Y’know, I know this is a joke, but back when I did contract work, I legit had a client do this. They bought two i3-2100s because 3+3 equals 6 and that’s more than a single i5.
Back when 3g was the hot new cell service. My friend called me up, stoked, because he upgraded his grandfathered unlimited data plan with verizon past 3g all the way to 5g, and for only 10 bux more per month!
Actually, he got swindled into giving up his plan for one with a 5gig data cap.
So, you joke about that, but there was a time when that was absolutely the strategy. Right around the Pentium 3 era, there was an enthusiast motherboard that came out with two sockets, and the hot advice was to get that motherboard and a pair of Celerons rather than a Pentium 3.
AMD’s first multicore CPUs were pretty much two single-core ones taped together. AMD didn’t bother designing the CPU such that it shared anything between the cores.
Physically assembling a full RBG machine is a nightmare. My current machine was a Meshify C fully rainbow’d out because I wanted to. Each fan goes from one wire to many wire, there’s an RGB controller they all have to go to that just stuck onto the back of the motherboard that also connects to a fan speed controller back there that leads to a port on the mobo, the radiator has to mount and those fans have many wire too cuz they’re RGB and wiring is a nightmare mess. Then one fan’s RGB started going crazy and just flashing randomly so I had to the that off in the extra software tab has to run at startup, then a radiator fan started spinning weird so I had to RMA the whole AIO and while I got a new one, it’s still in box.
I now have five silent black 120mm fans and a black Noctua d15. RGB RAM (identical pieces that never had their rainbow color sync up) have been replaced with black RAM. Never again.
I want a pc in a black case and I DONT WANT ANY GOOFY FUCKING LIGHTS. Everything comes with lights. The keyboard, the mouse, the fans, hell I bet some RAM has lighted coolers now.
It is not easy to choose stuff and not accidentally pay extra for a piece or two that lights up like bozo the clown’s asshole. It is a minefield.
Every single RAM manufacturer has an RGB variant, it’s been pretty common for like a decade now. You can even get dummy sticks that just have the lights.
Fortunately, going dark isn’t too difficult. Non-RGB fans are easy to come by and usually a bit cheaper. You can also just not connect them to the RGB headers. RAM is also cheaper in non-RGB variants. The only issues might be motherboard and GPU, though there’s a bunch of GPUs with no lighting at all and are also cheaper (ASUS Prime 9070xt has no lights), and most BIOSes have an option to turn it all off.
Oh very true. I love some blinky lights as long as I can set them to ALWAYS BE OFF when I want.
I was able to find some lovely replacement parts for all my RGB stuff though. I could have gone with a much cheaper CPU cooler, but I just loved how giant and chonky the d15 is. You can get black fans everywhere, I think I got some Corsair silent fans to replace all my RGB fans. RAM was easy to find RGB-free.
My mobo still has RGB but that was mega easy to disable forever. PSU is a KW black.
So how I have a beautiful silent blacked-out machine, and a drawer with a great working PSU, 32GB RAM, three RGB 120mm fans, and a 280mm RGB AIO just chillin there. Maybe I’ll make another machine with them sometime.
Quick edit: I DO want my keyboard and mouse to have lights on them. I live and work in a very low-light house because I’m a gremlin, and having dim lights and shine-through keycaps allows me to find keys I don’t hit as often when I need to, or find my mouse on my desk when it runs away.
That’s fair haha. Mine now lives face-to-face with my partner’s identical (but newer and more powerful) machine behind their big screen next to my desk, so lights wouldn’t do anything for me if I had them anymore.
I haven’t gone maximum rainbow vomit, but mine is a Fractal Pop Mini Air with RGB case fans, and yeah there were a few more little wires to run. The case actually has a built-in RGB controller, and I used that for awhile, but I got kinda curious and started playing with the onboard RGB, and I’ve got an aurora effect I like through OpenRGB. I think it’s doing that by Linux sending the motherboard’s RGB controller data constantly over I2C so it’s tying up some of my system RAM but fuck it it’s fun.
Physically assembling it is still fairly difficult. There’s the physical effort of wrangling a heavy heatsink or a huge graphics card into place while being gentle so you don’t bend or break any of the connectors. There’s plugging in all the cables in a tight space where you can’t always clearly see. There’s knowing which cable goes where when the labeling is small and all the cables look basically the same. There’s the challenge of knowing when a cable or a card is properly seated, knowing how much you can push to get something locked into place, without pushing too much and breaking it.
It’s harder than lego, but it’s not rocket surgery.
The hard part is if something doesn’t work. For whatever reason. Putting things together is easy, if it all works, nice, done. That’s how all my builds went, so I don’t actually know shit about troubleshooting. My friend build his first pc and nothing worked. I checked if it’s all plugged in, nothing. He changed all the parts and at the end he had two faulty ram.
I have yet to build a computer that didn’t POST on first boot, with one minor exception: My cousin’s Ryzen 5600 machine. I built that in a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini, which has a front IO reset button, and I wired the Reset and the Power buttons backwards. I pushed the power button, nothing. I pushed the Reset button, it booted to the BIOS setup.
I THOUGHT I had a problem with my uncle’s computer; but no, the monitor I was testing with chose to die during first POST. That monitor is behind three different trees now.
The physical act of assembling the computer isn’t the hard part. Picking out components that will work well together is the tough part.
“The good CPUs were very expensive so I just bought two cheap ones, that should be ok right?”
Y’know, I know this is a joke, but back when I did contract work, I legit had a client do this. They bought two i3-2100s because 3+3 equals 6 and that’s more than a single i5.
Back when 3g was the hot new cell service. My friend called me up, stoked, because he upgraded his grandfathered unlimited data plan with verizon past 3g all the way to 5g, and for only 10 bux more per month!
Actually, he got swindled into giving up his plan for one with a 5gig data cap.
So, you joke about that, but there was a time when that was absolutely the strategy. Right around the Pentium 3 era, there was an enthusiast motherboard that came out with two sockets, and the hot advice was to get that motherboard and a pair of Celerons rather than a Pentium 3.
AMD’s first multicore CPUs were pretty much two single-core ones taped together. AMD didn’t bother designing the CPU such that it shared anything between the cores.
PCPartPicker / Logical Increments / PC building forums: hold your own beer, we’ve got this for you
Physically assembling a full RBG machine is a nightmare. My current machine was a Meshify C fully rainbow’d out because I wanted to. Each fan goes from one wire to many wire, there’s an RGB controller they all have to go to that just stuck onto the back of the motherboard that also connects to a fan speed controller back there that leads to a port on the mobo, the radiator has to mount and those fans have many wire too cuz they’re RGB and wiring is a nightmare mess. Then one fan’s RGB started going crazy and just flashing randomly so I had to the that off in the extra software tab has to run at startup, then a radiator fan started spinning weird so I had to RMA the whole AIO and while I got a new one, it’s still in box.
I now have five silent black 120mm fans and a black Noctua d15. RGB RAM (identical pieces that never had their rainbow color sync up) have been replaced with black RAM. Never again.
The opposite of this is also hard.
I want a pc in a black case and I DONT WANT ANY GOOFY FUCKING LIGHTS. Everything comes with lights. The keyboard, the mouse, the fans, hell I bet some RAM has lighted coolers now.
It is not easy to choose stuff and not accidentally pay extra for a piece or two that lights up like bozo the clown’s asshole. It is a minefield.
It was significantly cheaper for me to get ram with lights than without. Same manufacturer and everything.
Every single RAM manufacturer has an RGB variant, it’s been pretty common for like a decade now. You can even get dummy sticks that just have the lights.
Fortunately, going dark isn’t too difficult. Non-RGB fans are easy to come by and usually a bit cheaper. You can also just not connect them to the RGB headers. RAM is also cheaper in non-RGB variants. The only issues might be motherboard and GPU, though there’s a bunch of GPUs with no lighting at all and are also cheaper (ASUS Prime 9070xt has no lights), and most BIOSes have an option to turn it all off.
Oh very true. I love some blinky lights as long as I can set them to ALWAYS BE OFF when I want.
I was able to find some lovely replacement parts for all my RGB stuff though. I could have gone with a much cheaper CPU cooler, but I just loved how giant and chonky the d15 is. You can get black fans everywhere, I think I got some Corsair silent fans to replace all my RGB fans. RAM was easy to find RGB-free.
My mobo still has RGB but that was mega easy to disable forever. PSU is a KW black.
So how I have a beautiful silent blacked-out machine, and a drawer with a great working PSU, 32GB RAM, three RGB 120mm fans, and a 280mm RGB AIO just chillin there. Maybe I’ll make another machine with them sometime.
Quick edit: I DO want my keyboard and mouse to have lights on them. I live and work in a very low-light house because I’m a gremlin, and having dim lights and shine-through keycaps allows me to find keys I don’t hit as often when I need to, or find my mouse on my desk when it runs away.
I undermount my PC on the far back corner of my desk, the lights just don’t do me any good.
That’s fair haha. Mine now lives face-to-face with my partner’s identical (but newer and more powerful) machine behind their big screen next to my desk, so lights wouldn’t do anything for me if I had them anymore.
I haven’t gone maximum rainbow vomit, but mine is a Fractal Pop Mini Air with RGB case fans, and yeah there were a few more little wires to run. The case actually has a built-in RGB controller, and I used that for awhile, but I got kinda curious and started playing with the onboard RGB, and I’ve got an aurora effect I like through OpenRGB. I think it’s doing that by Linux sending the motherboard’s RGB controller data constantly over I2C so it’s tying up some of my system RAM but fuck it it’s fun.
Physically assembling it is still fairly difficult. There’s the physical effort of wrangling a heavy heatsink or a huge graphics card into place while being gentle so you don’t bend or break any of the connectors. There’s plugging in all the cables in a tight space where you can’t always clearly see. There’s knowing which cable goes where when the labeling is small and all the cables look basically the same. There’s the challenge of knowing when a cable or a card is properly seated, knowing how much you can push to get something locked into place, without pushing too much and breaking it.
It’s harder than lego, but it’s not rocket surgery.
The hard part is if something doesn’t work. For whatever reason. Putting things together is easy, if it all works, nice, done. That’s how all my builds went, so I don’t actually know shit about troubleshooting. My friend build his first pc and nothing worked. I checked if it’s all plugged in, nothing. He changed all the parts and at the end he had two faulty ram.
I have yet to build a computer that didn’t POST on first boot, with one minor exception: My cousin’s Ryzen 5600 machine. I built that in a Fractal Meshify 2 Mini, which has a front IO reset button, and I wired the Reset and the Power buttons backwards. I pushed the power button, nothing. I pushed the Reset button, it booted to the BIOS setup.
I THOUGHT I had a problem with my uncle’s computer; but no, the monitor I was testing with chose to die during first POST. That monitor is behind three different trees now.