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Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

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Re: Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

#43

Post by mindslight »

pling wrote: post #11

This looks really cool. 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 :)

Modern laptops have been adequate for most tasks for quite some time (T61 ftw, personally). On the other hand, if you are CPU/GPU/RAM limited (eg rendering..), then you will still greatly benefit from the additional power a desktop build will bring. And it's refreshing to see the continuing progress of stats, while laptops have seemingly stagnated (6 cores and 64GiB RAM? Nifty!).

OP, I think you have a ways to go to match the utility of pcpartpicker. But if you want a possible leg-up on them, then look into supporting workstation builds with Xeon/Cxxx/ECC (they don't really cost more than comparable "consumer" builds, and if you value stability more than overclocking, they make a lot of sense). Niches can be powerful.

Re: Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

#44

Post by buckbova »

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.

I'm looking to start a new build soon. This case is speaking to me.

http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

Re: Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

#45

Post by lifeformed »

Cool! Some humble UI suggestions:

- 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.

- 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?

Re: Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

#46

Post by jbert »

Nice. One comment - I think it's not always showing the 'best' options in the initial 3.

e.g.

1 - Select Advanced

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.

But this is awesome - please keep it going and improving it :-)

Re: Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

#47

Post by warfangle »

SandB0x wrote: post #37

I really like it but I think it can be simplified. At least the original presentation of options. e.g. * The names Advanced and Pro are too similar. * "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. Can you get this down to three or four options and move the rest to the expert users section?

Agreed.

It would be nice if for each tier there were an Intel option and an AMD option ... and an ATi and nVidia option.

Re: Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

#48

Post by aresant »

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.

A rating / review of component selection by power-users is all that's missing here for me.

Beyond that this is brilliant and simple - I'm surprised that NewEgg doesn't offer something like this.

Re: Show HN: Pangoly – Build your shiny new PC

#49

Post by doorhammer »

buckbova wrote: post #44

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. I'm looking to start a new build soon. This case is speaking to me. http://www.tigerdirect.com/applications/SearchTools/item-det...

Have you tried http://pcpartpicker.com/ ?

I used it for my last build. You can select a variety of different vendors, browse parts compare prices, etc. It does a pretty good job doing the compatibility checks for you as well (I can do them myself, but my heart just wasn't in it this time, so it was handy).

I basically assembled my build with pcpartpicker, selected newegg, amazon and microcenter, then bundled it all up and ordered it. The microcenter one was neat because they actually found the processor I wanted at a local microcenter, for in store pickup, at a hundred bucks cheaper than anywhere else (not a technically crazy hurdle, but really convenient and pleasantly surprising).

Wondering how it compares to the site linked (I haven't looked through it yet; they could be totally different, but I'm going to check it out in a sec)

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