The thrills and chills–but not the bloodspills–of building a PC are now simulated in PC Building Simulator, a pleasingly self-descriptive name if I’ve ever heard one. Following a free prototype then a stretch in early access, PC Building Sim launched in full yesterday. If you’re curious about rummaging in a PC’s guts, this is a good way in. In sandbox and career modes, pick components (including many licensed from big names in hardware), slap ’em in, wire it up, add garish lights, boot it up, and even run 3DMark to test your honking rig’s muscle. It’s pretty neat.

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PC Building Simulator is set to leave early access this month after nearly a year of tuning and longer still as a free alpha. The Irregular Corporation’s sim does exactly what it says on the tin – it lets people experience the thrills of cracking open a fresh PC case, stuffing it with expensive electro-guts and hoping it doesn’t catch fire. There’s a career mode where you work your way up the ranks to tuning high-end machines, a sandbox mode, and all the virtual LED lighting strips and liquid cooling rigs your heart desires. Below, a video showcase of the luminous monster machines its players have made.

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I can barely look at screenshots of PC Building Simulator without sweating. Putting together my real PC was a singularly awful experience that I m not looking forward to replicating. I m the sort of person who could set fire to an office just by swapping out some RAM. Anyway! PC Building Simulator got an update today, introducing overclocking. Oh dear, I m sweating again. (more…)

PC Building Simulator should really be called IT Support Simulator. You spend a fair amount of time doing the former, but your main role in the game’s career mode is to deal with varying degrees of customer complaints as soon as they plop into your company inbox – which I’m surprised still exists considering you start your new enterprise with -$15 in the bank thanks to your conniving uncle having scrounged it all before he handed it over to you , presumably so he could make his quick getaway before the authorities did him in for fraud.

As a result, it’s up to you to get your shop back in order, making enough money from client orders, virus removals and repair jobs to keep the lights on, pay your bills and gradually upgrade your workshop into the PC building dream palace you’ve envisioned since you first got a whiff of some that sweet, sweet CPU thermal paste.

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Owning a gaming-spec PC is brill. Nothing quite like it, but the first time you have to crack open a case to swap out some RAM or install a new GPU is a harrowing experience, fraught with potentially terrible and expensive outcomes.

Enter PC Building Simulator, a piece of tech-nerd edutainment software that might seem frivolous at first, but I can see it being of real use to some folk, assuming it grows beyond its initial launch via Steam Early Access today.

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PC Building Simulator [official site] is not a game where your hand gets caught in a CPU fan and the PC spins round and round on your fingertip as wacky physics send everything in your workspace flying. Bumping the case as you insert a hard drive will not make your graphics card explode. Trying to insert RAM the wrong way will not make it vibrate and clang until it vanishes through a wall. No, PC Building Simulator is simply a game about building PCs component by component. We’ve mentioned it earlier this year after playing a free prototype, and now it’s headed for a full commercial release in autumn. (more…)