My PC Build: Why Building Your Own PC Can Benefit Your IT Career

Its my intuition to assume that building a PC benefits anyone who seeks to begin, sustain or improve a career in the information technology space. However, over the course of my career I've interacted with business roles adjacent to IT that don't see the value in PC building. I can still recall an interview I'd participated in years ago where I'd made some reference to my PC build at the time. My video card stopped working and I'd done some work to isolate that card as the problem and get the component replaced. Being naïve as I was back then, I had no clue that the person interviewing me didn't have a technical skill set. This is despite the product of the company being extremely technical. My story about discovering the problematic GPU carried no sway with the interviewer. My interviewer probably didn't know what a GPU was (This was several years before the current AI hype cycle). Years later I still find myself reflecting on that experience. In this blog I want to propose that the experience of building a PC and maintaining it engenders technology skills that contribute to any IT skill set. Furthermore, the skills gained by building a PC are not always obvious or immediately measurable. I aim to demonstrate this by discussing how its helped me personally.

So, lets talk about my starting point for building a PC in December 2022. The December 2022 build replaced a December 2010 build. That December 2010 build looked as follows in December 2022: 

December 2010 PC specs the time of purchase in December 2010:

• Core i7 950 (3.02 Ghz - quad core with hyperthreading)
• 6 GB of DDR3 Memory
• Nvidia GeForce GTX 470 video card
• Asus Sabertooth X58 Motherboard (PCIe gen 3)
• 120 GB SSD drive connected via SATA
• Asus DVD/CD Burner Drive

As seen in the image:

• 18 GB of DDR3 Memory
• Corsair AIO CPU cooler (180 mm)
• Nvidia 3080 GPU
• 2x 8 TB HDD in Raid 1  

My decision to build a new PC began in the summer of 2022. The first skill applicable to both PC building and IT business, learning how to evaluate PC components. Computer parts come in a vast range of prices and sizes. I learned that the first step in deciding what parts were best for me came down to knowing what I want to use the computer for. For me personally, I wanted to do high end VR gaming and to dabble in machine learning, in addition to the typical usage. I also intended to do web browsing, writing emails, writing this blog, household budgeting, etc. Such decisions are similar for any business that leverages technology. Before buying or implementing a business solution, its probably a good idea to ask, "what exactly do we want this solution to do for us"? 

 

The next skill that PC building helps with is budgeting. After deciding what your PC should do when its complete, you have to understand how much budget you have and where you want to spend the parts of that budget. I asked myself questions like, what CPU should I purchase? How much do the competing CPUs cost? Can I achieve my stated end goal by purchasing the cheapest CPU, or cheapest GPU? Do I need the most expensive motherboard? Or can I achieve my end goal with a mid-range motherboard? All of these questions should be relatable to any business. In business, you're trying to deliver the service or product you've advertised at the lowest possible cost to the business. So it is with PC building. 

 

Getting back to the specifics of my December 2022 PC build, I decided on purchasing an Nvidia 3080 GPU with 10 GB VRAM. My reasoning was, I wanted a component which would give me access to the CUDA library so I could experiment with machine learning. Secondarily, that winter was the year Nvidia launched its 4000 series GPUs and thus, the cost of the 3000 series were reduced in price. I was able to purchase the Nvida 3080 for $650, which was a pretty low price for the time.I purchased all of my PC components online, in or around the Thanksgiving holiday to incorporate black Friday savings. 

 

The 3080 GPU here was actually one of the first components of my new PC to arrive after being ordered. You can see it in the image above installed in my December 2010 PC for the purposes of testing. Surprisingly, it would have added considerable longevity to my existing PC if I'd decided to make that my entire PC upgrade. In that moment of testing, I learned something about how various PC components can contribute to the longevity of a PCs useful life.    

At the time of writing this, I'm 38. When I was a teenager and well into my 20s, I spent quite a bit of my free time playing PC games. My "gateway drug" was Half-Life and its litany of mods. My previous PC was built and purchased for 2 purposes. Purpose one, I wanted the latest PC system to play the newest PC games. Purpose two, I wanted a robust system that would last me through my college years. January of 2011 was to be my first semester University of Colorado Denver.

For my December 2022 PC build I knew I wanted an AMD processor. My December 2011 build had an Intel processor. While that processor performed well over the years, I didn't like the disposition and business practices of Intel once they'd established a competitive edge. Between 2010 and 2020, I watched Intel abandon the ambition to create great products and transition to a posture of limited innovation and constant price increases. My new PC build was the perfect opportunity to let my thoughts on this practice be known. 

Since I'd generally been happy with my PC built in 2010 through 2022, I'd not kept up on any of the latest advancements in hard drives, optical storage, memory, video cards, or motherboards. I broke my PC building project into 4 phases. From my initial decision to build to actually installing the OS, the elapsed time was 6 months. I spent the first 4 months watching YouTube videos explain what the latest and greatest PC parts were. I'd learned that in Fall 2022 AMD would be releasing their new CPU and GPU. I'd learned that Nvidia also was planning to release their new video card, the 4090. I researched the new motherboard standards such as PCIe 5.0, M.2 NVMe drives, DDR5 memory standards. I also noticed that it was quite common for new PC cases to be completely absent of DVD / Bluray optical storage. I did research on CPU cooling and knew I wanted to buy an AIO CPU cooler and that I wanted my power supply to be a 1000 watt supply. However, all of the decisions about specific technology would need to be bound by one thing, PC budget.

One previously unmentioned reason to build a PC is to avoid the manufactures markup on pre-built computers. When you build your own computer, you get to side step this markup. Whatever your budget on PC parts, you'll generally always get more for your money building the PC yourself. After doing hours of research on PC parts, I built a list of PC parts. I made considerations for an upper bound of my budget and a lower bound. Here is my list below:     

Once the parts list was decided, I waited until Black Friday / Cyber Monday, which are essentially shopping holidays coming at the end of the US holiday of Thanksgiving. On these days, retailers offer steep discounts on all types of products. In my case, I was strategically waiting for great deals on PC parts. Like this deal for a limited time at Microcenter:

 It was incredibly exciting to experience the trickle of parts arrive at my doorstep. While this next image doesn't include all of the PC parts, I took this image during the phase of arriving PC components!

Building the PC was quite the exercise in frustration. I'd received all of the parts one weekend before Christmas 2022 and I'd set out to get it working that weekend. Assembly took me about 6 - 7 hours. Additionally, I needed to make some decisions about what fans went where, what cables routed where and taking extra precaution not to damage any of the parts worth hundreds of dollars each. I got it assembled on the first day, but it refused to turn on. After pondering for hours on the first day of building, I decided I was too tired to continue. I went back to the problem the next day. For 4 hours I read blogs, watched YouTube videos and read manuals until I eventually discovered that the power cable from my power supply to the motherboard was not completely plugged in. After that hiccup, it was a short time before I was able to boot my PC to the BIOS and begin installing the operating system. The frustrations experienced with my PC not working immediately taught me patience and how to value documentation. There are many times in my IT career that I don't know what I'm doing and need to read the documentation. Out of all of the IT skills I've accumulated over the years, I think this one is the most valuable.

PC Specs:

• AMD 7700X (8 core 16 thread at 5.5 Ghz)
• 32 GB DDR 5 Memory
• B650 TOMAHAWK WIFI MOBO (PCIe Gen 5.0)
• Nvidia 3080 Video Card (10 GB vram)
• 2 TB NVMe M.2 Storage
• Celsius S36 AIO cooler 

Once I got the OS installed I began to run gaming benchmarks to see what kind of performance improvement my new PC would provide over my previous PC. Here are some of my benchmark scores from my new computer.

NEW PC Top Benchmark Scores:

Time Spy: https://www.3dmark.com/spy/34863269

Night Raid: https://www.3dmark.com/nr/817760 (Score: 81,506 )

Fire Strike: https://www.3dmark.com/fs/29329474

New PC using integrated graphics chip:

Night Raid: https://www.3dmark.com/nr/805775 (Score: 11,257 )

Previous PC from 2010:

Night Raid: https://www.3dmark.com/nr/802659 (Score: 14,355 )

In conclusion, PC building requires the skill to ask what the computer system will be used for, learning the capabilities of the parts and their costs, dexterity sills in putting the components together, and troubleshooting skills to address problems when the components don't work as expected. All of these skills should be highly relatable to any business in the 2020's. Perhaps consider asking your future employees if they have ever built a PC. If they've done so successfully, its quite possible they have the skills and appetite for challenge that you need to help your business succeed!