Last week, after a temporary hiccup thanks to a power supply that was dead out of the box, I finished building my first gaming PC. For the past few days I’ve been using it extensively, and as a result, I’ve experienced a number of brand new feelings that I’d like to share.
These feelings include:
Obsession with reading about PC parts and other people’s PC building stories. I never thought I would care this much about motherboards, but somehow I’ve become addicted to the r/buildapc subreddit, where people share their specs and ask all sorts of mundane questions about computer building. Why yes, I do want to read about the ant crawling in your monitor.
Realisation that suddenly you need to care about PC port news. Final Fantasy XII: The Zodiac Age is coming to PC? Oh yes. Red Dead Redemption 2 isn’t? What the hell, Rockstar? Wait, what do you mean some games aren’t optimised for PC?
Anxiety over how hot my CPU is running. OK, CPU-Z tells me it’s running at 65 degrees Celsius. Is that too hot? Wait, I just downloaded CPU Temp and that says that all four cores are running between 40 and 50 degrees Celsius. That’s fine, right? Is this all fine? Is my CPU going to melt?
Anxiety over whether the thermal paste is applied properly. Should I take the PC open and check the thermal paste? My cooler came with pre-applied paste but I took the heatsink off at one point when I was troubleshooting — was I supposed to apply more? Should I order thermal paste and stick it on there? Are my fans working properly? AHHHH.
Anxiety that the computer will just randomly turn off. Oh god, that would suck.
Anxiety that the PSU might blow up and set my apartment building on fire. Think about all of the PC parts I’d lose.
Anxiety that I’m not taking proper advantage of my machine. Turns out I bought a Freesync monitor, which works with AMD, instead of a G-sync monitor, which works with NVIDIA. And I have an NVIDIA GTX 1080. So my games aren’t looking as good as they should. Which leads to…
An insatiable desire to buy new things.
Paranoia that I bought the wrong things. Uh oh, should I have spent $US200 ($251) more for an IPS screen? Or is TN fine? What do all of these things even mean?
Video game choice paralysis, because suddenly I can play pretty much anything ever made. Why not dive into The Witcher 3 again? Or maybe I should finally check out XCOM 2? What if I just download an old classic like Heroes of Might and Magic 3 and screw around for a while? Or I could get an emulator and revisit one of those classic Mac games I used to love? Or or or or or or or.
Triumph over that paralysis, because instead I just spent an entire week playing Divinity Original Sin 2.
Realisation that Divinity Original Sin 2 is one of the best games I’ve ever played. It was worth building a PC just for this.
Anxiety that Divinity Original Sin 2 doesn’t look as good as it could, even though it still looks incredible. When is that new monitor gonna get here already?
Sudden interest in other people’s PC problems. Kotaku just ordered a pre-built PC that arrived broken, and as the proud builder of one (1) PC, I’m sure I can diagnose the problem!
Pride that, even when you’re doing the most mundane thing, it’s on a machine that you built from scratch. Man, nothing compares.
Comments
13 responses to “Fifteen New Emotions You Feel After Building A PC”
#16 – I get these little AMD/Intel/Nvidia stickers in the packaging… Do I put them on my case, or on the back of my phone, or on my car, or on the fridge, or on a pet?
“Anxiety that I’m not taking proper advantage of my machine”
G-sync isn’t worth the premium at all unless you are playing games that are constantly running at a lower FPS than your refresh rate.. Even then fast sync is better than a couple of the G-sync screens I have used.
“Paranoia that I bought the wrong things”
IPS screen is 200% worth the price premium over TN or VA(still much better than TN)
Fast Sync only provides better input latency than GSync + VSync when the framerate is considerably higher than the monitor refresh, otherwise it’s significantly worse (10-15%). Blur Busters has some explanation and benchmarking here.
building from scatch would have been more insightfull for noobs like me.
I’m still too scared to try.
If you did buy a TN panel, perhaps you should have shelled out that extra $200 for IPS …
Yeah, not a fan of TN panels. I hate how they distort colours and have bad viewing angles, amongst other things. The only 2 advantages TN panels have are that they’re cheaper, and faster.
For 40% more cost over the screen he got I’d say it’s not worth the margin really. IPS is still pretty rare at 1440p 144hz.
I’d take the better colour reproduction over the higher refresh rate, to be honest. Most TN screens just look washed out in comparison.
Horses for courses, as they say. I wouldn’t buy TN either, but they’re not quite as bad as they used to be.
I made an account just so I could comment this. You got most of these major parts for free. Not our fault you cheaper out on a power supply. Stop acting like you’ve done something amazing. If anyone got those for free they’d make a good pc as well.
Being ‘cheap’ is not a pre-requisite for an item to be DOA, I don’t see any blame being placed on the audience for this?
Perhaps check your comments actually have some meaning before going on a jealous rant.
I think you completely missed the point of this series. Building a PC for the first time is an accomplishment, and just because some of the parts were free doesn’t make the assembly process any less daunting for a newcomer.
Built mine last week, can confirm most of these factors are currently in play.