Thursday, May 4th 2023
Can You Build an Operable PC in 37 Minutes? The Neo Forza & Newegg PC Building Event Winner Just Did
The Newegg PC Building Contest finals were held in Taipei, on April 22nd. This isn't a typical e-sports event, or even an overclocking/benchmarking contest, but one with a very simple premise—build an operable PC using the parts of your choice, within a time-limit. The finals saw the top-5 contestants from a pool of 50 make their way to Taipei, and for the final event, the time set was just 1 hour. That seems like an eternity for someone used to building PCs, but this isn't a mom-and-pop Dell you're building—a fully fledged high-end gaming desktop with certain mandatory components to have (although the choice of make of the components is up to you). You're supposed to assemble the desktop and bring it up to an operable state.
Neo Forza became the DDR5 memory and SSD manufacturer of choice for most of the finalists. Three out of five finalists chose Neo Forza Trinity DDR5-7200 memory, and all five of them chose Neo Forza NFP455 NVMe Gen 4 SSD. While the winner put together the build in 37 minutes, the slowest of the five made it in just under the hour. They stated that the build was "stressful" and they never thought it could get so nerve-racking to put together a simple PC. Meanwhile, Neo Forza celebrated its unexpected claim to fame for being the memory vendor of choice among the finalists. "We were humbly overwhelmed as the event, inadvertently, showed Neo Forza as a preferred choice by experienced pro-users for DRAM and SSD in PC builds suitable for gaming, content-creation, streaming and 3D rendering," the company commented.
Neo Forza became the DDR5 memory and SSD manufacturer of choice for most of the finalists. Three out of five finalists chose Neo Forza Trinity DDR5-7200 memory, and all five of them chose Neo Forza NFP455 NVMe Gen 4 SSD. While the winner put together the build in 37 minutes, the slowest of the five made it in just under the hour. They stated that the build was "stressful" and they never thought it could get so nerve-racking to put together a simple PC. Meanwhile, Neo Forza celebrated its unexpected claim to fame for being the memory vendor of choice among the finalists. "We were humbly overwhelmed as the event, inadvertently, showed Neo Forza as a preferred choice by experienced pro-users for DRAM and SSD in PC builds suitable for gaming, content-creation, streaming and 3D rendering," the company commented.
32 Comments on Can You Build an Operable PC in 37 Minutes? The Neo Forza & Newegg PC Building Event Winner Just Did
but pc building is kinda therapeutic for me, so i wanna take my time
im sure Linus Media Group sees this and they will do a video about this challenge
That's assuming no operating system had to be installed.
This kind of stuff typically tunes your salespeople to aim towards more easy to assemble case recommendations. There's actually a lot of dynamics that go into making sure 15-20 customers get their DIY type computers every day per 1 assembly technitian. Maybe sometimes in the future it would be worth exapanding on it.
This was all, of course, considering no DOA's
But I guess its also what you get done, I think in the end you being done in 32 minutes gets less praise then someone doing it in 34 minutes but with neat cable management etc. ^ agreed
I don't really build PCs often and I usually take my sweet time with it and ofc I always run into an issue or two along the way. 'I think moving my system to my current case from my old one took my entire afternoon'
Let's just say I take my time. :D
Otherwise, yes, these days you get a CPU+IGP combo, throw in some RAM, screw in the NVMe SSD and the hardest part is connecting the power, reset, speaker and HDD led, if they are of the old design, where you have to connect them individually.
I can confirm that under no particular time constraints I do, roughly once a month, in one afternoon:
- unbox components,
- assemble 6-8 ATX PCs,
- cable-manage them
- configure BIOS options
- Boot into Macrium Technician suite to image them
- Domain-join and post-sysprep scripts
- Put it onto the "ready to go" shelf.
They're not complex builds thanks to M.2 and modular PSUs but 15 minutes is the absolute maximum it takes to assemble and screw it together and that's not even rushing. The overwhelming majority of the time is dealing with all the wasteful packaging.37 minutes with cable management while using AIOs or air coolers is doable, but I don't know how you could do you custom hardline water cooling in 37 minutes or less given how long it takes to produce one bend even when you're very practiced. Even if you're using straight pipes and fittings only, you still need to cut/finish the pipes and install the fittings and hope to hell you don't have a leak prior to actually booting it.
Also, I can't help but feel like this "contest" was just PR for Neo Forza. At least reading the article makes me feel this way.