My father and I share many traits and similarities, worldview notwithstanding. We both appreciate smoked meats and high-tech gadgetry. He makes this low groaning sound when displeased that I also seem to make as I’ve aged.
Much to my dad’s chagrin, the one thing we don’t share is a love of cars. He’s an engineer and a lifelong gearhead, working on vehicles regularly since growing up back on the family farm in southeastern Ohio.
I do not share this appreciation for engines, oil, and horsepower. What caught my eye was a different kind of machine: The home computer was infinitely fascinating to me as a child. A device with the potential for entertainment and business, it’s also a sophisticated and interconnected series of smaller devices that all somehow works in harmony.
From our first home PC, a Compaq Presario 4600, I was hooked on figuring out the software and hardware of this magical machine that would let me do homework and play games, all in one device. In many ways my love of computers is the same as my dad’s love of cars. Both require knowledge of how things hook together, and that one small thing can keep an entire system from running as intended.
Which is precisely why PC gaming is so hard to get into if you don’t want to get your hands dirty. I’ve repaired and replaced hundreds of pieces of computer hardware throughout my life, making plenty of mistakes along the way. Failure is always the best teacher and nothing taught me better than buying the wrong kind of memory or a video card that was too big for the computer tower.
When it comes to getting into the PC gaming scene, the most important thing is research. Sites like PC Parts Picker and Tom’s Guide provide a wealth of knowledge and advice. Whether you’re building a machine from scratch, going with a prebuilt unit, or buying a cheap tower and building it up over time, it’s important to discern how you intend to use the machine. Buy features for the machine you need, not the one you want.
I recently purchased my first new gaming PC in almost seven years, the new Dell Alienware Aurora R7 model. My previous desktop was a bare-bones tower I purchased off eBay, swapping in new processors, memory, and video cards — like a doctor performing triage in a busy emergency room. I kept that machine stitched together and running, all this time knowing that, when I bought it, I made a fatal error.
Skimping on power and not keeping an eye on the future can result in paying way more in the future than you did at the time. In my case, I bought a system that underperformed at the processor-level and had an entry-level motherboard, leaving me with a PC that bottlenecked in performance. By the time the computer was 4 years old I could no longer upgrade the memory or CPU, unless I changed the motherboard.
Mistakes were made.
This time, I made sure that the extra money I paid for the unit went to upgrading the processor, from an Intel i3 chipset to the i7-8700K Coffee Lake. This is a vast increase in power. Some things like the video card can always be upgraded down the road, and with ease. Hardware such as the processor require planning and, worse of all, thermal paste.
That said, buying a big, bulky video card can also save money down the road in other ways. A few years back, I upgraded to an NVidia GTX 960, the card below the benchmark for getting your PC virtual reality-ready. The 960 was a workhorse all this time, and ended up being far more versatile and powerful than the AMD Radeon RX 560 that came installed with my new Aurora R7.
This led to a brief moment of panic on the day that our family’s new addition arrived from Dell. The Aurora motherboard has four PCI slots, the space where video cards and capture units sit. The first two are the main slots, labeled as PCI-Express, which are also the fastest, most efficient slots. Consider the horror on my face when I attempted to slide in the 10-inch long, 2.5-pound video card into a space where it failed to fit.
A lot of PC maintenance and tinkering is pushing components into places and praying they fit and work. After jostling the device around and shouting, “No!,” over and again for five minutes, I realized the device could fit in the second PCI-Express slot, where the power supply chassis was blocking its entry into slot one.
Never have I been so relieved as when that card snapped into place. That is what gaming PC construction is all about: Cautious optimism.
I hope my dad knows that, even if he didn’t pass on a love of cars, he did pass on the ability to be thorough and detail-oriented. Automobiles and computers have much in common, but above all else, both have taught me that nothing will ruin your day faster than forgetting to hook up a single wire or screw.
For want of a nail, a shoe — and an entire afternoon — might be lost.
Contact William Harrison at DoubleUHarrison@gmail.com or on Twitter @DoubleUHarrison.
First Published January 18, 2018, 5:55 a.m.
