Are build requests on-topic?

Question

Are questions like

"I want to build a gaming computer that does a b c and also does x y z for less than $___"?

on topic here? Or do they have to be recommendations about an already existing list of hardware that the OP provides such as...

"I'm building a gaming computer to do a b c and x y z for less than $____. I'm thinking about using a ... GPU and a ... CPU.

Answer 1

This has been briefly discussed in chat here and there over the months, and it currently isn't on-topic either way.

Asking for a build from scratch
This is definitely the more off-topic question of the two you suggest. Although it has good intentions, this site only accepts questions asking for a single, specific piece of hardware. This means that asking for recommendations for entire computer builds (i.e., many different types of hardware) is easily off-topic.

Only a single type of hardware can be asked about in a question — that is the basis of the scope of this site.

Asking for a review of your build
This seems like it could work, and that's exactly why it's been discussed in the past, but alas it doesn't (at least not yet). It isn't really asking for a single product recommendation, but it also isn't clearly off-topic by definition — asking about a current build could possibly be read as asking for a recommendation. It's a gray area we currently have, and it's best to avoid these areas.

Additionally, as a few people have pointed out recently (example), a build review/the system in question could be seen as one piece of hardware. Going about it this way has its pros and cons though. Would they elicit too many broad answers? How would the answers be judged for quality? There are several downfalls to this approach, yet there is a chance it could work nonetheless.

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If you really want to ask for or about a build, for now the best way is to ask one question for each component. This way each question is about a specific piece of hardware.

Answer 2

I propose that for consistency's sake, custom PCs taken as a single piece of hardware really need to be part of the site's scope. There are some negative consequences I can think of which, in my view, heavily outweigh the benefits of excluding questions and answers which potentially deal with custom PCs, and I also think most of the problems this site's scope has with custom PC questions can be mitigated if we exercise this site's current best practices in moderation wisely.

As I understand it, the primary benefits/reasons for excluding these kinds of questions are:

• We avoid ambiguity about our site's purpose
• We avoid a lot of spam "custom rig" questions and answers
• It is usually difficult to conclusively answer the question because of the very wide solution space (due to the combinatorial nature of the solution)

To be totally clear, I value all of the above and do not want to change anything if change would lead to a worse experience in any of those regards. However, I think there are some serious foundational/conceptual weaknesses with our current way of achieving those goals which @ArtofCode's question tends to lay bare:

• Much like the classic Ship of Theseus problem of philosophy, it becomes difficult to define hardware as unitary or modular, since much of the difference is a matter of how we are acculturated to perceive "pieces" of technology.
• Because of that indistinctness inherent to our definition of the cutoff point for our scope, it becomes difficult for askers and answerers to do their jobs well - it is difficult to define whether they are doing it right, and they will err often because of it. It effectively creates ambiguity where we sought to avoid it.
• We are unwittingly biasing our site toward turnkey solutions, which in many, many cases, are not in fact the most desirable answer due to cost, inflexibility, or that they will be already known to most people who have done a little research in their area - this last really diminishes our value.
• For people looking for advice on how to build their own computer, especially their very first, it simply replaces one kind of spam ("rig" spam) with another ("component" spam). Worse, it takes less effort to make a legitimate post about a single component than it would take to make a legitimate post (if such posts were legitimated) about a whole computer.
• Requiring people to ask questions about individual components only instead of whole computers inadvertently places an unneeded and significant knowledge prerequisite on our askers, because many people who would otherwise be perfectly capable of defining their needs in terms of specifying the problem they want to solve with new hardware are instead asked to learn not only about the specific hardware which will solve their problem, but about entire classes of hardware which are only tangentially related to their problem (e.g. a person wishing to "play Witcher 3 at 1008p/60fps maximum settings for the least amount of USD and using Windows 10" - a question which is amenable to specific answers - must know about hard drives, even though the vast majority of things they learn about hard drives are immaterial to the question of whether their PC can solve their problem). Of course askers need to do research prior to coming here, but the difference between "doing some research" and "knowing enough about PC building to make a specific guess about the requirements of each component" is vast and, I think, unfair to askers.

That said, if we just did away with our rules about custom builds and opened the flood gates, I realize this place would rapidly become useless. Rules are needed to regulate "rig" spam into something more useful. I think it is possible to thread the needle on this and have some specific requirements which pertain only to hardware questions and answers which involve the recommendation of a whole computer system (in any form factor - desktops to phones). I am basing these recommendations on my work experience with how the FDA determines similarity of "devices" for the sake of 510K certification; they grapple with a remarkably similar problem:

1. If an asker would ask us to recommend a computer (turnkey or otherwise), they should present the question in terms of using it to solve one specific problem (play one game title, render one specific video in X amount of time, etc.)
2. If an asker would ask us to recommend a computer (turnkey or otherwise), they should include an example of one or more turnkey solutions which have been empirically or qualitatively determined to solve their specific problem, so that answers can be held to the standard of substantial equivalence in determining whether or not they constitute a helpful answer.
3. If an answer would recommend a computer (turnkey or otherwise), they should accompany that answer with an explanation for how its specifications are substantially equivalent or superior. Explanations which rely primarily on brand preference should be disfavored compared to explanations which try to show comparative or empirical evidence of their sufficiency.

I am not sure whether that would actually put too much onus on answerers, and perhaps there are better ways of doing this, but I felt I should call attention to the problem with our current state of affairs and at least try to present a solution.