IT'S HIT THE FAN

The mistakes every PC gamer has made during an upgrade project

- Phil Iwaniuk

It’s an odd rite of passage, when you think about it. You might have 10,000 hours in Dwarf Fortress. You might have a favorite DPI. You might even be able to name every 90% PCG review back to the ’90s, including the mad ones like Braveheart. But on some level, you only reach a certain level of enthusiast cred once you’ve willfully dismantled the box that makes your games happen, and then had a guess at how to put it all back together again, but this time with a new thing inside it.

It’s an endeavor that’s equally fraught with peril and rich with payoff, and which there’s no adequate preparation for, no matter how many hours of Linus you watch beforehand. Learning how to build or upgrade a PC is a learn-on-the-job undertaking, and ‘learning’ here is basically a euphemism for ‘hearing a sickening crunch and realizing the RAM doesn’t go in that way’.

It soon becomes second nature, and once it does we forget how baffling the innards of a mid-tower desktop look to a newcomer. But there’s a unifying quality to botched builds, a shared failure that unites us all who sail the good ship RGB. Let’s forge those bonds now by divulging the shameful, careless, expensive and heartbreaking things we’ve all done during an upgrade. No laughing, this is a safe space.

FORGOT THE THERMAL PASTE