Hi all, first of all … why would you want to do that ?
There are lots of manufacturers and sites that will happily assemble and set up a PC for you. So why would you want to build your own ?
The answer for me is very simple. I get total choice on what’s going into the machine for both the components and the software. I can put a bit of extra money in one thing that I think is important and make a sacrifice in something else that I don’t think will matter. I can future proof without breaking the bank. And probably the most important, it gets set up without any of the garbage software that the original equipment manufacturers (OEMs) will preinstall that either doesn’t go away completely when you uninstall it or it comes back again. It’s also bundled stuff like the malware that masquerades as branded anti-virus security software.
You could even choose to go away from the Microsoft Windows ecosystem and go to Linux now. That’s more viable, although I’ll come back to that in a while.
The most important thing is to do as much research as possible before you buy. Retails and online sites will be very keen to put discounts on selected models in their range. If you get tempted by those, ask yourself why the discount is happening. Is the discount because they have a stack of stock they can’t shift out of the warehouse because no one buys it ? Or are they dumping stock because it’s just gone obsolete and end of line. I’ve actually taken advantage of that for my last two laptops, they were both acquired on heavy end of line discounts and happened to be specifications that met my requirement.
This is probably the time for … Disclosure note ! All the decisions for the bits here were mine, I paid for everything, the companies mentioned have no idea who I am and no approaches had been made prior to selection of the bits. (Outside of the usual Overclockers and Scan we’ve got your email in our database robot marketing emails)
The catalyst for this post is to introduce the new build PC that appeared here over Easter. It’s the BunnyBox, named for when it was built again :-D. It follows Pumpkin, assembled on Oct 31 2011 and Meltdown, built on the hottest July day of 2019. But the main aim is to tell all of you reading that : You can do this too. Yes. You can. If you can handle a screwdriver and have a fairly light touch, you can build your home brew PC as well.
The key thing is to do all of the research before you part with any money. I have to admit to making a few mistakes with the BunnyBox, some of which were down to not researching properly, some were trusting the reviews a bit too much. Some mistakes and problems were making some bad assumptions. Oh and I may have forgotten to add the system memory to the order and had to hang around Stoke on Trent a while so they could fetch some out of the warehouse.
But the absolute key thing is : It’s YOUR money. YOUR decision to commit to spending it. Don’t ever feel pressured about spending YOUR money unless you’re absolutely comfortable in doing so. That goes for any pressure you may feel to up the spec when you don’t feel that’s affordable or presents value that you’re comfortable with.
Here’s the BunnyBox spec from Partpicker (linky). Partpicker is actually a really decent site to go to when researching the bits that go together to make a PC. They cut their selections down to what’s compatible. So if you choose an AMD cpu, they won’t show motherboards made for Intel chips. When I updated the list for the memory, it didn’t show memory that the board couldn’t handle. So it’s a handy thing to start from to see what’s out there and quickly get a list of bits.
That’s your motherboard, which everything plugs in to. There are different connectors for everything and they only go in one way around, so the only mistake you can make is to press too hard and break something that way. Don’t worry about that. Modern computer electronics are far more robust than when I was a lad too. It used to be that TTL (Transistor Transistor Logic) chips would break if you touched them wrong, electro static discharge wrist bands used to be required so you wouldn’t zap the bits. I don’t believe you need those these days. (Please no sue me if something doesn’t work ! 😀 ).
The first thing to go in was a 4TB Solid State Device (SSD) storage device. This is an nVME drive, which is the faster one. It’s an M2 format, which is a small card like a stick of chewing gum. Don’t eat it, too crunchy and expensive 😀
Here comes my first error, because I bought the more expensive one with a heatsink on. Cos … Meltdown’s similar SSD gave no problems in almost 6 years but it did run warm. The mistake was not researching that the board came with its own heatsink. I didn’t need to buy the one fixed to the drive. Oh well, coulda saved some cash.
I bought a single SSD because I was assuming that BunnyBox would be running a version of the Linux Operating System and didn’t know how that handled multiple drives. So I bought a bigger (4TB) cheaper one for significantly less than a quicker one of the same size.
Techie note – you’ll see PCIe, that’s the interface of how the components talk to each other. If you look at a computer architecture diagram, the wiring will connect blocks together mostly with the Peripheral Component Interconnect express (PCIe). It’s express cos it’s the considerably improved Mk2 version of PCI, which first got into PCs in the 90s. M2 SSD drives will show a Gen 4, Gen 5 and if you read this in a few years, probably Gen 6 and beyond. The newer versions offer improved transfer rates which might give you a benefit if you’re doing heavy data crunching but I figured I could save pennies (to go into better other bits) by not noticing going for a cheaper ultra fast drive.
That’s the memory going in. That picture actually shows the stick the wrong way around, because I wanted to draw attention to the notch that’s in the bottom of the stick. That’s a polarising notch and makes sure the memory goes in the correct way around because the polarising notch is slightly off the centre. When it’s in right, the grabby arms to the sides of the socket will do their grabby arm thing and close up. You might need to rest the board on something very solid here so it doesn’t flex when you put the memory in. Use the anti-static bag it comes in between Board and Solid Thing to protect everything.
Something else to note here is the sockets to use. There are 4 on the board there, so I could add more in later. However if you look real close (left side of the socket) and can read upside down, you’ll see DDR_A1, DDR_A2, DDR_B1 and DDR_B2 with a “First” beside them. Processors can gobble up 128 bits of data at a time, however the memory sticks send out only 64 bits at a time. So you double them up to get full performance. But they only work doubled up if they’re in the correct sockets. The board manual will tell you which sockets are best. If you put the memory in sockets DDR_A1 and DDR_B2 (mismatched sockets) then your new PC may not boot up at all.
Pardon the messiness of my bedsheet ! The camera picks up all of the dust and I don’t think I have the hand capacity to edit it out :-D. That’s the box, it’s an absolute unit of a Montech King 95 Pro. The 6 fans there are utterly silent when the machine is on and have the gloriness of already being assembled and cabled in to the box. You might see a bit of ducting below and there is more ducting above. The power supply goes in the back and the motherboard sits on that vertical plate. I’m extremely impressed with this case, it has exceptional build quality, it was easy to fit the All In One Cooler in the box above there and the box can fit the biggest coolers. However, it’s also a massive unit, comes in at 13kg and was a pricey £125. Honestly, with the build quality and 6 included silent fans, probably well worth that.
That’s the power supply going in there. Two things here … don’t skimp on the quality, so extra money went into the Lian Li supply there. I have a few power supply makers on my list of shame, Lian Li is actually a new one for me but they have a stellar reputation. The other is to get a big enough one that it can take it easy with the components in the box. So a 750W supply taking it easy at a 500W draw will last so much longer than a 500W supply straining to consistently deliver the same 500W.
It’s a false economy to go cheap on the power supply. Getting a good name one (like Lian Li) will lead to a more reliable and stable machine. And if it breaks, standards like 80+ GOLD means that it won’t break anything else when it … explodes. Not like a friend’s PC which broke all of its components when the cheap no name inadequate power supply melted. PSUs don’t explode … but don’t take one apart to find out as there is 115/240V in there, definitely don’t mess with the big round capacitors, those are the bits that can go boom.
That’s a modular power supply. The older ones came with all of their cables attached to ends on the inside, so they had a mass of unused cable to hide. A modular supply has those sockets there, so you only plug in the cables you require. Less untidy.
That’s skipping ahead a little to the motherboard installed in the box with the processor in there too. The box there is an ATX format box, with ATX dating back to the 90s. Literally IBM AT PC extended. There are newer formats like ITX out there but ATX has been consistent for decades. There is a sockets backplane on the bottom right and the board is secured by an array of small screws.
That’s an AMD Ryzen 7 9800x3d and BunnyBox has one of those due to a big discount that put it in an unbeatable price / performance bracket. I also have a lot of wariness about Intel at the moment because their quality and part resilience has gone downhill lately due to decisions made by their management.
The installation is a bit different again this time around. That’s an AMD AM5 socket. The lever on the left is for a so-called Zero Insertion Force socket. (It’s not zero force!) You use the lever to allow the socket to open and slide the ickle processor into the socket. Again, it’s polarized with the little dot you’ll see on the lower right corner to make sure you put it in the right way round. When you lower the retaining bracket, the black cover seen previously pops off and the lever then locks it in to place.
We can see a couple of black plastic things there too, every processor needs to be cooled because they’ll kick out a lot more heat when they’re busy. The first cooler this machine had was an All In One (AIO) Cooler by Thermalright. These work by having a heat block that clamps on top of the processor using the hooks on the plastic things above and below. The AIO is then connected to a radiator with a couple of pipes filled with cooling fluid. There’s a pump that circulates the fluid and fans to cool the radiator. It’s a lot easier to install coolers on the AM5 generation of socket than the previous AM4 generation.
That’s everything together ! Not quite, because there are buttons and plugs and lights and sockets to wire up too. The PC case has 2 older USB, 1 new USB-C, a couple of audio sockets, a reset button, a power button and a power light. These all plug into sockets on the board, the motherboard manual will have the where to’s here.
But that is actually it. The graphics card is in there as well. Note how close it is to the processor, I’ll come back to that. Also note how close the memory is on the right there. (Foreshadowing anyone ? 😀 )
The next thing is to take a long solid drink, clean up the mess from any blood sacrifices that might have happened along the way. Depending on the build quality of the components, you might have picked up a cut or two. Cheap cases have many more sharp edges. I only got a very minor cut this time around for the somewhat required blood sacrifice. It keeps the Machine Spirit happy :-D.
Plan A for BunnyBox was to abandon Microsoft and go over to Linux. I attempted using Bazzite Linux, as the reviews and things written about it were favourable. It’s worth checking out Linux, it’s free so you lose nothing but a bit of time in exchange for learning about the alternatives that are out there.
This lasted 1 day.
He he, overly dramatic moment there. The machine actually fired up and installed easily first time but I removed it from the machine because I was getting terrible performance with older games like Idle Champions and Motorsport Manager. The Steam platform is starting to get more games designed for Linux but can also support Windows only games by using the Proton translation library. That wasn’t working so good for me, possibly because the Bazzite install didn’t have the info to allow it to properly use the brand new to market nVidia 5060Ti 16GB I bought. And because I couldn’t see how to install the new drivers, I put Bazzite in the bin and went straight back to the known entity of Windows with a WIndows 11 install.
You live, you learn, you add more knowledge.
So I pop Windows in there, install the Horizon Zero Dawn in there and run its benchmark. All is good. Temperatures go up but it gives a result of 160 fps wibblies which was up from the 71 fps wibblies that Meltdown could achieve. It’s an older game but has a good benchmark for testing purposes.
I then look at the BOINC science sums application and … the temperatures rapidly go off into orbit and as AMD Ryzens do, the machine goes into thermal protection where it slows itself down to around a tenth of its potential performance. This is where the panic comes in. I’ll do a bit TLDR there (this post has gone LONG!) and say that I think the AIO cooler wasn’t taking any heat away from the processor, the pipes and radiator were cold. So I swapped it out for …
Yeah. I went back to what I know and bought the most massive air cooler from a good make that I could get hold of at short notice. That’s a Noctua NH-D15 and while it is a fantastic cooler, I did make a couple of errors when choosing it. The fan there is a massive 140mm, there are supposed to be two but the other one clashes on the memory sticks. The cooler is installed off axis as well, about 7mm above where it should be, because it clashes with the graphics card below.
So while Partpicker will give you a LOT of info about whether everything will fit together, it doesn’t know everything. I don’t know everything. I still make errors like that by (going back to the start) not doing all of the research. I checked whether the cooler would fit in the case … not whether it would fit around the rest of the components.
But it all works, BunnyBox is rock solid so far, it’s an absolute powerhouse running the performance hungry Star Wars Outlaws with no frame drops on very high detail so I’m a happy little bunnydwagon here tapping this post into it.
I think that’s where I’d better leave it before I end up posting tomorrow instead of today. I’ll leave you with :
You got this, you can do it too. Read about what you’re planning to put together, use hardware review sites (like Tomshardware) and borrow the specs from their testing rigs. Learn about the bits and it’ll help you out when you have the screwdriver in hand and assembling.
Take it easy, take your time. Don’t panic if things don’t turn on immediately. Just check that all the wires are where they are supposed to be. Repeat your steps if you have to, measure twice install once that kind of thing.
And compare notes with your local geeky techy community too. We’ll love to gossip about components and tempt people into buying new bits and pieces. Just remember that it’s your money, your budget, stick to those limits. If you’re not sure about what you’re about to do, hold off and learn a bit more. Computer bits only get cheaper and better if you wait.
May your Machine Spirits be contented little beasties.