No desk, no dining table, and the kitchen counter has about 40cm of usable space. So the build is happening on the bedroom floor, which is carpet, in winter, in a flat where the radiators are on constantly and everything feels dry. Some people say a wrist strap is essential and others say the whole thing is a myth. First build, £900 of parts, I would rather not find out the hard way.
Ranked by what actually goes wrong on carpet: screws vanish into it, the case tips over while you are torquing the cooler down, and a long way behind those, static. Put the empty motherboard box or the case box flat on the floor and work on top of it, keep a magnetic tray or a cereal bowl for screws, and lean the case against a wall or a chair leg while fitting the cooler. Do those three things and the carpet stops being a factor.
The screws thing sounds like a joke until you are on your hands and knees at midnight with a phone torch looking for one standoff screw. Bowl on the floor from minute one.
Practical carpet detail nobody mentions: build as much as you can outside the case. Board, CPU, cooler and RAM all go together on the box, then the whole assembly drops in as one piece. Fewer handling events, less kneeling, fewer chances to lose a screw in the pile.
I am the datapoint on the other side. Nylon carpet, dry flat, pulled a board out of the bag while kneeling on it and felt the zap through the IO shield. It posted, ran five weeks, then started dropping the second NVMe slot and eventually would not post at all. No way to prove causation, but I will never handle a board again without earthing myself first. A ten pound strap against a two hundred pound board is not a close call.
Built about twenty machines on carpet over fifteen years, no strap, no dead parts. That is not proof it is safe, it is proof the odds are decent, and I would still say what everyone else is saying: touch the case, work on the box, don't be a hero about it.
Keep parts in their antistatic bags until the moment they go in, and never rest a board on top of the bag while you work — the outside of those bags is conductive by design. Board on the cardboard, bag folded away.
@monitor_riser_mo · 3mo ago · 3 replies
Electronics repair background, so here is the boring accurate version. Electrostatic discharge damage is real, and it is usually latent rather than instant, meaning the part works and then dies weeks later, which is exactly why nobody in these threads ever connects the two events. The mitigation is cheap though: plug the PSU into the wall with its switch off so the chassis is earthed, touch bare metal on the case before you handle anything, and don't shuffle about in wool socks between touching the case and touching a board. A strap clipped to the case does the same job with less discipline required and costs about as much as a coffee.
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@quietmargin · 3mo ago
One caveat: if your sockets are unearthed or you are on an extension lead of unknown quality, the earthed-PSU trick is doing less than you think. Clipping the strap to the case still equalises you and the case, which is most of the benefit anyway.
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@layer_shift_lu · 3mo ago
This is the answer I wish I had read first. Everyone frames it as whether it will explode, when the real failure mode is a stick of RAM that starts throwing errors in March.
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