doesn't short circuit and come into contact with the rest of the system.

Nailed it.

Jeez, then proceeds to screw the PSU in, fan facing inwards..?
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Only watched a bit so far but:

His anti static wristband isn’t attached to anything??? Is this some modern hocus pocus denounced by the church?

How much paste has he applied? Surely that’s gonna totally bork it!

I’m old fashioned, always assemble the board, cpu and cooler before putting it into the case.

My antistatic bands we never attached to much. Well. They were when I put them on but inevitably I'd forget, wander off and "pop".

Thankfully they were just press-studs so no damage done. :)
 

Oussebon

Multiverse Poster
Apparently The Verge pulled the video in the end, and updated the article: https://www.theverge.com/2018/9/13/17828092/gaming-pc-build-custom-how-to-asus-intel-geforce-cost

When he was banging on about NVMe SSDs and then pulled out a Kingston M.2 drive, I was wondering whether it really was an NVMe drive (Kingston do have NVMe drives but are probably better known for budget M.2 Sata SSDs). The article seems to clarify it was indeed an M.2 Sata rather than NVMe (a UV500). They did also get faster RAM - or at least quoted the speed properly - in the article, so maybe they changed the SSD too. I couldn't make out the SSD in the video, and ultimately who even knows what they were doing.

I've only built 2 PCs, plus mostly rebuilding this PCS PC over the years with replacement/upgrade parts, etc, but seriously. :/
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
...to make sure the power supply doesn't short circuit and come into contact with the rest of the system.

Nailed it.

Jeez, then proceeds to screw the PSU in, fan facing inwards..?

Now I've finally managed to watch it I'm gobsmacked. At least he's safe from the PSU shorting...
 

ubuysa

The BSOD Doctor
Having never built a computer myself (hardware hurts if you drop it on your foot!) this all looks fine to me... :whistling:




Later edit; Actually that's a lie. I had one of the early pocket calculators, the Sinclair Cambridge, which you had to build yourself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Cambridge). That counts doesn't it? I remember that thing well, it used reverse Polish notation (where the operators follow the operands) and in the instruction book one of the exercises was to calculate the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight.....

BTW. I met Sir Clive Sinclair at a black tie dinner once. That's all I have to say about that....
 
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Tony1044

Prolific Poster
Having never built a computer myself (hardware hurts if you drop it on your foot!) this all looks fine to me... :whistling:




Later edit; Actually that's a lie. I had one of the early pocket calculators, the Sinclair Cambridge, which you had to build yourself (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sinclair_Cambridge). That counts doesn't it? I remember that thing well, it used reverse Polish notation (where the operators follow the operands) and in the instruction book one of the exercises was to calculate the speed of light in furlongs per fortnight.....

I mean playing devils advocate, it wasn't a badly produced or executed video it was just littered with mistakes and things you wouldn't do.

As others have said, his anti-static wristband went nowhere and he was missing an antistatic mat.

Also, they provide no protection whatsoever to the person wearing them and I'm not sure why he would suggest this...except then, like Oussebon mentioned, he refers to the sound/vibration dampers as being there to stop the PSU from shorting out on the case, which is beyond ridiculous.

I'd say given those two statements, he knows absolutely nothing about electrical or electronics to even a basic level.

Other mistakes such as putting the PSU in the wrong way, claiming the SSD was something it wasn't (though I'll confess I wouldn't ever pick up on that these days, so I'd take it face value).

Personally, when I was building PC's myself, I preferred to get the motherboard in first but this is going back to the day when you couldn't guarantee the cases would be square, so getting the motherboard in meant you had at least a fighting change of, e.g., getting the cards in ok. :)

I had a brilliant Casio calculator that was designed specifically for electrical and electronic engineering students. As programmable, graphing calculators were banned (they were still quite new and expensive then as well), this was the best option.

It had a series of pre-programmed SI units built in so rather than needing to memorise them like my peers, I had a button. Thinking back, it's amazing it was allowed, really.

I'd kept it in a drawer for 20 years thinking maybe one day one of my kids might find it useful only to find out that many of the SI units have actually changed - not radically, of course, but as methods were found to measure them more accurately, they were altered enough in many cases that they'd throw out the calculations (it doesn't take much when you're into 10^-12 or 10^24 scales to throw things out significantly) at which point I realised that like me, and a lot of the stuff we'd been taught, it should really be in a museum. :)

It was actually quite a sad moment for me - that calculator saw me through years of study and countless tests and exams.
 

Stephen M

Author Level
I have just got my first scientific calculator, a Casio fx85, as I have to use it for my OU courses. The last time I needed a cube root or something like that I used my seven-figure log tables, although i suspect I am not the only one here to have done a maths O' Level when no calculators were allowed.
 
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