Times being what they are, you may be thinking of building your own computer, but is it worth it? Is it worth the chance of your new build starting on fire after you've put it all together and hit the power button for the first time?Six years ago that's what happened to me. Well, it wasn't really a fire, but it was close enough. Let me start from the beginning. I was a gamer, but a gaming computer starved gamer. I needed something that could fulfill my gaming needs. I needed to log on to my favorite mmorpg and hunt down some newbs without chopping and crashing to the desktop.
So I decided that building my own computer would be a good idea. I did the research and bought the parts. I even bought one extra part, a motherboard. I had forgotten to take it out of the online shopping cart before clicking the final "submit order" button. What a lucky break, but I'll get to that later.
After submitting my order, about a week later my parts arrived. The site of my new gaming PC in its shiny new boxes strewn all over the floor was truly something to behold, but alas, it was also frightening. Frightening because I had just spent around $2500 on something I really had no idea how to assemble. I thought it would be like hooking up a VCR, there's only one way to do it, right?
Let me give you a little more background information here, my roommate had ordered the exact same computer and his parts arrived along with mine.
Anyway, we unpacked all of my parts and started to build the computer at about 9 p.m. It was winter, so it was dark, but our moods were that of life lit by a roaring fire to achieve gaming greatness. By 3 a.m. my computer was fully assembled. We had went through the heart pounding process of snapping the RAM into place and figuring out exactly what stand-offs were. Even more frightening was the process of installing the CPU and then pressing with the force of 100 men to snap the CPU fan into place. But, it was all done, or was it? You see, there was this one extra cord, I believe it said something about HDMI sound on it.
Every cord we had plugged in had been either clearly labeled or clearly obvious as to where it needed to go, but there was no clear spot for this one. I was going to leave it unplugged as I just thought it was an extra random thing that I didn't really need, but my friend found a spot where it would fit, and it actually did seem like a good spot for it. I reluctantly plugged it in. Finally, we were done.
I hooked up the keyboard, mouse and monitor and prepared to hit the power button for the first time. The anticipation was killing me. In fact, it had me so frightened that I had one hand on the power cord on the back of the computer while the other was getting ready to push the power button.
I then pushed the button and within half a second my other hand had pulled the power cord out of the back of the computer. There was something about the smoke that had come rolling off the motherboard that made me pull the cord. Maybe because smoke means fire? I'll never be sure.
After spending a combined total of $5000, we had just lit our first attempt at building a computer on fire. Let's just say there was a little tension in the room. Luckily I had that spare motherboard.
What followed was the quickest build tear down and subsequent assembly I have ever done. We were so overwhelmed with madness that we didn't really care what happened next. Within an hour we had my new computer fired up and running. That first site of Windows popping up on the new monitor was amazing. It was one of the best feelings I've ever had. It was all worth it.
Times being what they are, you might not be able to order a spare motherboard. But don't fret, just remember the moral of the story, well, I'll let you figure it out.
