Your obvious rival here is PCPartPicker. Having used that extensively, here's some things I don't like about yours:<p>Expert mode removes compatibility checks. This shouldn't be the case - as soon as I select an item, it should cull the results and show me only the intersection of items that are now compatible with my chosen piece of hardware.<p>The lack of an ability to filter. Maybe I want to splurge more on a graphics card, but I need one that has at least 4 mini-display port outputs to drive my monitors. Right now there doesn't seem to be a way to say "show me only gpus that are nvidia, above $500, and can drive at least 4 monitors".<p>One of the biggest things for me: lack of reviews. You have a pangoly score. That's great and all, but you're a brand I don't (yet) trust. If I'm buying a component that costs multiple hundreds of dollars, I want more than a single score from a company I haven't heard of. I want to know what the reliability is like, and I want to hear it from people who have had hands on experience with it. I want to know how loud the fans are, what temperature it runs at passively and actively, etc.<p>Visually your site is really nice, but your expert mode leaves a lot to be desired, and I think you have a ways to go before you catch up with the competition. If I were you I would try and find your niche - either target users who are switching over from console gaming, and want to build their first computer, or build out a bunch of more expert features and target regular hobbyists.
Beautiful execution and a well-done site. Nice visual choices and a good responsive layout. Great example of waiting until a product has some polish before a Show HN.<p>Yesterday, Forbes did an article[1] about how console gamers are moving towards PC.<p>I think you could really knock it out of the park if you capitalized on that trend and added a portion of your site for folks looking to migrate. Something that shows how specs from different sets of cheaper hardware could mimic and beat the console they may be trying to migrate from. Perhaps something with a bit more of an educational front to it.<p>You could even go as far as video demonstrations showing how the performance of a $400.00 PC from your service could rival or beat a console.<p>There's a big trend/meme on the Internet right now regarding the "PC Master Race"[2] that I think you could explore for some inspiration, if you haven't. The trend started a few years ago[3] but has started to pick up more and more.<p>You may even find some great success with a section specifically for building customized, beautiful "Steam Boxes"[4] that are starting to appear more and more in living rooms in place of consoles.<p>[1] - <a href="http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2014/07/14/the-console-war-is-over-the-pc-already-won/" rel="nofollow">http://www.forbes.com/sites/marcochiappetta/2014/07/14/the-c...</a><p>[2] - <a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/pcmasterrace/</a><p>[3] - <a href="http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-glorious-pc-gaming-master-race" rel="nofollow">http://knowyourmeme.com/memes/the-glorious-pc-gaming-master-...</a><p>[4] - <a href="http://gizmodo.com/13-steam-boxes-ranked-1496078448" rel="nofollow">http://gizmodo.com/13-steam-boxes-ranked-1496078448</a>
Thanks!
I'm the owner, so here's a brief overview of the available features:<p><pre><code> - Build configuration starting from user's preferred budget. The suggested components are always safe to be used in the same build and it's also possible to add optional parts like peripherals.
- Automatic build creation starting from user's preferred component.
- Sharing: once the build is completed it's possible to share it on the most popular social networks (Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, Reddit), on forums (BBCode) o by Email.
- Build guidelines: for every component type we provide general guidelines and best practices for the picking, also suggesting the highest rated products currently available on the market.
- Product reviews: our rating, pros and cons, q&a, price history, suggested PC builds for the selected component and compatibility.
- Price analysis and trends.
- Multilanguage and multicurrency.
- Responsive design: the website provides an optimal viewing experience on all devices (desktops, tablets and smartphones).</code></pre>
Cool! Some humble UI suggestions:<p>- I don't really need to see big pictures of everything (except the case and peripherals). It's kind of visually noisy, and it doesn't help me make any decisions. Maybe just a small thumbnail would suffice.<p>- It'd be nice to be able to instantly visually compare the most important traits of each component. For example, for SSDs, I'd like to see Price, Size, and Speed. If you just had a bar for each of those things, I'd be able to instantly see the tradeoffs I'm making. The hover-over info is nice too, it's good to see if I'm trading price for durability, or some other less common metric. Maybe this kind of info could replace the big images?
When I build a PC, the number one feature I want is ECC memory. It can be tricky to find a non-server configuration that supports it (you historically need a "good" bios that is smart enough to enable it for AMD, and you typically need a Xeon flavor CPU + workstation level board for Intel; caveat, it has been 2.5 years since my last build).<p>I was hoping that this tool might make finding non-server parts that support ECC easier, but alas, that does not seem to be the case.
Here's some advice:<p>I can never remember any details regarding the Intel chipsets. Is a given CPU a Haswell processor? Ivy bridge? Should I wait for Broadwell? Am I misremembering code words entirely? I would love it if this site helped me figure out which chipset I'll be getting, in case I care.
I really like it but I think it can be simplified. At least the original presentation of options. e.g.<p>* The names Advanced and Pro are too similar.<p>* "For AMD lovers, a cheaper alternative of the Gamer configuration" OK, but then this could be folded into the Gamer configuration as an alternate flavour.<p>Can you get this down to three or four options and move the rest to the expert users section?
Seems like there's a good mid-ground between pre-configured systems and expert mode. A mode which offers some alerts for silly mistakes (or prevents them from being made in the first place) would be nice. i.e. an Intel chip paired with an AMD socketed motherboard.
Why can't you perform compatibility checks on hardware in free build mode? That would take so much headache out of the composing, and be an awesome middle ground between the prebuilt ones and the completely free builder.
I like how polished this site is. It would be a good companion to this parts recommendation guide: <a href="http://www.logicalincrements.com/" rel="nofollow">http://www.logicalincrements.com/</a><p>However, I disagree that a "Pro" build is necessary for software development, as suggested by the description. I've gotten by writing software on a netbook.
Nice. One comment - I think it's not always showing the 'best' options in the initial 3.<p>e.g.<p>1 - Select Advanced<p>2 - the two processor options shown are (+11% cost, +13% perf) and (+7% cost, +3%perf). If I expand "more options", I can see a (+9 %cost, +16%perf) in there which is preumably superior to either of the two shown.<p>But this <i>is</i> awesome - please keep it going and improving it :-)
Although i'm unsure of the legality, you might want to add hackintosh/OSX86 setups in there as well, matching the right hardware combos is a big part of getting it all setup and the latest configs change often
While it's pretty, the site doesn't allow for much in the way of customizing one's criteria. Or it's very non-obvious on how to do so. For example, I might want a gaming system with a apx $150 video card rather than a $200 to $300 one. Perhaps I have hard drives already and don't need a new one. Why the rather pricey power supplies? The CPU choices are limited and don't reflect current options. What about cooling options? Why the limited case choices? etc, etc, etc.
Reminds me of Ars System Guides<p>I haven't read in a while but they're still doing them:<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/ars-technica-system-guide-bargain-box-april-2014/" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/2014/04/ars-technica-system-g...</a><p>they have decent forums too<p><a href="http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewforum.php?f=8" rel="nofollow">http://arstechnica.com/civis/viewforum.php?f=8</a><p>A hackintosh section would be good. The one I used to build mine years ago is gone..
So the business model is based on piping customers to amazon ? thats neat, however i found that amazon germany lacks the diversity that many of the big online hardware retailers have around here.
Is it only stuff that amazon sells or also marketplace ?
It seems like a beautiful tool, however not having options to pick components I have a strong preference for such as Hitachi hard drives, and Silverstone cases for instance means I can't use it to build systems I might actually want to build ever.<p>I agree with other comments that if you want it to appeal to hobbyists you need a pretty massive build out of options.
Looks great so far!<p>Any thoughts into a comparison tool?<p>I have a PC that was pretty powerful when I built it, but has aged (5-6 years old now).<p>I'd love to find a way to easily compare my current system to these ones. For instance, the 'AMDicted' sounds good, but I can't easily tell if it's an upgrade from my current rig or not.
It really needs a section for "Operating System". Windows isn't free, and most build-your-owns will be a Windows machine. Other appropriate options should be available (linux/bsd/etc) along with a 'no OS' options, for people who might already have a free license.
This tool looks fantastic.<p>I recently put together a couple of machines from parts, and having not done so for many years, found it extremely difficult to do so. A tool like this, that could highlight compatible CPUs, motherboards and so on, would have been very helpful!<p>A few (highly specific) features that would be useful:<p>* For the cheaper machines, there are some very good value case/PSU combos on Amazon (and elsewhere). It would be great to include these in the list of components. I know bargain-basement PSUs have a reputation for being poor quality, but there are reliabile ones out there (I ended up buying three different cheap case+CPUs and they have all been perfect under high load)<p>* I found it extremely hard to discover which CPUs came with their own heatsink+fan. Any way to clarify this would be very useful.
One thing that bugs me at first glance is that after I pick a preset denoted with a "starting price", when it gets to the next page with the component breakdown the starting price is $100-300 higher.
I really really hate browsing shops and reviews and manufacturer sites and all that, trying to find the build I want.. so a website to help with that would be nice. Unfortunately this is not it. The selection is not there, and it doesn't really allow me to set any criteria (without which I could buy anything and there'd be no problem to solve). The site also fails to provide an easy-to-glance overview of the differences between alternatives.
I pretty much bounce between newegg and tigerdirect when building a machine. Once you have a case and motherboard, everything falls into place based on my budget.<p>I'm looking to start a new build soon. This case is speaking to me.<p><a href="http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-details.asp?EdpNo=9113957&Sku=C69-0008" rel="nofollow">http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...</a>
The hardest part for me about building a pc is making sure I get the proper RAM config, and this doesn't seem to help much. I want LOTS of ram (32gb), so let me pick a motherboard with 4 slots easily, and then make sure the selections have to be compatible. Same sort of issue with a video card. I want dual DVI for output to 2 monitors, that is more important than speed for me.
I wish somebody would make a similar web tool for the power users. I spend at least few days every few years browsing countless sites and forums trying to choose an optimal build when upgrading my desktop. It should satisfy at least these requirements:<p>1) include most of available parts, not just few trendy ones (in this site I got only 8 motherboards and 6 CPU's for AMD)<p>2) do price/performance analysis on fly (with referenced to sources) and unobtrusively show better candidates on this aspect in the same price range<p>3) show small summary on parts when clicked: exhaustive specifications, release date, current price (depending on region), available newer versions or successors (if any)<p>4) no ugly tablet orientated design with big pictures (and why would I care how my RAM looks like anyway?), but clean, slim list with advanced details. This site looks super ugly on my 22", full HD monitor.<p>I understand that the biggest problem is to maintain up-to-date database, but I would even pay few bucks to use such tool to save my time.
This is awesome. I remember building my first computer at 12 years old. :) A nice fat gaming rig with dual boot to Linux. My parents bought it for me after I got all "E's for effort!"<p>At the time all I had to go by was a "how to build your own computer" book. I would have loved something like this.
Hello<p>I haven't used pcpartpicker, but went to have a quick look compared to yours. I can see a lot of work has gone into it. I like that you don't have to navigate away from the page.<p>1) Images are bit big
2) At first I struggled finding the divisions of parts. Maybe close all accordions except the first. This way it might feel more like steps. Currently all "steps" are open and options seem endless as its a page full of objects. Remember when scanning over a page, we basically first see a sillhoutte of major objects.
3) Maybe number accordions, so seems more like steps 1) Motherboard 2) CPU
4) Show important information without any action require by the user. Example some of the CPU's cannot immediately identify the Speed without reading the whole title.<p>Well done. Hopefully you see comments not as negative but constructive.<p>All of the best forwards
I like it a lot, but it would be cool to hear some of the technical details. Such as:<p>- Technology stack?<p>- How do you keep product pricing up-to-date? Do you have a persistent process that iterates over your known product list, querying Amazon's Product Advertising API (staying within rate limits)? If that's the case would love to hear more details on language and libraries used as I'm working on something similar.<p>- How do you discover new products to list?<p>- What storage backend do you use to store historic pricing data? Regular relational database or something more exotic like InfluxDB?<p>- Any plans on introducing new retailers besides Amazon? If so, how will you correlate products into canonical listings if the product does not have UPC information?<p>Things like that.
I found myself looking for a 'upgrade your shiny old PC' section...<p>Site is appealing, but would be more useful if you could put in everything you already have, then look at which piece/pieces could be upgraded, with $/wattage/performance changes...
Very nice.<p>I'm sure I'm not alone in having kicked around ideas for something like this for a long time.<p>Comparing PC builds has been an informal competition / game on various forums for many years.<p>I expect having more in the way of features to share, compare and feature/track builds could be very popular.<p>There are people who take great pride in meticulous builds. Giving them a platform to share their work would be great.<p>Likewise, have a look at any 'Lets Play' vid on YouTube or whatever and you'll see dozens of questions about the configuration that produced the video.<p>Hooking up with a popular 'caster such that they link to 'their' builds on Pangoly could be a great source of traffic.<p>Looking forward to seeing how this pans out.
This is really cool -- now when people ask me how hard it is to build their own PC I can show them this site... Usually my answer is "it's just as easy as picking the right things, and putting round pegs into round holes"
Does anyone else remember Geek.com's value/mid/high end gaming PC build articles? Each month they'd revise each setup and I always used it as a guide when building or costing machines.<p>I tried to find them this morning, but didn't have luck. Did they ditch this feature?<p>Edit: What I liked about the feature is that despite being a "tech" and having built several PC's in the past, I can no longer keep current with hardware developments. The Geek.com guides allowed me to jump right in, without a weekend of research to get up to speed on the latest CPU's, GPU's and various hardware components.
First of all, what is that shiny gold motherboard [0] on the front page? Secondly, I recommend that you add Amazon reviews as another feature - just like price and performance. Also, I think you should add in some kind of metric for mice and keyboards - # of buttons, DPI, activation weight, etc. Finally, I really like the UI of your site. Although it may not be as feature-rich as some competitors, it seems many HNers have forgotten the importance of a good design.<p>[0] <a href="http://pangoly.com/images/main-mb1.png" rel="nofollow">http://pangoly.com/images/main-mb1.png</a>
Suggestion: on the starting page, the "Highlights" for each starting configuration include both technical details ("AMD APU A6/A8 Series Dual/Quad Core") and a blurb describing what this configuration is good for ("Ideal for browsing the Internet, watching movies and chatting"). Furthermore, the latter always comes last on the list. I think that the blurb should come first, and that it shouldn't be part of the "checklist", but should rather be in highlighted near the top somewhere (maybe above or below the price).
Love the idea. A maybe tangential question for you or sites like yours...<p>So this might be all "tyranny of choice". But what is the difference between certain parts? Like if there are two motherboards and both of them cost ballpark $200 and support the same mainstream inputs/components, how do I know which one to choose?<p>It's moments like those that paralyze me from taking advantage of these services. Or why I like buying Apple where I don't really have a choice (implicit to the fact that I don't care which motherboard I'm getting other than Apple-curated).
This teaches a very good lesson I'll never forget. I have to invest more of my idle time on my side projects. I bought a domain to do this but never got around to finish it. Wonderful execution. Kudos.
Maybe it's just me, but I don't really care how my motherboard looks like. Means: I don't need to see those product photos, they could make space for more important information.
This is perfectly timed (for me) as I plan to build a gaming computer soon. I've lived off a laptop and an older desktop for a bunch of years but have money sitting saved for a new desktop.<p>Overall, I really like the site rating and the rational pros/cons between the different options.<p>The description of the AMD gamer computer made me realize there were more options than three, I didn't intuitively realize I could scroll down for more computer builds at first. That is probably more a me problem than a mass problem, however.
I would like to offer some critical feedback. I just took a look at PcPartPicker and it seems so much better.<p>On my monitor I can see at most 9 components at a time on your site. On PcPartPicker its about 28. I don't see the images serving any purpose. Why should I look at an image of the processor's box? What information does it give me?<p>I also recommend the book Visual Display of Quantitative Information. It's in the YC library and its fantastic.
I'd prefer to be able to have motherboards suggestions based on requested features. Like, so many USB ports, SATA ports and this socket for AMD CPU.
I first hit this on mobile and it was just about unusable. I couldn't find out how to switch over to the desktop version and had to wait until I was at a desktop to take a look.<p>Other than the mobile issues, it's a nice idea and pretty clean looking site. I'd reduce the images in size, especially the gigantic brand logos scrolling across the bottom. Make it more of a dashboard and less like a slideshow.
In the UK there has existed for several years something almost exactly like this in the form of [PC Specialist][0]. Well worth checking out and in my experience more pleasant to interact with than this website (a simpler interface, without all the unnecessarily huge images and so on).<p>[0]: <a href="http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/" rel="nofollow">http://www.pcspecialist.co.uk/</a>
It would be nice if after configuring a pc, I could just copy the URL and send it to someone and have it display the pc I had configured.<p>Still, cool site!
Ditch the notices/warnings. Eg:<p><pre><code> > Don't worry about hardware compatibility, the following components are safe to be used in the same PC build.
</code></pre>
It looks like an error, which it isn't. Instead, convey this in the UI--eg a small "100% compatible" / "compatibility guarantee" badge next to each product.
The most daunting part of building a custom computer is usually validation of the component quality and, more importantly, how they'll wind up working together.<p>A rating / review of component selection by power-users is all that's missing here for me.<p>Beyond that this is brilliant and simple - I'm surprised that NewEgg doesn't offer something like this.
I find it unfortunate that I can't completely remove the graphics card from the mid-range system, and I'm not allowed to select a SSD for it either. If I could do those things I would be able to compare this site directly to the PC I built yesterday.<p>Also I notice that you're missing estimated tax, shipping, and a Windows license from the price.
#1 Almost all games are created by PC, and port to console, not the other way around.<p>#2 Almost all games can play on PC, maybe just with lower setting.<p>#3 PC games are for people who like to discover => example how someone found out how to enable watch dog's E3 graph setting. But you have no control over console.<p>#4 Almost all console games are created by Pc, oh wait.
Feature request: I want to buy a new gaming machine but the sticker shock is a little much right now. Is it possible to save my configuration and get price alerts when a component goes on sale? Bonus points: could I configure multiple acceptable components and get an alert when any of those products goes on sale?
It's cool :-) I've also been working on a similar project [0]. A side project, started around an year ago. Initially it was focused primarily on Indian users, now, I'm adding support for other currencies as well.<p>[0] <a href="http://assembleyourpc.net" rel="nofollow">http://assembleyourpc.net</a>
The site looks great, but the "Learn" section is badly in need of some copy editing. Subject/verb pluralization disagreement and odd grammatical structure (to a native English speaker, many of the sentences sound awkward) are the biggest issues.
I've been looking for a site like this for a while. The only issue I had was picking the $605 configuration and wanting 16 gig of memory and blue ray. What you initially choose sometimes limits capacity later, though not with hard drives.
Really neat! I'd like to see something where I could say "I want 32GB of RAM" and that would constrain my motherboard choices, for example. I could also see the same kind of thing working with power supplies and video cards.
Accessories should be part of the options. You need cables for example to connect the HDs to the MB, DVI adapters for older monitors, etc. Some people may have a spare one, while others will have to make an additional trip to the store.
Nice site! Some suggestions:<p>* Allow users to specify a form factor (like HTPC, μATX, mini ATX, ATX, ...) and filter components like mainboard and case by this.<p>* Allow users to use a different Amazon site for pricing info (.de/.fr would be nice for me personally)
How does this compare to pcpartpicker? I don't see any option to use euros as the currency without getting an italian user interface. Are the prices at all localized, if so, do you have plans to support any other countries?
Incase you were unaware, these guys (<a href="http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc" rel="nofollow">http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc</a>) _are_ your target audience. And your main competitor is pcpartpicker
Looks great, but I spent forever trying to figure out why clicking the tiles didn't do anything.
I finally found that <i>touching</i> the tiles works.<p>I'm on a windows 8 touchscreen laptop, running the latest version of chrome.
Why no info on multi-processor systems? Google provides their chrome engineers with 16 core, 64gig systems. Dreamworks provides even larger machines. So anything labeled "Expert" seems to need better options
I would really like to to tweak the price. I.E. get a suggestion what i could get for 50 pounds more. Also I can't figure out how to select "none" for components. I.e. Most people already have a case.
I like the design, but I would like a better overview when picking motherboards. Perhaps include number of PCI-E slots, number of USB slots, type of audio built in, type of video built in, that sort of thing.
I think the only thing missing here are the CPU coolers. Edit: Nevermind, found them. :)<p>Otherwise it looks like a cool way to pick a build, especially since it's been so long since I have looked into building a desktop.
Tangential offshoot topic: So for my soon to arrive Oculus Rift, what's the cheapest PC I can build with this site? Could i start with the cheapest option and just add a beefy graphics card?
Not enough choices in my opinion. If it were to implement close to the amount of hardware choices as PCPartPicker then it would be very practical. The site layout and design is very nice though.
This is really cool. Two things I find vital when I'm shopping for components are reviews and brands. It'd be nice to filter based on Newegg reviews or select a certain set of brands.
Wow, it's been so long since I've built a desktop I had to look up APU. (a CPU that does more than just central processing, possible a GPU on the same chip)
This is really really awesome and I'm gonna need something like this in the coming months. Only bad thing is that I need the price in € as I live in France.
Not sure if it would be possible to add the price for a similar configured PC from the major pc vendor sites like HP, Lenovo,Dell etc for comparison purposes.
Nice work, really like the UI, much simpler to use than other tools.<p>It'd be nice if you could add some mini-itx options for HPTC and/or Steam Machine.
This looks really cool.<p>I haven't built my own PC for a number of years and probably wouldn't consider it any more to be honest (MacBook FTW). I will however recommend this to anyone who does ask me about self-builds :)
Am about to buy/build PC right now. It will be a six-core socket 2011 CPU with a couple of 780s. All the CPUs are little 1150s. Guess I'm not your target audience?