Welcome at Custom PC Magazine April 2022 Issue

When you’ve been mucking about for PCs as long as we have (and in my case that’s longer than I really want to think about), you accumulate a veritable bank of tips and tricks that prepare you for the future. You learn from your mistakes, other people pass on their wisdom to you and you get better at PC building as you go.
Sometimes you make a mistake and think ‘I really wish I’d known that before I started’, or ‘why did no one tell me that?!’ Here’s a confession from a PC veteran who’s been fiddling with the insides of computers for years – after being accustomed to Intel’s LGA sockets for many years, I made a big slip-up when I moved over to AMD’s AM4 socket a few years ago.
I tested my Ryzen 7 2700X with the stock cooler first, then removed the cooler, so I could fit my waterblock and noticed that my new CPU was stuck to the contact plate, with a row of bent pins that I had to straighten out again. It was a rookie mistake borne out of a lack of recent experience with AMD CPUs, and it could have been avoided if I’d had this month’s feature to hand (see p70).
If you’re upfront and honest with other PC enthusiasts, you’ll find people have made all sorts of mistakes. Another common one is leaving the plastic film on your CPU cooler’s contact plate, so it doesn’t make thermal contact with the CPU. Most of us have done it at some point.
It’s easy to take your accumulated knowledge for granted, and you’d be surprised how much you can learn from other people’s experience. It might be easy enough to put an SSD in an M.2 slot, and fit a fan to a case, but knowing which slot and fan mount to use, and which way round to mount your fan, isn’t always obvious.
That’s why we’ve devoted this month’s lead feature to passing on some of the advice that has made life easier for us over the years – tips that aren’t always in instruction manuals or build guides, but that you’ll be glad you know when it comes to your next build.
We’d also be really interested in hearing some of your tips for PC building. Send them to us at [email protected], and we’ll print the best ones.

Download from:

NitroFlare

• Foodie Magazine – February 2022
• Britain – March-April 2022