Really, the text deconstructs itself almost as fast as the jokes write themselves.

Well perhaps I shouldn’t use the words minor upgrade when I did replace the motherboard several times. I did say I’d replaced just about every part though. I really meant minor in the sense that each upgrade only involved a few parts upgrades.

Being able to replace the motherboard though, I can upgrade 3 of the components (cpu, ram, and motherboard) at the same time while keeping the old stuff. Otherwise I’d have to replace everything else with a new pc (video card, hard drive, case, cd/dvd drives, etc).

I also wouldn’t say that I do it because it’s fun at all, because it’s not.

I would say that their is a side benefit though. Whenever something goes wrong with the pc (ram, video card, etc) as any pc would after a certain amount of time I have the experience necessary to troubleshoot the problem instead of going through tech support hell or sending the pc in for repairs. In fact that experience helped get one of my first tech jobs.

These days, “building” a PC is about as enjoyable as rewiring my stereo, but at least when I rewire the stereo I know that the TV will still work when I’m done, which isn’t really the case with the PC.

I have no real sympathy for any of the alleged rationale behind building your own, and I especially don’t really feel sorry for the linux people who say they only have limited hardware support. If I wanted Unix with limited hardware support, I’d buy a Mac.

If you have a PC that is really 6 years old, here’s what you can’t do unless you replace the motherboard:

-you can’t use PCI Express.
-you can’t use 4x or 8x AGP, so whatever videocard you put in will be dog slow, comparatively speaking.
-you can’t put in a newer CPU that is substantially faster than whatever was in it in the first place
-you can’t use any of the newer, faster RAM.
-you (probably) can’t do Serial ATA.

Now, that’s all true of a Dell (or what have you) as well. For me to upgrade my home-built box (which is only 4 years old) to even approach the performance of what you can get today, I would need to replace just about every component, including the mainboard. So what’s the point?

What upgrades did you do to your PC that you couldn’t do on a standard Dell workstation?

I also totally agree with the cheapness argument that Dan mentioned. While I’ll recommend Dell’s to anyone who wants a computer, I wouldn’t want to touch one for my own personal machine. That said, whenever I do build a computer for me or help someone else build one some problem inevitably arises that requires a bit of troubleshooting.

In any case even if you buy a pc like a Dell you almost have to reformat and reinstall windows right away to get rid of all the extra junk they load on the system.

I didn’t overclock. I bought good parts. I got the supplier (who’s well reputed in-town in the DIY community) to assemble CPU/memory/motherboard and stress test, which is a service they provide. And I’ve had nothing but crazy. The side of the case is still off the machine, since managing heat flow turns out to be a black art with these current joule-burners.

I think we’ve passed over some sort of tetchiness threshhold in the past year, with stuff like dual channel memory and high speed CPUs having a lot less tolerance for variation then the casual DIYer is going to achieve.

If you’re building a nice disk server and don’t care about crazy high CPU/GPU speeds, sure, build your own. But I’d also had “fairly decent luck” and figured this last time out would be no different, and then manged to short out my mobo and run up against all kinds of memory stick failures and heat distribution issues.

And next time I’m paying someone else to run up against that.

Every mass-produced PC I’ve ever seen exudes an air of pervasive cheapness. Every component was carefully hand-selected to do the bare minimum required so it would cost less. Sure, you can’t blame the vendors — with Dell and HP locked in a death struggle to see which one can out-bleed the other, every fraction of a penny counts — but that doesn’t mean that you have to like the result. (Most recent example: the Dell box I use at work came with an 800 MHz FSB CPU, but 333 MHz RAM, meaning that the CPU and RAM were perpetually out of sync. Replacing the cheap RAM with good stuff bumped up the memory throughput by 50%, which is not small potatoes in my book.)

To buy a machine that I could actually feel *good* about, I’d have to go to an outfit like Alienware, and I *can* cobble together my own equivalently-performing box for less than they charge.

I’ve had fairly decent luck with boxen I’ve built myself, but then I try to stick to known-good chipsets, and never, ever overclock. (I love to mock overclockers. And not with love. They’re the cargo-culters of computing, and I enjoy their self-inflicted suffering the way some people enjoy fine wine.)

“Your ‘revolution’ is over, Mr. Lebowski! Condolences! The bums lost! My advice is, do what your parents did! Get a Mac, sir! The bums will always lose– do you hear me, Lebowski?”

Now I’m going to replace the failed hard drive in my wife’s PowerBook. When I escape, in 2 days, I’ll be happy to tell you how much happier I’d have been the last few days if I’d had a Dell laptop, with drives mounted in the side of the case rather than buried behind the processor, 6 linear feet of concrete, a tesseract, and 4 armed guards who are annoyed at being trapped in a 5 lb laptop.

With any luck I’ll have the Legos unpacked by Christmas.

That said, my latest PC is a Dell Inspiron 300m, which runs Linux passingly, and I couldn’t be much happier =)

I think the only game the looked qualitatively better on the shinier card was Doom 3; even Half Life 2 wasn’t noticeably nicer on the 9800 (in terms of visual quality).

Happily, World of Warcraft runs great on my PowerBook, even on trips .