I could do with a new PC. I’ve been getting new prebuilt laptops every 3-4 years, and while I love the portability, a desktop is probably a better solution. I’ve thought about going the prebuilt route, but it’s hard to find a provider who can build something decent and price competitive; the likes of PCSpecialist, CaseKing just don’t fit the bill. So, I’ve decided to got the route of building my own. I’ve ordered most of the parts, and here’s the lineup I’ve come down to. I’ll be using this thread to document the process of building it as the parts come in over the next few weeks.
Hey this is timely! My PC is ~12 years old although it’s nearly been Ship of Theseus’d along the way.
I finally decided I wanted to start from scratch and all my components should be arriving today!
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keep us up to date! I’m kinda shitting myself as I’ve never done this before, but also pretty excited to not have to swap out my entire system every few years. I haven’t ordered the GPU yet as I don’t have 300 quid to blow atm and it’s not necessary to get running, but other than that everything is arriving over the next 2 weeks.
If you can build a LEGO set, you can build your own PC. Just use PC part picker like you are to check compatibility and once you get it in your hands, the hardest part is wire management and making sure you install the processor properly.
I built my own PC out of college and have upgraded it twice since. I’m a bit out of the loop with the most recent components but can help if you have general questions!
I am mostly excited for the new m2 ssds. I’m still all SATA so it’ll be a nice upgrade
and with perfect timing, my laptop suddenly stopped working today out of nowhere. I think the mobo is straight up dead; it isn’t even detecting the charger being plugged in.
hoping I can get it repaired, replaced or refunded under the EU’s 2 year rule. but still a real pain in the ass.
update: it’s working again! I tried EVERYTHING last night; power draining, taking the battery out, removing one of the RAM modules, taking out my second drive, and no matter what, it wouldn’t power on and the light that turns on when there’s a charger connected stayed off. Almost as an afterthought, I left it plugged in overnight.
When I got up this morning, I clicked the power button fully expecting it not to do anything, but sure enough, it powered on and seems to be working completely fine.
As of now, I’l be going with two m.2 sticks (1TB and 512GB) and a single 512GB SATA SSD. The 512GB m.2 is from an old laptop lying around and the 512GB SATA is an old WD Blue 1TB SSD that I recently swapped out for a 2TB equivalent in what I’m now going to call my Lazarus laptop. In time, I’ll likely upgrade everything to m.2 however. I’m never using HDD’s again, with how low SSD’s cost now, there’s basically no point in using them anymore in use cases like mine. I’ll use the aforementioned ones in addition to the 1TB one I added in PartPicker for the OS
Speaking of the OS, I’m going Win10. It’s not perfect; it needs a lot of registry editing to feel right for me but the 5 mins I spent with 11 made me want to pull my hair out so I’ll be sticking with 10 as long as it’s viable.
have decided on this as my resurrecting laptop’s theme song
Video output was intermittently dropping out for a long time until I recently decided to re-seat my GPU. The latch was quite stuck and hard to reach, so I tried levering it with a screwdriver. I’m an electronics technician so I really shouldn’t have had to learn the hard way to tell you: don’t do that.
have ordered everything but the GPU now - went with a different PSU as my original pick sold out. I went with a Corsair CV550. Not the most premium pick, but it should do, especially seeing as my system’s estimated wattage (283W with the 4060 installed) is fairly low all things considered.
Everything has arrived except for the PSU and case. Have installed the CPU (way easier than I expected), M.2 SSD and RAM. All that’s left to do is to install the CPU cooler, put the mobo in the case, hook up all the wires and install the GPU.
Cooler installed!
can’t really do anything else until the case and psu get here, and that won’t be until monday.
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All that’s left to do is to hook up all the wires
Prepare yourself for this to be 80% of the work.
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I went with an AIO this time for cooling and the radiator was too long to top mount. I planned to front mount it but then there wasn’t enough room for the GPU. 
Waiting on another smaller cooler to come in now to finish the build. PCPartpicker said everything was compatible but that they didn’t have full physical dimensions for everything. Guess the lesson is I should’ve gotten out my tape measure before ordering everything 
Looking good! Im always a bit taken aback by how simple the cpu bit is. Literally just drop it in.
the psu came a little sooner than expected, so I put the assembled motherboard on the desk, hooked up
the PSU cables for the power and CPU aaand it’s not displaying on the screen. have tried both the VGA and HDMI outputs, have tried two monitors, nada. was kinda terrified i’d fucked something up irreperably, but as it turns out the 5600X CPU doesn’t have integrated graphics, so on the one hand I’m relieved I (apparently) haven’t fucked up, but am also kind of annoyed I’ll have to wait before I get a GPU to even see anything.
no integrated gfx was my first thought when you said it wasn’t displaying. Glad you found that to be the case!
bought a cheap 1030 just to test it out. amazon are super liberal with returns so I can pretty much return it as soon as I get the RTX card.
