I’m planning on building a PC soon and, while I have done plenty of research, I’d like to hear advice from people who have experience in the area personally. It’s also just nice talking to other people in general, lol

  • l4sgc@beehaw.orgEnglish
    2·
    1 year ago

    It’s difficult to know what advice might be helpful for you without more context, but the one mistake I made with my last PC build was choosing a small form factor case. I thought it looked really clean not to have all that wasted space inside the case, but it makes any system changes much more arduous trying to squeeze my hands into tight spots.

    Also when I needed to upgrade my gpu a few months ago and filtered to ones that would fit in the case there was literally only 1 option, it wasn’t my first choice but it was close enough I went with it instead of dealing with the hassle of buying a new case and rebuilding everything. I know for sure I will need a new case the next time I need a new gpu though.

    The other thing I’ll mention is to make sure all your bios settings are configured correctly: resizable bar, XMP, etc.

    • PurrJPro@beehaw.orgOPEnglish
      0·
      1 year ago

      Thanks! Choosing a case that’s small enough to be easy to transport but not hard to build in is a concern, but I believe my current case will do well! Setting up the bios is what I’m more concerned with, but I’m sure I’ll manage. And sorry but the vagueness of the post, I’m generally looking for any advice instead of specific advice

      • l4sgc@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Bios can be difficult because some of the settings are named differently if you have an amd or intel cpu. Additionally the interface and where the settings are located seems to be dependent on the motherboard manufacturer.

        But in general the important things that are required to install windows 11 are uefi boot and the tpm being enabled, and these will almost certainly be set to the correct values by default.

        For gaming performance resizable bar/smart access memory improves gpu performance, and xmp/expo improves ram performance, these is a decent chance these will not be enable in the bios by default.

        For programming, I also wanted to use the windows subsystem for linux, and I had to go to my bios and enable cpu virtualization for that. Not sure what other workflows might rely on virtualization.

        I’ll also just mention that at one point I had some instability related to restarting. If I tried to restart it would post but fail to boot into windows, but doing shut-down and then turning the computer on again worked fine. And I think I resolved that by disabling fast-boot in the bios. Note that I wouldn’t expect you to get that restart issue, I think it was related to me being on the insider-preview build of windows at the time. But fast-boot-off is something I made a note of as a good troubleshooting step.