Considering how HN professedly struggles to use non-reversible cables, it wouldn't surprise me if someone started to complain about getting skillchecked by a Molex or SATA.
And that CPU, with the little gold tab you gotta line up? That's a whopping three ways you could go wrong! Forget about it, might as well just phone Dell or Apple and pay the idiot tax.
Given my experience with PC parts in the past, most folks would be skillchecked when getting any card for their slots, that don't exactly match the motherboard firmware, bus protocol version or speed, even a x.1 variation makes all the difference.
Also better check if the UEFI firmware does understand the nice NVMe SSD brand, version that was bought.
Be sure to not fill all the slots either, or ensure the electromagnetic radiation from each board doesn't cause issues with their neighbour, they might be a possible reason for random freezes.
Custom PCs aren't IKEA, and my time building them is long gone, I have better things to do.
> Also better check if the UEFI firmware does understand the nice NVMe SSD brand, version that was bought.
That's funny! I haven't heard of this being an issue since 2009. And back then, it was an issue with a select few manufacturers that took it upon themselves to modify the stock ACPI tables to behave differently from how the OEM intended it to behave.
Not naming any names, but it really was a pain in the ass for the people that bought commercial dual-boot software and couldn't run ostensibly recent OSes. Something you didn't encounter if you braved the impossible gauntlet of building a PC from scratch, as there was no "we know better than you" interruption from companies with a sizable investment in watching UEFI burn. Of course, you still have to put up with other fierce trials such as "which way does the DIMM line up" and "how do screws work" which will triumph over so-called hackers that thought they were smart enough to build a PC.
Just a thought. Custom PCs will never consume the world, but we are going to point and laugh if you buy a preconfigured rackmount or tower at the sticker price. That's like watching a car enthusiast proudly exit the used Honda dealership after paying three times the Blue Book price for their ride. Puts you up there with Elon and Zuckerberg in the pantheon of people that let FOMO drive irrational hardware purchases.
> Custom PCs aren't IKEA,
Correct, IKEA furniture actually demands literacy from the person installing it.
> I have better things to do.
You're a Hacker News user with 14 years of seniority and enough karma to make the Buddha blush. We both know that if you had anything better to do, you wouldn't be writing paragraph-length replies to arguments you supposedly don't take seriously in the first place. Whatever "better things" exist on your agenda, they must have quite the lengthy refractory period for you to find the time in your horribly busy life for this and the other 63,548 comments you've submit to this site.
If you can't prove that PC building is inconvenient, you can't prove that your time is worth something and you can't prove that your alternative is better value, what are you trying to tell me? That you're lazier than a middle schooler and too dumb to shop at Radioshack? Touché and well met, your rhetoric moves me.
