Juha Saarinen: How to build a PC in lockdown

Power supply goes in and after that it's time to watch some cable management YouTubes. Photo / Juha Saarinen

Lockdown meant lots of spare time with everything in hiatus and as I am that kind of person, it seemed a perfect time to build a Windows PC with my nine year old son.

"Now why would anyone build a computer?" you might ask. Well, I used to do it quite a bit, partly to reuse existing bits that worked fine, and partly to upgrade hardware that was getting old.

Sure, it's really geeky but a good way to learn how infotech actually works. That said, I haven't done it for years, mostly because of using Apple Macs which don't lend themselves to custom builds unless you're slapping together a "Hackintosh" PC to violate the macOS licensing agreement.

The parts that arrived were from familiar names: an MSI motherboard that everything plugs into, an Nvidia RTX 2080 graphics card that'll come in handy for playing around with artificial intelligence as well as gaming, and the brains of the system, the Intel Core i7 9700K processor that can be overclocked or run faster than specified.

All the above went into a case made by Antec, with a 650 Watt power supply and water cooler for the processor from Silverstone. Asus chipped in with a 27-inch screen that has a fast 144 Hertz refresh rate which is good for smooth gaming action.

That collection of parts is a small insight into a massive global supply chain the pandemic broke up and which is slowly coming right again.

Taiwanese, Japanese and American vendors design electronics that are fabricated or assembled in China or South East Asia. It's one giant global logistics circus of companies specialising in making the different parts that others integrate into their products.

Intel is the exception, making processors in manufacturing sites mainly in the US, but also in Ireland and Israel.

Going back to the parts, things have changed a bit in the last few years like the PC storage not being a hard disk per se. Instead, I got a small non-volatile memory card, also made by Intel. It's tiny but can hold a full terabyte of data.

What hasn't changed is the outlandish design and naming of PC componentry aimed at gaming. The Antec case looks like something Jony Ive might design if he didn't like you, and it's called Dark Avenger. It is quite dark, that's true, but what it intends to avenge is not clear.

Still, it's a quality case with lots of space and easy to work with. I could cram it full of storage devices too and become a micro-cloud service provider for my little village quite easily and cheaply.

The target market for gaming PCs isn't into subtlety I guess, and my son was laughing at the over the top names of the gear, like the motherboard being called Tomahawk after the cruise missiles and big fans for the processor water cooler that have… wait for it… rainbow LEDs built into them.

You can make them blink and change colour in different patterns which is amusing for a little while but mostly distracting and adds complexity to the wiring management. At least the fans are nice and quiet while pushing air through the water cooler.

Other things that haven't changed are the confounding manuals. If you wanted an answer to "could a nine year old build a PC?" it is "no, unless s/he's a genius at figuring out weird manuals."

Despite my having built PCs before, we got stuck a number of times like with the mysterious additional power connector on the motherboard that wasn't documented.

Extensive searching online revealed that you don't really need it unless you want an additional power boost for extreme overclocking.

What does make things easier now is that you can learn from other people having gone through the same head scratching moments, and posted about how to get around them on the Internet.

YouTube is full of videos that help you avoid making costly mistakes when building PCs, and some Reddit forums are really useful too. Long story short, don't drop a couple of grand on parts to build a PC without another computer to look up things on that manuals fail to explain.

We took it easy and had the system assembled in four rainy afternoons over a week.

Thanks to other people having been there, done that wrong and posted about it, we didn't have to redo things. Nevertheless, it was a little nerve-wracking to press the power switch, wondering if something might have been plugged into the wrong socket or pins.

There was no smoke or explosions, only silent fans spinning colourfully.

Whether or not building computers is a good thing to teach your kids rather than say building houses or lawyering isn't easy to answer but it was certainly fun and goodness me, nine-year-old brains are fast and learn easily.

If you do decide to build one after the lockdown lifts and gear becomes available, try to support your local computer shop rather than buying parts from Amazon or another online retail giant.

They don't need any more of your money, but local retailers do. On the software side of things, everything is sold online now and not in physical retail stores unfortunately but looking for local developers' products is a cool thing to do. More on that in another column.