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Comment by jotux | Hacker News Reader

There are sites now [1] that let you select components and will tell you if your CPU/motherboard/RAM are compatible. It will even tell you if your power supply can handle the amount of power of all the components. When you select components it will give you links to multiple places to purchase them.

I don't keep up with current events in custom PCs and when I built a PC last year [2] I thought it was incredibly straight forward.

[1] pcpartpicker.com

[2] https://pcpartpicker.com/b/HgBbt6

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Except that you have the problem right off the bat:

https://pcpartpicker.com/products/cpu/

Which CPU family and which series? Once you finish THAT, everything gets a lot more straightforward.

That list is terrible. At least order the families/series chronologically.

If I'm a reasonably informed random, I know to click a handful of things with "lake" in the name and a handful of things with "zen" in the name and that's about it. Except you can't do that with the chooser as it gives you zero choices, since -zen is a series and -lake is a family and those are disjoint (I should be able to union those).

As a noob, I would miss any of the "gaming value" choices with that heuristic (Haswell/Broadwell that are quite nice).

I don't see any EPYC in that list, so I'm scratching my head (yes, I know it's a server but a random person won't) and I would miss the Threadripper choice (why doesn't it have Ryzen next to it).

The problem isn't assembling a PC. It's the fact that PC knowledge has a half-life of like 6 months, and you really can't trust review sites or web searches on this topic anymore.

You're not supposed to pick a CPU from the full list. Use the filters on the left to narrow it down.

Did you actually read my comment? I was talking about the choices IN THE FILTERS.

The problem, as a noob, is that you don't even have enough knowledge to use the filters correctly.

Aye. We've got some things in the works to improve that.

I suspect most newbies to building a PC wouldn't just go to the individual part list and start picking a processor. They'd go to the build guides(https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/) and look at builds in their price range. A bunch of the build guides on that site have start-to-finish youtube videos of the entire build as well.

Maybe that particular filter on that particular part isn't that easy to use but I think sites like this make building a PC extremely approachable, even for someone who has never built a PC before.

Used to be daunting, but for my last few builds I have used some combination of PC Part Picker and the selections from the seasonal TechReport.com guides. Much easier than a couple decades ago when I was a teenager.

Should also be mentioned that the manuals that come with things like motherboards and cases are much more detailed than they used to be.

PCPP is useful to look up if your build or a build similar to yours is gonna have problems or little gotchas.

PCPP is really revolutionary. Building a PC in 2018 should be easy.

The only priblem is a lot of everchanging technologies and acronyms, e.g. NVMe, M.2, etc.

Yeah I'm not saying it's hard for me, but I've built a few (using pcpartpicker) and do a lot of electronic design work, so I'm comfortable handling PCB's.

For others, even just pcpartpicker can present an overload of information.

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