| What would you say is the biggest "bottleneck" for the site right now? Thanks for all that you do. | Like code-wise? It's kinda spread out right now balanced across things. Every time traffic doubles, something architecturally breaks. I think next to break would be our cache infrastructure, then the number of db queries we make. But we survived Black Friday and Cyber Monday, so architecturally we're probably fine until next year. |
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| out of curiousity how hard is it to redesign these things when they break? | Depends on what it is. First version of the site ran everything on a $20/mo single 256MB RAM instance. Then we had a traffic spike the same time processing a large Newegg catalog and it ran out of RAM. Just paid more money for a 768MB RAM instance which bought me another year. Then that migrated to a separate db from frontend. Then separate offline task/feed processing. Usually you see the issues cropping up months before they break, so you have time to prepare. Our current pricing architecture was years worth of work and iteration though. |
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| How much of this did you learn on the job? Or were you already proficient in designing scalable systems before starting PCPP? | There are a lot of articles that talk through different sites and their architectures. Those often provide some good info on why they chose what they did, what broke, how they fixed it, etc. For smaller stuff like ours there are pretty standard patterns. Eventually you'll hit a point where some aspect of that starts to fall behind. That's when you can adjust your setup to your particular performance needs. So I guess what I'd say is it has been a mix of reading how larger players do it, and then using that to guide our architecture. |
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| What arch are you using? AWS? Azure? Other? | AWS |
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| I'm assuming you're the AWS Arch, SysOp, Dev? | Yep. |
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| Very nice. How long have you been doing AWS? | About five years I think? It's not the cheapest but it's been great for us. |
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| The resource costs more, but you save in not having to have more people on staff to support it. Did you switch from On site? Datacenter? | We were at a different (smaller) cloud provider. Before when that provider would go down, people would harass on twitter telling us to fix our stuff. Now when AWS goes down, half the internet goes down with it so people blame AWS and not us. That's been kinda nice lol. |
| How formal is the required attire at The Eggies? | Hahahahaha. I'll never forget what you told me - that everyone probably thought I worked for intel because I wore a suit. The card said evening/cocktail attire! That event was an interesting experience. |
| What has been the weirdest PC you have seen in your life? | There was a guy who brought a grill PC to QuakeCon several years ago. As in, grill on wheels. Flip open the grill and the monitor was on the top half, and the components were in the bottom half. That thing was so awesome. |
| I think it might be this | Yes! That's it! |
| Can you guys add the NZXT H1 to your cases? | We hope to soon. We need to incorporate some modeling for cases so that we can list them with integrated cooling first. |
| What are your thoughts on things like Stadia and online/cloud work environments where having high-end computer parts don't matter as much as a solid internet connection? Do you see the relevance of PCPartPicker waning in the near future or do you think building PCs will still be a thing a generation or two down the line? | I'm not too worried about it to be honest. If it becomes prevalent, that's ok. I think there will always be a DIY side of things even if latencies reduce enough to make cloud setups viable. |
| Hi Phillip, about 8ish years ago I was learning how to code web applications and was a total noob. I sent you an email with beginner questions and you answered. Just want to call out how much of an impact that made as now I’m a Staff Software Engineer at a tech company. | That's awesome! Congrats! |
| What's your favorite cheese? | Eh, maybe Parmigiano Reggiano? |
| Do you sometimes get items to review/test or to thank you for your website? | When we were filming content for youtube we'd get stuff to review/test. But we never really pushed hard for it. Some manufacturers would let you keep the stuff, others would ask you to send it back. I think if we had started doing product reviews we could have opened up the review sample floodgates but we never went there. |
| Do you use PCPartPicker yourself to pcpick parts? | Yes. |
| ? | Correct - all the components are entered manually. There's a team of people who do that, and I do very few these days (mostly the CPUs). We don't scrape for that data but we have some tools/dashboards to make it a bit easier. |
| Umm hi Pc Part Picker, I'm a huge fan! When I watched some yt vids on pc building back in the day, I was lead to your site where I discovered a platform to share lots of cool builds and ask questions to others when I was making mine. While this has been said before I'll say it again, your site has been massively helpful and had been a cornerstone in the pc gaming community because of how good of a resource it is, so thank you so much. So anyway... 1. Who chooses which builds get featured? I love hopping on and seeing what creative things people do with their builds. Is there an upvote criteria for it/do some just get recommended? 2. What got you into custom PCs and gaming? It'd be super cool to hear your story and what got you to make this site in the first place. ty! | Alex already mentioned #1 - Ryan picks. (I'll also second the good photos. For me great photos of a good build will win out over bad photos of an epic build.) |
| 2) - Growing up the last family computer we had was a commodore 64. The IBM PCs and clones were too expensive. Later after my brothers went to college I'd borrow my dad's work laptop to play warcraft 2 over a serial cable with friends. My first PC was scraped together as cheap as I absolutely could because I didn't have a lot of money. I think my first build was ~$350 minus OS but including monitor (bought for $100 at an auction) and a bunch of secondhand parts. I upgraded that PC to a Celeron 300A running 450MHz my junior year in college and it was so stupid fast for me. But that too was a budget upgrade at the time. I ran that build for another 4 years I think? By that time I was out of college with a full-time job, so I had a bit more discretionary income to spend on PC stuff. So long story short, custom PCs for me started out of budget necessity. Later when I had more money it shifted to being able to get exactly what I wanted. |
| What's your stance on RGB? | My kids love it. I like it if it's subtle and not distracting. |
| What’s one feature most people don’t know about/use? I’ve only ever used pcpp a couple times, but I’d love to get more familiar with it! | Probably parametric selections. |
| ok, so first of all, thank you so much for this service. Without it, I would have been lost on my first PC. Secondly, the question. What were the specs of your first build? | AMD K5-133. 80MB hard drive. I think it had 2MB RAM, but I can't remember. |
| Idk if this has already been asked and answered, but did your ever expect it to become so widespread and popular? | Not even close. I thought if I was lucky it'd make enough for my wife and I to go get coffee. I had planned to work on it for about a year, learn Python and Django, and then move on to something else. |
| No questions at this time - I just wanted to use this as an opportunity to thank you for contributing to KBMOD's Extra-Life campaign over the years. Literally, tens of thousands of dollars, all of which you didn't have to donate. What Extra-Life does for kids is great, and you are a big part of that. Thank you. :) | KBMOD was one of the first groups that started using the site. They had me on their podcast waaaay back. I had a newborn who barely slept so I did that interview in my car parked in my garage. They're great guys, and I'm more than happy to contribute to what they've done for Extra Life. |
| Have you ever thought about stopping work and stepping down from owner of PCPP? If so why? | Like if I could retire? Selfishly and honestly, yeah, all the time. I don't because I feel like PCPP is only about 10% of what I want it to be (feature/functionality-wise). Too much unfinished stuff. |
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| You have done me and my friends countless benefits with this tool. We definitely take it for granted and I give you my gratitude. Your compatibility notes have saved me more times than I’d like to admit! Anyways, here are my questions. 1. If you could travel back in time to 2010, and give yourself advice for the future, what would it be? | 1) - great question. Had to think about it for a bit. Mostly I wouldn't say anything at all, because my naivety early on kinda helped? There were some problems we'd have to solve later that I didn't really know how hard they were when I first started. Had I known (like how terrible most retailer price data quality is) I may not have ever tried to do it? |
| One of the things that was really hard for me the first several years was the emotional roller coaster. When I left my job to work on it full time, it was a heavy weight of responsibility. What happens if it fails? What happens if I screw up royally? The highs were higher and the lows were lower. And I could go from the highest high one day (just got mentioned on website X or Y) to the lowest low the next day (retailer Z cut commissions by a factor of 4, or a new competitor popped up cloning all our features and data but with better UI). The emotional swings were really hard to deal with. Over time I've learned to temper that, so the bad days aren't as bad and the great days are good. I'd tell myself that when it gets a little crazy to just take a breath, slow down, and take it all one bit at a time. |
| 2. Have you ever thought of expanding beyond computer hardware and doing something else? For example, another program. Have a great day! | 2). We've looked at other niches. We launched a cycling site similar to PCPP. We learned a lot along the way but unfortunately it just didn't work out. The concept might be viable in other niches, but it's not something we're going to consider pursuing for at least another year. |
| Are there brands who tried to pay you guys for higher rankings? | Yes. But we don't do that. I guess it's pretty common other places because we get asked for that a lot. Essentially paid placements or people wanting to pay to win the buy box price - which we don't do. |
| Thanks for all the hard work! Could you expand on the issues you faced when trying to make MTB part picker work? Remember the project being unfeasible and closed but would really love to hear you talk more about it. Is MTB another one of your personal hobbies? | Our cycling site was pretty hard to shut down. That one hurt. We ran into a couple things: people build new PCs ground up every few years. Bikes on the other hand are usually bought pre-built and are rarely ground-up builds. PCs are economically viable to build ground up, where bikes aren't unless you're $5K+. And at that price point, you're probably buying from a local bike shop you've got a relationship at rather than our site. So most of our traffic/sales were cockpit or weatear oriented. Lots of tires. Data entry for compatibility for full bike builds was really expensive because it needed really intense domain specific knowledge. So the site basically wasn't profitable where it was actually referring sales. |
| I'm not a MTB guy, but I do enjoy bikes. I don't ride that much though. I converted an old hybrid to a 1x drop bar setup for commuting to the office, so I'm super excited to be able to ride that once COVID goes away. |
| What was the hardest part? | Work-life balance. |
| First off, thank you so much for creating what has become an integral part of PC building for not just myself but for all my friends as well. I always tell anyone who is new to the PC scene to build their rig or check for compatibility using PCPartPicker! My questions is, I feel it's become second nature to me and so many others to check the price history as well as set alerts for any potential components that do go on sale in the future. PCPartPicker is an awesome site to do this on but I feel like there could be more to it. For one a PcPartPicker mobile app would be awesome along with notifications of sales on components one wishes to be alerted on. Are there any plans to do bring an app to the market or maybe even go further with price alerts for components that users want to be instantly notified on? | We hope to launch a PWA version later this month that will support push notification price alerts (on platforms that support it). |
| Hello pcpartpicker love your website, you are a god among men. Question: How fast does your crawler work? In an era like now where RTX 3000 series and Ryzen 5000, Radeon 6000 disappear in an instant, do you think your crawler could be fast enough to "catch" and display stock before they get sold out? | We can run very fast - < 10min latency on full product catalog updates, or < 1min latency on select product sets.... if we had that kind of availability from retailers. Only one offers that though. The rest have data feeds with latencies too high to use for catching GPU stock right now. (If you watch closely enough, you'll find that even retailers have caching latencies between product pages and product category pages. The category page pricing can be out of sync with the product page pricing. If they can't get it the same on their own site there isn't a chance we'll get better latency from their feed.) |
| What is the future of PcPatpicker? I know you added Cycling Builder but that seems to be discontinued. Are you planning on expanding into any more fields similar to Cycling or was that a one-off thing? | For now we're going to focus solely on PC. We learned a lot trying to launch Cycling Builder. I don't plan on going after other niche markets for a while, if at all. |
| Hey Philip and team! Two questions: 1. How do you handle low quality data/data integrity issues from your partners? For example duplicate listings made by marketplace sellers on Amazon 2. Would it be possible to add RGB compatibility to cases and related components, or would that be hell? I think it might be helpful for me builders to know that their Asus Mobo isn't going to support their MSI RGB controller, for example. :) Thank you!! | We generally only list the buy box winner. In the past we've had to do some validation on marketplace sellers that would show low base price but exorbitant shipping. But Amazon seems to have filtered that out a lot more than what we were seeing 5-6 years ago. |
| Do you have the hammock up at the new office? Serious aside, big congrats on yout progress over the past decade. Its been great to see first hand how this community has evolved since you made pcpp your fulltime gig! | Thanks Jappetto. :) I had the hammock is up in the back of the office but Jack took it down to make room for the reno... :(. One day, one day. |
| I know this is such a small feature to ask for: but would you be willing to make the line on the price history graph “hold” and slidable for mobile users? For example, on my iPhone in safari, I can tap different points on the graph and prices pop up. But I can’t tap and hold the line on the graph and slide it left or right (with the idea being the prices would change dynamically with the hold and slide method). Regardless, I really enjoy your website and all the work your team has put into making it such a great tool for the pc building community. It’s the first place I send friends who are new to building and want to get an idea of what’s required. | Can look into this for sure. Probably a touch/drag event I'm not handling. |
| What was the most difficult technical challenge you faced? | We've since removed the feature, but doing lowest-price calculation on a part list with parametric part selections and combo deals was probably the hardest problem so far. The general algorithm itself isn't bad, but rather it's doing it hundreds of times a second across hundreds of thousands of prices, and getting an answer back in < 100ms for each. That was hard, but fun. |
| Have you considered cooperating with userbenchmark website? I liked to check my pc parts there before i purchased and they have sophisticated database, maybe some kind of collaboration could boost both websites, what do you think? | We're working toward sourcing our benchmark data internally where we can control every aspect of the process. |
| Hey, I have a question: Your price history software is probably the best implementation I've found so far, with specific retailers and the like (in comparison to say CamelCamelCamel which just shows Amazon and 3rd party), is there any possibility to expand this to maybe more tech related products? Maybe even a whole new site, because it's *really really good* | We could. We have the price tracking across retailers already. But it'd be a bit different of a site - just price comparison. It requires a bit different workload to populate that stuff. On the PC side, the data entry is pretty expensive because we model all the bits for compatibility. For general purpose price comparison though, it's more just aggregating pictures and random specs that don't have specific meaning. There are data sources for that available, but from what we've found the quality is really low. I'm not sure if that's something we'd want to do (listing stuff with spec data we don't source ourselves, and with filtering that wouldn't be as detailed). |
| Thanks you guys rock. Would love if there was a way to do rebates through pc partpicker, and letting you guys get a cut. Any chance you can add in bundle sales? Sound like that could be complicated but super useful. | We ran bundle sales listings for a few retailers for several years. We ended up removing them because they were often unreliable. One retailer even had bundle deals listed that were more expensive than the sum of the parts. It was a huge hassle both on the implementation and data quality side, so we ended up removing it. |
| PCPP, Jesus Christ, thank you so much. You helped me make my first build, and now my second one. You have helped so many people, and I hope you understand how much everyone cares about the resource. For my question, what was your first experience with technology? | Computer-wise my grandparents gave us a TRS-80 color computer growing up. Had minesweeper some submarine game can't remember the name on the cassette tape drive. Later we got a commodore 64. But I was more into audio than computers until I got to college. |
| Not sure if the AMA is over now or if this has already been asked. If so, no worries. Thanks for making pcpartpicker. Its been imparitive to pc gaming and pcs. But what are your hobbies and passion outside of computers and gaming? Do you have any other pet projects like pc part picker? And do you have any pets? | I love building stuff. Anything really, but electronics and lately 3d printing. Used to do a lot of woodworking but that stopped when I had kids (no time these days). Love swimming, and picked up running again when COVID hit. |
| Hey, thank you so much for what you do! Its really cool! If i had one thing to suggest, it would be to improve the estimated power consumptions as i've had some issues with that before But i'd love to ask -- what was the biggest hurdle you had to jump to set up your system? | The biggest hurdle was probably convincing retailers we were worth working with early on. When we were small no one knew who we were, and so when we'd ask if we could list them they only saw us as another price comparison site. |
| Might you have any plans to open source/license your part search engine for other hobby projects? I can think of several "assembled from standard components" type things that I really wished I could use PCPartPicker on. | We tried it out for cycling, but it didn't click like PC did. We've had suggestions for a number of other niches. The challenges are partially product modeling, and partially getting part numbers for everything. The latter is surprisingly hard. |
| Considering that the idea literally spawned from relevant work at the time, was there ever any intellectual rights issues? Was that ever a worry in your mind? Appreciate the work and due diligence with the AMA. | I talked with the company about it to confirm that there wouldn't be any overlap or competing interests. I had an appendix/page/whatever-the-name-is added to my employment agreement saying it was ok to work on it. |
| Replying again in this thread because the OP deserves it...my experience 7 years ago with him... https://www.reddit.com/buildapc/comments/17c031/big_thanks_to_this_sub_and_especially_to/ ...and now my son is studying computer science in college. I kinda like to think this helped...thanks Phillip, you are the MAN! | Awesome! I'm happy that we got to be a small part of that. |
| What are your thoughts on the shortage of hardware, bots, scalpers, ebay listings, and so forth? | It stinks. Everyone has different opinions on who should get their cards first. Or whether different approaches (scalping, scraping, etc) are ok or not. So personally I'm just sitting back while supply catches up and then I'll try and get a card once it all settles down. |
| What are your other hobbies aside from PC stuff? | I got my first filament 3d printer last year and absolutely love it. I love electronics in general so anything involving that. (For instance here's the beginning stages of a motorized minecraft chicken alarm clock for my son: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C15NKLbUFdo. I absolutely love tinkering on stuff like that.) |
| Regarding cases, I know we can sort by full/mid/itx etc., however I wanted to ask if there were plans to add dimension sorting, like by width. Is that just a lot harder to pull off? | We're really constrained width-wise on that category view and how many columns we can show. We could put it in there, but we'd have to drop other columns to make it work. |
| What is your favourite Christmas movie, and Christmas time food? | Elf. We watch it every year. My wife made me watch it every year after we got married, now we both make my kids watch it every year. |
| Not really Christmas food specifically but around Christmas time my wife makes a certain Chex mix that I love. That or the scones she makes. |
| Thanks for building a truly useful site with no extra crap. My question...What are some of your favorite retailers, and why? | I wish I could answer this. I've had some really great retail experiences - both with pre-sales help and super easy returns / RMA service. If I retire from this one day I'll be happy to say who those were from. |
| What’s your favorite console? | My kids really aren't that into consoles, so we don't have a PS4/5/Xbox here. Tried to get them into the Switch but they don't play that either. The last console I spent significant time on was a Panasonic 3DO that I won in a competition and had Street Fighter for. |
| Thank you for everything with that website. It's been a godsend as I build PCs for friends and friends of friends. I only have one question. Why doesn't Amazon appear in the price history graphs? | We only show price history for the retailers when we have permission to. |
| Thanks for helping me build my first PC this spring. If I have to ask a question... what's your favourite pizza? | Pepperoni from Via313 (Detroit style). manirelli is from Chicago so I'm sure he's a bit opinionated on this question. |
| Pcpartpicker but for bikes? I heard this almost happened. Im in the market for a new bike and a site like that sounds so awesome! | We launched a cycling site, ran it for roughly a year, and then decided to shut it down. It just didn't work out unfortunately. |
| How many times have you built your own PC? | For myself personally? Lots of little odd systems here and there for linux servers, experiments and whatnot, so probably a couple dozen. For work related stuff, both at my old job and via PCPP, several dozen more. |
| What do you think was the break trough point in your sites history. When did you really get things going? | I'd say the inflection point happened probably April 2011. That's the point where I realized that this might not be a side project after all. |
| Avid PCPartPicker user here. What are your plans for the future of PCPartPicker? | PWA version later this month, benchmarks and youtube content again next year. Those are the main things. Otherwise lots of small things here and there. |
| Thanks for the help for years! How do you guys feel about newegg attempting to implement pcpartpicker like software internally on their own website? | I figured it was inevitable, and I'm surprised it didn't happen sooner. |
| 1. Is it still coded using Django? 2. Any thoughts on making parts (heh) of it open source? | It's written mostly in Python and uses a lot of Django, yeah. No plans to open source it right now. |
| Would you consider becoming a stockist for pc parts in the future? | No plans on selling stuff ourselves. We have no real expertise in that and the margins are super tight. |
| u/pcpartpicker just wanted to ask, how are you? | Doing ok. Feeling like I'm finally starting to come out of a year's worth of development burnout. |
| Any more info on development for the app? | Hoping to release the PWA version this month. |
| What’s your favourite food Mr. Partpicker? | Sushi, but rarely get to eat it. |
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| I’m assuming that’s because of your location relative to the closest ocean | Oh I'm no connoisseur. I like just the simple stuff and it doesn't have to be on the coast or at a fancy place. The issue is that it's expensive, my kids won't eat it, and I don't want to eat at a restaurant because of COVID (and I've never been big on sushi takeout). |
| PWA PWA PWA! | Hopefully by the end of the month. |
| [deleted] | https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/video/june-15-1992-dan-quayle-misspells-potato-48017343 |
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| Oh no. I'd never seen that. It hurt my soul. | And they all applaud at the end too, like a real life emperor has no clothes moment. |
| What kind of revenue do you make? | Slightly more than expenses. |
| First, Thank you for this wonderful tool. For suggestions, PCPP works pretty good in America and Europe, but when it comes to Asian countries, most of the times it's not very helpful as it shows very high prices. So, kindly see to this! | manirelli: If you have suggestions for retailers you can always send a message on our contact page: https://pcpartpicker.com/contact/ |
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| For example - pcpp shows me a price, but if I directly go to the official site, it's very less. Like in amazon, most of the time, it's due to difference in sellers. So, is there an option to automatically select the cheapest option? | We have some special rules in place to prevent unreliable listings from showing but the default is to show the lowest price based on the information provided from the retailer. If you have a specific example I can take a look. |
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| Specialist-Hippo9328: Ok, thx. I got that. I don't have a specific example right now FUS_ROALD_DAHL: Maybe see if you can find one. It's not every day you have a developer offering to look at your specific issue. | ThoughtA: You're not wrong, but we see every single piece of feedback like this and devote time to them. For example, if you send us a ticket about it via our Contact page, you will get a human response 100% of the time. |
| oh, man. how blessed are you? that websites doing great. lol. is awesome. | manirelli: Very blessed and thankful every day. |
| I was hoping you'd shed some light on what you consider to be current gen PC specs for an AMD build. Think in the $1000 price range. Maybe something like the 3600 CPU and the rx 5700 GPU ect? Thanks! | manirelli: We've got a number of guides at and around that pricepoint: https://pcpartpicker.com/guide/ |
| I really like your site, im sure it has helped countless people, including me, and saved us countless hours of researching. Theres not enough good things i can say to express our appreciation, so im gonna be real and talk about areas that need improvement. For me, that is price availability updata, at least for canada. i find it not as useful as its intended to be, half the time it doesnt show the store and their price. And its not even a small store, its big ones like amazon, canada computer, bestbuy! I mean i dont expect real time updates for every store, but i remember x570 tomahawk being available in many stores, different prices, but on pcpp, it showed no price no stores for months! And there were quite a few items that i found in regular big retailers that just simply didnt show on pcpp. So ultimately, i could only use pcpp for 3 things, keeping lists of diff builds, compatibility check, and if i dont know where to start looking for a component, i could use filters to narrow it down to get a few models, and google to compare and look deeper. I cannot rely on it for price alert anymore, i had to manually set up wish list with every retailer, and check them individually, which i believe is one of the problems pcpp was designed to resolve. I really wish i can start trusting pcpp on prices again. | ThoughtA: If you have any examples, now or in the future, we would very much appreciate you reporting them. Usually it's because there's an issue with the merchant's data (even the big ones), but that doesn't mean we necessarily wouldn't be able to do anything about it. |
| You can send me a message on here, post in our Request Additions / Corrections Here forum section, or send us a contact request. |
| First of all, thank you so much for PCPartpicker. And for a question, what is your favorite feature in the works and/or one that is already in PCP? (Sorry if that made no sense.) | manirelli: Oh that has to be [redacted] |
| Probably got to this late, but I'll give it a shot maybe somebody gets to it. What parts should a long-term, sort of "layaway" build focus on first in regards to price changes? Meaning, what products fluctuate in price the fastest and/or most substantially? Also what parts should an amateur builder obtain first without worrying too much about compatibility/obsolescence if the rest of the build takes a bit more time to piece together? Might be a little vague I know, but basically I got a new job in tech where I will sometimes need to work remote and the work I do isn't going to be possible on the budget laptop I'm rockin' these days. My goal is to put together a PC powerful enough to remote my new job and hopefully a strong enough GPU to handle my gaming hobbies as well. Dual purpose, but I won't be able to buy it outright, was a tough year. It will be a build I slowly pay for and piece together over the next year hopefully. This might not be the type of question you guys are fielding but thought I'd give it a shot. Love to hear what the pros think. I've used PCPartPicker in the past to help friends put together their monster gaming stations when they first got started, I have a lot of faith and respect in this tool. | ThoughtA: If you don't have a use for the component before the build, I'd largely hold off on buying piecemeal over a long time. There's some wiggle room when it comes to parts that don't directly impact performance such as the case or PSU, but even there there will be advances made, aesthetics changed, and preferences evolved. Better to have a beefier emergency fund than a video card collecting dust on the floor when that video card could be cheaper later (current stock issues notwithstanding). That being said, if you're fight stock issues, see something in a particularly deep sale (if it impacts performance), or see something on a decent sale (and doesn't impace performance), then it's not so bad to have at it. Additionally, if you do have use for the component, such as throwing the GPU into your build that you plan to replace later, then any part is fair game. |
| Why don't you make the various flags and data points required for items as they're entered? Fans, for instance, not every one lists a decibel rating. | ThoughtA: We do have a number of data fields that are required for entry. However, requiring certain data fields would create more problems than they'd solve it. This is often the case for specs that are not always listed. If case fans required decibel rating to be added, there would be fans that are just never added to the site because that spec data is missing for them. |
| If the data is there, we will always add it regardless of whether it's a required field. The data field required status mostly just helps with human error, which we try really hard to cut down as close to zero as possible. |
| Much doubt you will see this but ill drop it anyway. Pcpartpicker has helped me an insane amount. I have friends, friends of friends and other people who want to build PC's and I always use Pcpartpicker to ensure im not buying the wrong parts. This site has been one of the most useful sites and has helped me make some cash on the side (from building PC's), and I will be forever thankful for this (not to mention that the user compatibility is one of the best i have ever seen and so simple). I did want to ask a question however, all the prices accessible are always in american dollars (which I take is where most your customers are from) but has it ever been thought to move it to a more world wide option and show prices in the selected countries. In each country in the world there are places where people buy from. I feel this would add on to make things quicker and simpler. For example: South Africa has a site called evetech.co.za Switzerland has a site called digitec (Of course there are many more, but these are the primary ones) | manirelli: We currently support 37 different countries. The country dropdown is in the top right corner of the site. If you have additional retailer recommendations please send them via our contact page: https://pcpartpicker.com/contact/ |
| Bruh this is cool. 1. Will you ever add micro center as a price option? 2. Do you think you will ever make a dark mode for the website? | We’d love to work with them. We had some discussions with them but then they stopped responding. |
| On desktop the switch is on the top right corner of the site. On mobile, tap the profile icon and then the switch. |
| Philip, Brent, Jenny, everyone...thank you so much. I'm a longtime lurker here, but my brother and dad are the engineers in the family; I'd never built a PC. When my old prebuilt started to slow down last year, I decided to give it a shot. I built the whole thing through your website; it's an AMD build with an RX 5700. In total it cost me just under $900, way less than I expected to spend (though I later sprung for a fancy 1440p monitor, also found through your site). Four different retailers delivered my stuff over the next week, I inexpertly threw it together, and it runs like a dream. I can't imagine trying to do it without PCPartPicker. Now I'm playing Cyberpunk smoothly on Ultra settings while the internet implodes about it not working on their machines. All thanks to you guys. So I guess my question is...do you feel the love and appreciation for what you do every day? Because we're sending it your way. | Thanks for the kind words. :). Definitely feel appreciated. Definitely. |
| Yo! I used your site to build my first rig a few months back. What do you think the new Intel series of CPUs will look like? | manirelli: Visually? The same as the others :) I try not to crystal ball too hard on future components. Build with what is available unless there are solid releases dates (and reasonable supply). |
| Hi Philip! I LOVE what you built. about five years ago, my son was getting interested in pc's and wanted to build one. I was clueless and found you site. I was able to learn how to ask my son the right questions by reading the forum, and then got suggestions and critiques on my virtual build. I ordered the parts directly from your handy dandy list of pricing and availability, they came in and we built his first pc. He was off and running and has been using your site to help classmates build their own machines. I don't have a question, just want to thank you for developing a useful and easy-to-use tool for people who are not computer inclined. I hope that this venture has served you well and you continue for as long as I might ever need your help. Best wishes, Mike | That's awesome! |
| I think all one needs to know the least number lives you've made better is to look at the number of subscribers just on this sub. Thank you! Question: 1. One of the things I noticed is that whenever there is a new price for a product that is listed on the retailers the website tracks, there is a delay before the information is updated. Sometimes that delay is significant such that the listed price won't last before your websites starts to reflect it. Do you have an strategies to minimize that to the point that all we need to do is just visit your website for all of our purchase needs? 2. Will you allow users to submit links or embed video links to products review so that people can just watch it on your site as they browse? | On 1), most of the time there is a lag is from how long it takes for the retailer to send us the price data. We push for updates as frequently as we can get, but some retailers only update their price data (for us) once a day. On fast moving products that can mean that we show stale prices. 2). We can certainly look into that. I've seen a few other people mention linking to other product reviews, so that's something I can chat with our team about. |
| Why do my fans never turn off? Running an old ASRock motherboard with an AMD Phenom II processor. BIOS is updated, latest update of Windows 10, all updated drivers, etc. 2 fans plugged into a splitter to the fan header on my motherboard + 2 more plugged straight into my power supply + the cpu cooler fan all stay running when my computer goes to sleep (on it’s own, or when forced to sleep). Monitor still goes to standby after 10 mins. Any help would be greatly appreciated. I already tried a clean install of Windows with no background apps running and fans still stayed running. | manirelli: The fans plugged into your PSU molex will run at 100% - that is a limitation of molex. Modern boards can control fan speeds on some 3pin headers but one that age may not be able to. It will depend on the specific hardware (mobo/fans) involved. Feel free to stop by our discord and ask in the troubleshooting section. Pictures will be helpful. http://discord.gg/pcpartpicker |
