I am old. I remember when pricewatch.com and tigerdirect.com existed. You wanted to build a PC, you were picking parts manually uphill both ways while wearing an onion on your belt.
No. First you always say "it's so easy to build a PC, you're dumb to get a console for gaming". Pay attention to always say this, even in unrelated circumstances
Then, after years of saying that "it's so easy", when your friend finally says "I finally want to build a PC, can you help me?", you drop this bomb
Just buy a pre built, take all the parts out and put em back in for the full experience. It really feels like a new build if you leave it apart for a few weeks so you forget where everything was!
Yeah, even with years of experience, LI has been my go-to for speccing out a build. They update pretty regularly and they offer tiers even without dGPUs that'll still hold up for last-gen gaming. Good way to introduce people to the basics of computing hardware.
Obvs this is a meme community, but a great site for PC builds is logical increments.com. They spec out different build suggestions for various budget and have some localizations too. Great starting point, especially for beginners.
Or ... instead of sending them down a rabbit hole, just point them to a web shop with a PC builder and tell them you will do it together to get an optimised build.
How to subconsciously gatekeep PC ownership from women. I would say this probably meets the tenuous definition of "mansplaining". Your girl wants to engage in your hobby with you. Why make it seem daunting when it should be fun? Sure, there's things to learn and lots to read. Did you have somebody overwhelming you with the minutiae of research and "things you have to understand" when you got into PC building? Nurture the newbies, don't lord your knowledge over them.
Did you have somebody overwhelming you with the minutiae of research and “things you have to understand” when you got into PC building?
I just kinda started plugging shit in where it fit. This was in the days of the ISA bus and mobo DIP switches. All my technical knowledge was learned through breaking something and trying to fix it.
My protip if you really can't bother with all that and just want to do expensive Legos is to go to an active forum for PCs where you can simply ask for a recommendation for a build.
What you need to supply is a budget example and what it needs to cover. I.e. if screen needs to be part of it or if you have one. If you do the resolution and refresh rate is good input (or just make and model which is printed on it). Finally you need an idea of what games you'll play. With that a mini war will erupt between AMD and Intel and AMD and Nvidia around what would be the best build for the budget.
Keep in mind to pick a forum based in the same country as you, else the recommendations might not at all fit your budget due to local price variance.
Hell you could probably make do without a budget if you say you're unsure how much is reasonable to spend to play the games you wish to play and you'll get recommendations to that effect as well.
I’ve been planning my next build on PCPartsPicker for the past 3 days. Not sure if I’ve slept. No time. Too much reconfiguring to do. A friend is also working on a new build. We both spent the day on PCPartsPicker optimising. We haven’t touched meth since we started all this.
Or you could do what one person I knew did, just used Newegg pc building, didn’t short anything and just added the first thing on the list. Then had them build it. It was just when am5 came out. Some crazy Eatx mobo and cpu with a 3060, would always blue screen.