Yay descriptive titles. If you are answering here you have presumably built or at least specced a PC for yourself. What would you have done differently with the benefit of hindsight? This could be because you made a poor choice or because one of the choices you made did not pan out the way you thought (either the tech did not get picked up or you did not use it the way you thought you would).
Edit
Also going to add peripherals to this one.
Did you get a fancy gaming mouse or keyboard, or indeed some kind of art/engineering type inputs, and not gain much use from it? Did you skimp on that and pay the price? Did you opt for bog standard and later consider it a mistake?
----
I have not actually built a new PC for anything like performance for myself since https://gbatemp.net/threads/new-pc-time.42858/ back in 2007. It did well for many years for me before I rode it into the ground and it joined the wall of PC parts towers but there were things I would have changed.
I eventually stuck 4 gigs of RAM in there, probably should have gone for that at the time as 2 was maybe not low but not high and I had not yet discovered my fondness for having hundreds of tabs open at once.
This was on the turning point of directX10 but I went for high end DX9 cards. This was not a bad move as the failure of Vista and domination of the 360 (and later PS3) during that timeframe meant directX10 exclusive was nothing like previous directX versions.
Would have probably skipped SLI if I had to do it over again -- 4 monitors was nice but 3 does me well and a basic slave card or maybe got one of those triple head to go things. Also driver makers were, and still are, not up to the task and it burned power like nobody's business (got serious bills because of that one). On the flip side a friend got a mid range DX10 card about 7 months later and where might struggled a bit with certain titles it blazed through them. I wisely avoided anything resembling physx. I eventually replaced the GPU with a cheap one made for media PCs as one of my vendors had one going for £20 or so.
The motherboard was not a great one (had some flex in it which killed it eventually) and dropped me down to single card before then.
More money for hard drives (more, larger, maybe faster as this was the era 10K RPM drives in the consumer space) would have also done -- to this day I have no storage space. Indeed it was a cut I made to get two cards.
I can't remember what quad core was doing at the time but given my fondness for video and then the rise of multi core encoding that might have been an idea. Never actually overclocked it for day to day uses -- fiddled with it for a while but nothing much beyond that. Also never really overclocked the graphics cards despite that being what I got them for, though the drivers did much for me there and they were clocked and built nicely enough.
2 DVDs was overkill. Did burn multiple discs at once a few times but the hard drive could not keep up if things were fragmented. I sold one to a friend and the other eventually died. I only replaced it when the xbox 360 special burning drive stuff kicked off (got one of the permaflash models before prices shot through the roof, and to this day it forms my primary DVD drive for any burning needs).
I never wired the firewire up on the front, but the front USBs were used all the time.
The case was not bad, though the plastic side wall meant radio leaked everywhere, something I found when fixing a cool old radio on the workbench next to the machine.
Software is software. No regrets about rocking XP until 2014 when I got a nice SSD and went to Linux.
Edit
Also going to add peripherals to this one.
Did you get a fancy gaming mouse or keyboard, or indeed some kind of art/engineering type inputs, and not gain much use from it? Did you skimp on that and pay the price? Did you opt for bog standard and later consider it a mistake?
----
I have not actually built a new PC for anything like performance for myself since https://gbatemp.net/threads/new-pc-time.42858/ back in 2007. It did well for many years for me before I rode it into the ground and it joined the wall of PC parts towers but there were things I would have changed.
I eventually stuck 4 gigs of RAM in there, probably should have gone for that at the time as 2 was maybe not low but not high and I had not yet discovered my fondness for having hundreds of tabs open at once.
This was on the turning point of directX10 but I went for high end DX9 cards. This was not a bad move as the failure of Vista and domination of the 360 (and later PS3) during that timeframe meant directX10 exclusive was nothing like previous directX versions.
Would have probably skipped SLI if I had to do it over again -- 4 monitors was nice but 3 does me well and a basic slave card or maybe got one of those triple head to go things. Also driver makers were, and still are, not up to the task and it burned power like nobody's business (got serious bills because of that one). On the flip side a friend got a mid range DX10 card about 7 months later and where might struggled a bit with certain titles it blazed through them. I wisely avoided anything resembling physx. I eventually replaced the GPU with a cheap one made for media PCs as one of my vendors had one going for £20 or so.
The motherboard was not a great one (had some flex in it which killed it eventually) and dropped me down to single card before then.
More money for hard drives (more, larger, maybe faster as this was the era 10K RPM drives in the consumer space) would have also done -- to this day I have no storage space. Indeed it was a cut I made to get two cards.
I can't remember what quad core was doing at the time but given my fondness for video and then the rise of multi core encoding that might have been an idea. Never actually overclocked it for day to day uses -- fiddled with it for a while but nothing much beyond that. Also never really overclocked the graphics cards despite that being what I got them for, though the drivers did much for me there and they were clocked and built nicely enough.
2 DVDs was overkill. Did burn multiple discs at once a few times but the hard drive could not keep up if things were fragmented. I sold one to a friend and the other eventually died. I only replaced it when the xbox 360 special burning drive stuff kicked off (got one of the permaflash models before prices shot through the roof, and to this day it forms my primary DVD drive for any burning needs).
I never wired the firewire up on the front, but the front USBs were used all the time.
The case was not bad, though the plastic side wall meant radio leaked everywhere, something I found when fixing a cool old radio on the workbench next to the machine.
Software is software. No regrets about rocking XP until 2014 when I got a nice SSD and went to Linux.
Last edited by FAST6191,
